Mom, A Life: Part Three

Mom, A Life: Part Two

The Pre- and Early War Years

In 1938, before the war started, Mom and her sister, Shirley, experienced what they thought was a huge windstorm, what's known in New England as a Nor'easter. They saw huge trees fall and went outside across the street to the bluff overlooking the beach where a twenty-five foot storm surge had brought the ocean to within five feet of their perch. The young man who would later marry Mom was out working, delivering groceries. There being no storm forecasts in those days, it was only after the fact that anyone knew they'd been through the most destructive hurricane in the 20th Century to hit Long Island and parts of Connecticut further west.

In 1939 Mom had the chance to visit her Uncle George Matthieu in Newport News, Virginia. Uncle George had married into the family when he met Mom's Aunt Eula at a medical facility in Louisiana where she was a nurse and he'd been sent to recover after being gassed in World War I. They'd moved to Connecticut but the Depression was on and as the government geared up for war Uncle George found work as a pattern maker for the Navy. Mom's family drove to Virginia in their 1933 Hudson, a three day trip averaging 35 miles per hour and staying overnight in roadside cabins, the precursors to motels, for $3.00 per night for the entire family, including Grandma Davis. Some of the cabins even had indoor plumbing. It was in Virginia that Mom ate her first fresh fig, plucked right from the tree. They stayed for a week and then drove home for three days again.

Mom had always wanted to be a nurse, maybe because of the other nurses in the family or maybe because of her extensive exposure to the medical profession with her repeated operations as a child. The problem was, the tuition was $300, which, during the Depression, as she said, "might as well have been $3 million." So, instead, she went to work as a lab assistant for the Chief of Ophthalmology at Yale, for $20 a week.

As World War II approached, the federal government set up the Nurse Cadet Corps in anticipation of future needs. The Cadet Corps not only paid the tuition but gave the girls a stipend to live on. Her boss encouraged Mom to sign up but she had to take extra classes first in math, trigonometry and chemistry. Fortunately for her, they let her substitute her French for the Latin she never took in school. She took the classes while she continued working.

By then the war had started. Mom's brother, Chester, immediately enlisted in the Marines rather than wait to be drafted. He disappeared into the Marine Corps and no one in the family knew where he was until they received a notice saying he was recovering from being wounded on Iwo Jima. Mom's mother was frantic but apparently the wound was relatively minor.

Marshall Rosinus, the boy Mom would eventually marry, enlisted in the Air Force, or rather tried to. He had to make three attempts, because of some irregularity in his eyes, before they would take him and even then he spent the war stateside as a recruiting sergeant on college campuses.

Mom was accepted to Hartford Hospital School of Nursing in 1944 for the class of '47. All the other girls were 18 year olds fresh out of high school. Mom was 25.