Mom, A Life: Part Four

Mom, A Life: Part Three

The Later War Years

The School of Nursing, in 1944, was housed in Hartford Hospital, a very large Victorian house, complete with free-flying bat, on Jefferson Street in Hartford. Students and faculty frequently chased the bat without success over the years. Standards of hygiene were . . . different . . . back then.

When patients checked out (men on one floor, women on another and surgery on still another) the beds were stripped down to the springs which the nursing students scrubbed with toothbrushes. When the beds were remade, sheets had to be cornered just so and the open ends of pillow cases were never to face the door. Nursing students poured and counted prescribed meds (with supervision).

Nursing school was not all work. It was here Mom learned to swim underwater and dive in the residence pool, two things she could never do as a child due to the mastoid infections. Because there was a war on, the local movie theaters held morning showings to accommodate shift workers, including student nurses. Mom was also selected to be editor-in-chief of the yearbook sophomore year. Her only really negative experience was coming down, along with twenty or so fellow students, with a serious case of food poisoning. They were all treated to a course of the new wonder drug penicillin, 500,000 units every four hours injected in the buttocks. Fortunately, all the girls had a crush on the male doctor who treated them.

Thanks to the atom bomb, the war ended before Mom graduated and she never had to tend casualties from an invasion of Japan.

Graduation, Career and Marriage

Mom graduated as a Registered Nurse in 1947. Shortly thereafter, she moved back to New Haven and started in the neo-natology ward at St. Raphael Hospital but left when procedural disputes between the woman running the unit and the sister in charge of the department created stress and dysfunction for all the nurses. Mom became a PRN (where needed) nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital which at least had the advantage of never being routine.

Marshall Rosinus, who Mom had known since childhood from school and church functions, was discharged from the Army Air Force after the war and returned to West Haven. He worked for the New Haven Water Company for a while and, with a friend, would hitchhike to Hartford to visit Mom and the friend's girlfriend (also a nursing student and also a friend of Mom. The world was a smaller place back then).

(At some point, Marshall ran off on a very short lived and ill-advised marriage to someone named Rita. Mom never spoke or wrote one word about it but Dad mentioned it to me once, and I have found a Florida divorce record for them. Who she was, how they met and when (or why) they married I have not been able to determine. The divorce was recorded in Dade County in 1949. The same year Mom and Dad married.)

In 1949 Mom and Dad married in the First Congregational Church, West Haven, Connecticut. Mom was 29 and Dad 31. Mom's dress was home made and everyone was relieved when they caught her two-year-old nephew, Gerald Parsons, before he could take a pair of large shears to it while it hung on the door before the service. Gerald's older brother Douglas (four+) was ring bearer.
Since they were both older, they decided to try for children right away but had no luck. Dad went first for a check-up and then Mom but there were no physical reasons holding them back and finally the doctor just told them to forget about it and relax. That advice worked. That, and Mom managed to change shifts at the hospital.

One of their favorite pastimes was horseback riding, once Mom got used to the beasts, and they rode together on weekends right up until Dad discovered the Connecticut Governor's Horse Guard, Company B, and Mom discovered she was pregnant.