A Model of Discipline

From the top of her steep driveway here, Nancy Leftenant-Colon gazed along Sugar Toms Lane at trees turned incandescent by the advance of autumn and, above the fiery extravaganza, a blue sky, pale and pure. Leftenant-Colon said she would never leave this tranquil acre on Long Island’s North Shore, where she has lived for 27 years. Then she apologized for not raking the backyard.

“I do it all myself,” she said.

In a way, that has been the ethic of her life as military nurse and black American--doing for herself what would not get done otherwise, sizing up the odds and taking her best shot, turning obstacle into advantage. One of 12 children of humble North Amityville, N.Y., parents, Leftenant-Colon learned early that determination and pride were essential survival skills.

“My father would say, ‘I don’t care what you do. If it’s sweeping the floor, do it the best you can,’ ” she recalled.

The advice resonated. Leftenant-Colon, 77, became a registered nurse in the mid-1940s, when it often was difficult for black women to obtain professional training, and she entered the U.S. Army as a reservist after graduation from the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, which served minority students.

“I saw a picture of an Army nurse with her cape,” Leftenant-Colon said. “She looked so good--straight and tall. I wanted to do my part.”

*

Like America, however, the Army was ambivalent--at best--about race. Leftenant-Colon was accepted into the ranks but not as a member of the Regular Army Nurse Corps, then an all-white institution. Second-class status did not prevent the nurses from performing in first-class fashion, Leftenant-Colon said.

The young recruits from several black nursing schools were assigned to an Army hospital at Fort Devens in Massachusetts--high-impact duty since the facility treated large numbers of GIs wounded in World War II.

Leftenant-Colon said she and her friends were in an advanced state of readiness. Their training had been intense, she said, because teachers knew black women would have to demonstrate superior skills. And the nurses realized their work might affect how successors were judged.

“White nurses could just go and be nurses,” said Sandra Davis, a nurse historian at La Salle University in Philadelphia and president of the Museum of Nursing History in the same city. “They didn’t have to be examples. But black nurses did. They had to be more than just good.” Typically, Davis said, minority women received rigorous preparation. “They had to be like Avis--’We try harder.’ ”

At Fort Devens, black nurses so impressed doctors and patients, Leftenant-Colon said, that many--including her--were promoted from second to first lieutenants in 11 months. White nurses snubbed the black newcomers, Leftenant-Colon said, and seemed to resent their success. “It was like throwing somebody in a briar patch,” she recalled.

From the outset, black nurses realized, they would have to be models of discipline and restraint. Barbara Gross, of Cranston, R.I., a classmate from the Lincoln School, said no one showed more courage or cool than Leftenant-Colon.

“When we got to Fort Devens, we were called in and told that we had to act differently,” Gross said. “I thought that was a put-down. I guess they thought all black people start trouble. My reaction was to get out of the military as soon as I could, but Nan stayed in. She wouldn’t complain. She just went right ahead.”

In 1948, Leftenant-Colon’s resolve paid off. She applied for regular status--black nurses could serve only as reservists previously--and, in keeping with President Truman’s order that the military be desegregated, defense officials approved. Leftenant-Colon became the first black nurse in the Regular Army Nurse Corps, but that was not her last move. The next year, she transferred to the Air Force, which, in 1947, was designated a separate branch of the armed services. Leftenant-Colon wanted to take wing.

*

Aviation ignited Leftenant-Colon’s imagination. Her brother, Sam Leftenant, one of six members of the family who served in the military, was a pilot with the famed Tuskegee Airmen, a unit of black fliers who saw extensive action during World War II. Leftenant died in April 1945, when his P-51 Mustang was shot down over Austria.

When her brother was training in South Carolina, Leftenant-Colon visited. The young woman wanted to enter the Army but was afraid she would be tainted by the “terrible things” often said in those days about the character of military women. “You just do what Mom and Dad told you was right and you’ll have no trouble,” Leftenant-Colon recalled her brother saying.

Even then, his sister seemed dedicated, clear of purpose--and not likely to be distracted by foolishness. Spann Watson, a Tuskegee Airman who lives in Westbury, N.Y., remembered meeting the former Nancy Leftenant--she later married Bayard K. Colon, a captain in the Air Force reserve who died in 1972--before departing for the war zone. “She was very bright and positive,” said Watson, 81, who flew 32 missions for the Airmen. “She was one of those people you are not going to turn away.”

*

Bright, positive and steadfast--these were the qualities James Leftenant, a maintenance man, and his wife, Eunice, a domestic worker, wanted their children to reflect. Hailing from Goose Creek, S.C., a small farming community outside Charleston, the Leftenants moved to Long Island in search of better educational opportunities for their children when Nancy--the seventh of their 12--was 3.

“I wish I could have shared them with the rest of the world because they were wonderful,” said Leftenant-Colon of her parents, both of whom are dead.

The family was poor, she said--so poor that, as a third-grader, Nancy could not bring to school the 85 cents a firm was charging to trace family histories. She never determined the origins of the Leftenant name but knows that her father was the son of a slave and her mother was the daughter of a freed slave. But neither parent was inclined to dwell on the past, Leftenant-Colon said. Their goal was to assure better lives for their children.

*

Among the Leftenant offspring--three of the six boys have died, all six girls are alive--were nurses, teachers, the owner of a small business, a watchmaker, a police officer, a mechanic, a technician. Two Leftenant children earned master’s degrees; one, a bachelor’s. Achievement was the family ethic. Early in life, the Leftenant children learned responsibility. Like her brothers and sisters, Nancy knew what was expected.

“In our family, the oldest children always took care of the younger,” said her sister Mary Leftenant, 69, of Amityville, a nurse who retired from the Air Force in 1975 as a lieutenant colonel. “Even when she was going to high school, Nancy would give us money and tell us how to do all the little things that are important. She was always very steadfast. She was our icon.”

Mary Leftenant said her sister has maintained a belief in people that may seem naive at a time when values so often seem under assault and self-interest prevails. If life treated her unfairly, Nancy only gained strength, her sister said. “It made her a better person.”

*

There were hard times. Leftenant-Colon recalled being unable to eat at restaurants while traveling to military bases in the South. Blacks were denied rooms at most hotels, and Leftenant-Colon said she often drove hundreds of miles out of the way to stay with friends.

If the larger society was struggling with racial questions, Leftenant-Colon said the military offered a “great life.” In general, she said, the quality of a person’s work counted, not the color of skin. In the service, she thought of herself as a nurse, not a racial statistic. “I’m one of the group,” Leftenant-Colon said. “You need each other.”

She stayed “one of the group” for 20 years.

Leftenant-Colon--”Lefty” as military buddies knew her--became a flight nurse. She trained or was stationed in Germany, Tokyo, Alaska, Ohio, Alabama, Maryland, New York and New Jersey. In 1954, she helped evacuate French Legionnaires from Vietnam after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. Along the line, she met Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe. She once cared for an Arab prince who was guarded by men with jeweled sabers. She served for years as an officer of the Tuskegee Airmen and held the presidency from 1989-’91--the only woman elected to the post.

In 1965, Leftenant-Colon retired as a major. She went back to Long Island, where her husband had part ownership in a funeral home and worked as a guidance counselor. From 1971-84, Leftenant-Colon worked as a nurse at Amityville High School--a job she loved. “I talked to students in their language,” she recalled.

Now, youthful looking in jeans and a sweatshirt, Leftenant-Colon is at leisure, though the word hardly seems to apply.

Wearing a commemorative brown leather jacket of the Tuskegee Airmen, she looked as ready to tour the world as tidy the house. One thing, though, said Leftenant-Colon, gazing at her long, pitched driveway. When it snows, she lets someone else do the plowing. Rank does have its privileges.