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Thursday, November 07, 2002

By Mary Niederberger

They came from the nursing schools of such hospitals as South Side, Allegheny General and St. Margaret and they traveled across the world to care for wounded and sick U.S. soldiers defending freedom during World War I.

When these military nurses returned home after the war, Allegheny County residents showed their appreciation in the form of a monument placed prominently on a hillside along Corrigan Drive in South Park, then one of the county's newest such parks.

	Mary Ann Rosko, left, and Hildy Sullivan, members of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Registered Nurses Club, at the monument erected to remember nurses of World War I in South Park. The club will hold a Veterans Day memorial service there on Monday. (Tony Tye, Post-Gazette)

It was dedicated, along with nine other monuments to war veterans, on Aug. 28, 1934 -- the opening day of the county fair -- during ceremonies that included a parade in which 3,000 people marched.

On Monday, another ceremony will be held at the monument -- a Veterans Day memorial service similar to the ones that have been held for the past decade by the Southwestern Pennsylvania Registered Nurses Club.

Between the monument's dedication and its rediscovery by a club member about a dozen years ago, no one knows how long it retained its prominent position on the hillside. But sometime through the years, the monument apparently was forgotten.

By the time Jayne Groninger and her Irish terrier, Corky, stumbled upon it while walking in the park, the monument was overgrown. Groninger had been walking Corky along Corrigan when he pulled her up the hill to investigate what was under the weeds.

"I found this monument with writing on it that said it was dedicated to the nurses who served in the World War," said Groninger, who was surprised at the find. Her home is located on the edge of the park and she was a frequent walker there, yet she'd had no idea the monument was there.

She took that information back to her professional group, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Registered Nurses Club, where she found some members interested in restoring the monument to prominence and commemorating the women for whom it was dedicated.

"One of the nurses was really interested, and she went to the park officials and asked why it was let go. She really kept after them," Groninger said.

That nurse was Mary Ann Rosko of West Mifflin. "I said if we are going to hold these services every year, then it should be more presentable than it was," said Rosko, who spent several years as an Army nurse in the mid-1950s.

She sought out former park manager Edward Spanitz, who had the area cleared and then built a platform and flower box at the monument. He later added, at the nurses club's request, a wooden staircase and railing that leads from the Corrigan Drive parking lot up the grassy hill.

Now the concrete monument, which stands a little taller than 5 feet, is surrounded by an arch of pine trees. Its bronze plaque reads: "A tribute of the people of Allegheny County to the nurses who served in the World War."

Members of the nurses club believe it is the only monument to war nurses in the area.

Honoring service

Although the original mission of the nurses club was to promote educational opportunities for nurses and develop community interest in nursing, it later added commemorating war nurses to its list. Since 1992, the group, which was founded in 1961, has held a memorial service at the monument each Veterans Day.

Rita Blanc of Bethel Park, a club member and a nurse who served overseas in the military in 1945 after the end of World War II, said that, when she attends the services, she thinks of the challenges that faced World War I nurses.

Like other club members, Blanc had participated in the military's nurse cadet program and had committed herself to war service, but the war ended before she could get there.

"It's hard to even imagine what it was like. I imagine the conditions in the Korean War just from watching 'M*A*S*H'."

For the nurses in the First World War "there had to be very little equipment and tough conditions," said Blanc, who was also a nurse for the Bethel Park School District for 20 years before retiring in 1986.

According to Jean Waldman, a volunteer historian for the Red Cross, which recruited nurses during the two World Wars, the 20,000 nurses who served overseas in the Army, Navy and U.S. Public Health Service in World War I worked in conditions that were primitive and often dirty.

"It was not 'M*A*S*H' and it was not 'ER.' It was very different in terms of what they had to work with," Waldman said.

Because wounded soldiers often lay for days undiscovered in cold, wet conditions, they came in with layers of mud cementing clothing to their injured, bloody bodies, Waldman said. In those cases, removing clothing and cleaning wounds became an extensive procedure in which nurses patiently and gently wiped away layer after layer.

World War I nurses were the first military nurses to deal with wounds that were not the result of personalized combat, but rather of machine guns and poisonous gases.

"The suffering was acute and the effects of the gases were so deadly," Waldman said.

In that era of medicine, sterilization was only beginning to become the practice.

Waldman said that in photographs in the war archives, some medical personnel working on patients are seen wearing surgical masks and gloves, but many others aren't.

As a result, doctors and nurses would save patients from their injuries only to watch them die later from infections. They could treat pain with morphine, but there were no antibiotics to treat infections.

'They were making do'

Waldman said that during the war, there were large base hospitals and also mobile units that were evacuation hospitals. Some nurses worked on hospitals set on trains.

"They would set up a hospital for 300 men and get 3,000. They had to adjust to circumstances quickly. People were pulled constantly from the base hospitals and sent to the mobile units."

Waldman said passages in the book "The History of American Red Cross Nursing" describe doctors and nurses from World War I operating on patients by candlelight in hospitals set up in tents on the mud. "They were making do with what they had."

Then another medical challenge hit the members of the military toward the end of World War I -- the influenza outbreak of 1918. Waldman said of the 296 nurses lost during the war, most died from influenza.

While members of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Nurses Club make sure to look back each Veterans Day on the contributions of the nurses of World War I and of subsequent wars, they also continue to work for the future of nursing.

Since the group's inception 41 years ago, it has given away about $200,000 in scholarship money to about 80 nursing students.

The scholarship funds come from money raised by social events such as card parties and luncheons and from the late Mary Powers, a former club member. There are about 120 club members.

This year's Veterans Day service will begin at 11 a.m. Monday at the monument and is open to anyone who wants to pay tribute to military nurses, said Hildy Sullivan of Bethel Park, organizer of the event. The service will be led by Bethel Park Mayor Cliff Morton.

Mary Niederberger is a free-lance writer.