Lori Glenn
May 07, 2008 11:06 pm
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MOULTRIE — At 98, Nadine Caldwell is still a spitfire.
She lives alone, still drives to wherever she wants to go and she still remembers the days when nursing was more instinct and suitable for only for the hardy of soul.
And Caldwell is made of hardy stuff. She chalks up her long and active life to daily choices that, dare say, many would be hard pressed to follow.
“I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t eat chocolate,” she said. “But I allow myself one Co-Cola a day, and my doctor says there ain’t no need in rocking the boat.”
Caldwell was honored Tuesday night at Colquitt Regional Medical Center’s Nurses Day Celebration at Moultrie Technical College as the county’s “most seasoned nurse.” And she’s the spicy sort, not hesitant to dole out a barb or two to get her point across.
Caldwell grew up a Howell in her native Norman Park. She married young and left school but later achieved her high school diploma and even a year at Norman College. Caldwell knew she had to go to work, she said, when her husband, Harvey, was drafted into World War II.
“He had overnight to determine which branch of service he would go in,” she said.
Her husband died Feb. 17, 1944, but she got his body back to bury a year later. They didn’t have children, and she never remarried.
Nurses were needed in town at the time. Nora Manning, administrator of Vereen Memorial Hospital, came looking for Caldwell’s sister Lillian, who had worked with her before. Manning recruited Caldwell into nursing and away from the business courses she was taking to become a secretary.
“I had never had done any kind of work, and I didn’t know what Mrs. Manning wanted me to do,” she said.
“Nurses weren’t getting nothing but having to do all that dirty work,” she said, adding that her other sister, Norman, was also a nurse. “They get now as much in one hour as we got in a month.”
In 1944, Harvey Caldwell died in the service of his country at age 37. Nadine Caldwell took up the flag at home tending to the wave of servicemen’s families who came in the doors of old Vereen Memorial Hospital. Spence Field air base opened in 1941 and over the span of the war had trained nearly 6,000 pilots before it closed in 1945 and was reactivated in 1951 during the Korean conflict. Caldwell was there in the middle of it all.
Her training consisted of some courses at the Carnegie library and then on-the-job training at the old hospital. She was a nurse for the next 15 years.
Even as an operating room nurse, Caldwell at that time earned $25 a month, she said. On the plus side, they were allowed to live at the hospital and eat free.
“We couldn’t afford to buy but so many uniforms, and we’d have to wash them out at night,” she said.
She remembers her years as a nurse during World War II and Moultrie’s subsequent boom time as active, to say the least. She worked at Vereen Memorial every day except Sunday and often would spend those at a small hospital at Pavo doing elective work, she said. Registered nurses were the ones who would administer anesthesia in those days.
“Ms. Keifer (the registered nurse at Vereen Memorial) would carry her little anesthesia bag and everything,” she said.
Also back then, blood was transfused directly from person to person. It would take all day long to administer, she said, and she as nurse would have to actively monitor the transfusion the entire time. Caldwell remembered transfusions were particularly tiring for the nurses.
They had an x-ray room and two big autoclaves to sterilize reusable glass syringes. The operating room had two sets of instruments, she said.
In a spoof written by a now-unknown author, the wild and woolly day-to-day for a nurse at Vereen Memorial was revealed. Visitors loomed large in the parody.
“...The nurses, pour souls, are forced to conclude that curiosity might kill a cat but it was the life and breath of visitors to a hospital,” said the account.
Caldwell was featured: “On her way to fix an ice cap for 104, Nurse Caldwell must assure an ice cream-bearing visitor that yes, Mrs. Sparks may eat a little cream; yes, Mr. Lindsey has gone home; no, Mr. Harper is not seriously ill; yes, every bed is full; yes, the nurses are busy. Passing by the reception desk, Nurse Caldwell pauses long enough to pry the nose of an inquisitive visitor out of the hanging-from-a-wire-by-the-desk case histories which said visitor was devouring and send her on her way to Room 109 to rock in the squeaky chair and entertain her friend Mrs. James with the lurid details of her recently gleaned information.”
That was a small sampling of the evidently wild times at Vereen Memorial.
“We had a bull pen for the drunks, and we’d put them in and lock ’em up,” she said.
She remembers the maternity ward as overflowing. The beginning of the Baby Boom was obvious in Moultrie, Ga., she said.
“We had them lined up in that hall,” she said.
For all of the difficulties she faced in her personal life, Caldwell clearly loved nursing and said she would recommend it to those with the right temperament for the profession’s demands.
“It was just something I liked to do,” she said. “It was a joy and it was a sorrow, because I lost my husband.”
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