Obituaries : Lulu Hassenplug; Founded UCLA School of Nursing

Lulu Wolf Hassenplug, the founding dean of the UCLA School of Nursing who revolutionized nursing education and liberated the former “handmaidens of medicine,” has died. She was 91.

Mrs. Hassenplug, who was designated a Times Woman of the Year in 1958, died Tuesday at Eisenhower Memorial Hospital in Rancho Mirage, UCLA officials announced.

Arriving in Westwood in 1948 as the UCLA Medical Center was being established, the new dean insisted that nurses be taught and treated like students, rather than hospital employees. She spearheaded a movement to move nursing education from hospitals to college campuses.

“A nurse must be able to speak, read and write as well as the people she works with,” Mrs. Hassenplug told The Times in 1958. “We are training nurses to think. This is the purpose of a liberal education. A well-trained mind can usually handle any difficulty. A well-trained mind is basic to giving individualized patient care.”

A native of Milton, Pa., Lulu Wolf delayed marrying her grade school sweetheart until she was 49, despite his high school graduation day proposal, because, she said later, “I had eyes only for nursing.” Harry Seers Hassenplug, the real estate and insurance executive she finally married in 1953, died in 1983.

Miss Wolf graduated from the Army School of Nursing at Walter Reed Hospital and Columbia University and earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University.

While a professor of nursing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, she received the invitation from UCLA to set up the kind of education program she considered necessary to train nurses adequately. She created the first university undergraduate program for nurses in the West and quickly added graduate programs.

“It takes a good deal of courage to break old patterns,” she said later, praising UCLA officials. “Nursing grew up as a handmaiden service to doctors. One of our hardest jobs was finding a faculty that had the courage to break with the past.”

The UCLA School of Nursing has a Lulu Wolf Hassenplug Scholarship and this fall will inaugurate its first endowed chair in her honor.

The former dean, who retired and moved to Palm Desert in 1968, is survived by a niece, Peggy Lou Weldy of Tucson.

A memorial service is planned for Oct. 7 at 2 p.m. at the UCLA Faculty Center.

Memorial donations can be sent to the Lulu Wolf Hassenplug Endowed Chair Fund or the Lulu Wolf Hassenplug Scholarship Fund, UCLA School of Nursing, Box 951702, Los Angeles, Calif. 90095-1702.