Nurturing a New Life : Charles Ballard, 62, of Altadena traded banker’s hours for a night shift of nursing sick babies.

Dawn was breaking as Charles Ballard made his final rounds of sick babies at Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital, and he was ready for a good day’s sleep.

Hardly the banker’s hours he’d been accustomed to, but Ballard figures they’re not bad for a 62-year-old man in his first year as a registered nurse.

With a pen-sized flashlight clamped between his teeth, the stocky, dignified-looking Ballard worked his way down the hall in the pediatric center, training a miniature spotlight on each patient as he secured an intravenous tube that a tiny foot had kicked loose, soothed an asthmatic boy, took temperatures and checked every chart.

“You like to turn them over to the next shift in as good shape as possible,” Ballard said with a contented smile.

Older than everyone else and the only man in sight during the 7:30 a.m. shift change, Ballard is usually taken for a doctor or a technician, but almost never for a registered nurse.

“A banker--now that I could believe,” said the mother of one young patient when she found out that Ballard was a nurse.

In fact, Ballard is a former manager of the Bank of America branch in Altadena. He retired in 1984 at age 58 and almost immediately embarked on his new profession. He began taking nursing prerequisite courses at Pasadena City College and soon enrolled in the school’s two-year nursing program. Of the 38 members of last June’s graduating class, Ballard was one of only two men and the oldest by far.

Offered several jobs, he chose the graveyard shift in pediatrics at the Huntington because, he said, “I like dealing with little sick babies, and night was when the openings were.”

He started five months ago, and people are still asking: Why nursing?

“I get that all the time,” Ballard said. “Old friends say, ‘You’re what ? Doing what ?’ They see it as incongruous. But I found it very easy to let go of being a banker and get absorbed in this. I’ve had a ball.”

When he was a student at Pomona College, Ballard said, a tough course in zoology drove him out of premed studies and into banking. He earned a master’s degree in business education at UC Berkeley.

“But I never totally gave up wanting to be in medicine, and with an opportunity for early retirement I thought: ‘Oh, yeah! Here’s a way I can get back into it!’ ” he said. “There’s a heavy demand for nurses, and I figured that once I graduated, I would have five to 10 years to put into a career.”

In the meantime, Ballard has been a reserve deputy for the Sheriff’s Department’s Altadena Mountain Rescue Team for 28 years and was one of the first people to be certified as an emergency medical technician through Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

“I brag about him all the time,” said Carol Painter, captain of the sheriff’s Crescenta Valley and Altadena patrol stations. “When I hear of people getting ready to retire, I tell the Chuck Ballard story.”

Painter said Ballard is the team’s oldest active member and is responsible for saving many lives.

“Twenty-eight years is the longest anyone has ever served, and Chuck can still pass an agility test that 21-year-olds have to take,” she said. “These are the men you see on TV rappelling down mountains and hanging out of helicopters to save people. And Chuck’s our hero.”

Ballard said the emergency medical work on search and rescue teams influenced him to become a registered nurse, although, he said, “It occurred to me that I might not be accepted. But the people I talked to at PCC said: ‘Go for it.’ ”

“He was a wonderful student,” recalled Kristine de Queiros, chairman of the PCC nursing department.

While a few women over 50 have enrolled in nursing there, Ballard is the only person in his 60s to graduate, she said. Male graduates, who usually make up about 10% of each PCC nursing class, had all been younger than 40 until Ballard arrived.

“He’s also the only one who had a successful career,” said De Queiros. “He had the wisdom, the experience and diplomacy of an older person, and had a very leveling, balancing effect on the students.”

Reminiscing in the spacious living room of his home on the edge of Eaton Canyon in Altadena, Ballard said: “Yeah, I had some doubts. I wondered how I would be accepted. Sometimes I felt: ‘Hey, I got a tiger by the tail.’ But I was always strongly motivated.”

Ballard’s wife, Rae, is chairman of the English department at PCC. They have two adult children and one grandchild, who have given him lots of encouragement, he said.

“I get tired, and I worry,” he said. “You have to watch these babies and make sure one of them doesn’t develop problems. Sometimes I put in a little extra time, but remember--I’m the new kid on the block, and I still have a lot to learn.”