By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The hardy women who trained to become nurses in Waco during and just after World War II had to be inventive and tough as nails to get through the curriculum and their 12-hour shifts.

Joyce Alexander Luck, who graduated with the last class of World War II-era Cadet Nurses in September 1948 from Hillcrest Memorial Hospital — now Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center — recalled being instructed to find a suitable critter for an anatomy class. She electrocuted a stray cat for the course, she said, and she wasn’t the only one who found a specimen that way.

And when one of her favorite patients died — a young Army veteran with leukemia — Luck had to go to the basement of the hospital for a good cry, she said. Nurses were not supposed to show emotion on the job, she said.

The Cadet Nurse program was created during World War II by the federal government to ease shortages of trained medical personnel. Nurses who enrolled before the war’s end in 1945 were allowed to finish their studies with federal funding.

Luck’s favorite place at Hillcrest, especially in the baby boom years of 1946 through 1962, was in the maternity ward. Helping to deliver the next generation of Wacoans was rewarding, she said — even if she did have to care for more than 20 squalling infants at a time during her shift.

Ruth B. Steusloff, another September 1948 Hillcrest graduate, recalled having to scrub the window screens of the operating suite — on the top floor to catch breezes — every morning before she could open the tool packs for surgeons.

“It sounds prehistoric, I know,” she said. “But we did get a good rotation through the wards, including the psych hospital in Austin. When you got out of school, you really knew what working in the hospital was all about.”

Tot Talbert, a 1963 Hillcrest Baptist Hospital nursing school graduate, said that even in the 1960s, some “old school” nursing chores hadn’t changed much since World War II. Nurses still washed and dried rubber gloves to repowder them. The thermometers and syringes were still made of glass instead of plastic. Nurses still rolled their own cotton balls during down time.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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