February 2022

February 2022 Count Down to 50^th Reunion

We emailed you January 15^th to let you know we were waiting until March to make definitive decisions re our planned June dates for our 50^th reunion. We’ll send you that information once the Alumnae has announced their decision about the Lobster Dinner. In the meantime  the Committee will meet later this month to consider various alternatives and seek your feedback so that once the Alumnae decision is known the Committee will be able to provide ours. Please check your email later this month to respond to our suggested alternatives.

Amidst the ongoing, somewhat discouraging, Covid news we’re continuing to try to add a little joy to our collective lives. Thus, we’re including 11 stories for you to guess which classmate(s) is the subject of the story. We received some of the stories in response to our December 2021 request and others as feedback to website materials or previous class emails. Have some fun with your guesses to see how perceptive you are. Answers will be provided with our March monthly email.

We’ve made the quiz much easier than the September Quiz to hopefully encourage lots of class participation. We have 11 questions and nine names. The names are those who submitted stories or are named in them. Some names are repeat answers. The nine names in alphabetical order of “training” name are: Joanne Albert Belliveau, Gail Blair Storr, Louise Carrier Deschenes, Donna Fraser Lerette, Mary Ellen Hynes Sear, Joanne Logan Simpson, Carolyn MacMillan Doiron, Mary Lou St. Pierre Audet, and Brenda Tingley.

1. Which student told us “I remember being woken up in the middle of the night, with a couple of the gals throwing rocks at the window to wake me up so I could unlock the  bedroom window so they could climb up on the big garbage bin so they could climb into their bedroom. That was at Anne St residence.
2. One “task” at the Annex was to volunteer to “let in” those errant students who came in late after dates or “Dance O’Rama”. Late  access was to crawl up the slide into the laundry room where someone would be waiting to open the window and let our beloved comrades in. Tricky business though it was in the winter, we managed! Such a resilient group!
3. To give you a story of sneaking out of residence I’ll tell you this. We lived on Anne Street and my apartment was across from the housemothers’ office, on the ground floor, so after I padded my bed and covered it with bedding, I would, in my pajamas and laundry bag, sneak down the hall to Name of Classmate’s There I would remove my outside clothes from the laundry bag, dress, and Name of Classmate and I would sneak out of her bedroom window. I have a feeling that eventually they had an inkling because not long after the windows were nailed down on the ground floor and that was the end of our escapades. Who were these two classmates?
4. “Oh the memories!! I have the program of 1971 The Last of the Stripes Review along with a ticket ($0.75) as well as 2 pictures. One picture of my boomerang won’t come back and one of Tingley singing ‘Suzanne’. That night was very special for me. My Dad came for the show and since he worked 7 days a week, that was such a nice surprise for me”. Who was this student?
5. Do you remember that in our OR rotation one of the tasks assigned to students was daily cleaning of the sterile supply room – taking all sterile packs off shelves, cleaning shelves and returning packs ordered by date of sterilization. Mrs. Forsythe would ask students if they been had assigned to clean the sterile supply room yet? One student tells us that she cleaned the sterile supply room every day of her 8-week OR Rotation. If she answered “yes” Mrs. Forsythe would say “good, then you know what to do”. If she said “no” Mrs. Forsythe would say “good, then it’s time you learned how to do it” Who was this student?
6. I remember coming in to Anne Street 6:30 one morning as others were leaving to go to work, just enough time to change and head to work myself . Who was this student?
7. Name of classmate and I spent a night in jail in PEI. This is the story. We hitchhiked to PEI but not having much money we decided that we would sleep at the Sallyann, but they were full so we switched our thinking to sleeping  in a church (they were open 24 hours then). We went into the church, picked a pew and laid down. In a few minutes Name of Classmate said: “wow, these pews are hard”, to which I replied: “they sure are, we have to find something else”. So I had the brilliant idea to go to the jail house in Charlottetown, surely they would put us up. So we did. The jailer was a most accommodating fellow. He gave us a cell and a mattress, locked us in and woke us next morning  with an egg breakfast. We tried it again the next night but the man thought it was not right for 2 “nice young ladies” to sleep in jail so he called a friend of his who had a B & B and he drove us there,  his friend never made us pay a cent. How’s that for good old PEI hospitality, hey. Who were these two classmates?
8. Which student remarked one reviewing the residence rules “I do remember the rules…I only wish I’d had enough of a life that I could have needed to break some of them …😂😂😂”
9. Who met her husband after graduation while working on an Obs- Gyn Floor and looking after his mom there? Fast forward to now and she says “we have 2 lovely daughters and 4 granddaughters”.  
10. It was the first year at the Annex. Lights out at 10 o’clock with no exceptions. Except, the hockey playoffs were on and the game would not be over until 11.  After pleading with the unrelenting house mother, a few of us hockey fans took matters into our own hands and “knifed” closed the door to the kitchen TV room . The house mother was quite “put out” to say the least but, luckily for us, had no idea who was behind the locked door. Happily, we watched the game to completion and then methodically escaped the kitchen without detection. Of course, mention of it was made the next day, but I don’t recall any “late pass” repercussions.
11. As for being called to Mrs. Wright’s office, it was a frequent “privilege” for me but I was called to the “inner sanctum” of her room in West Lane residence  once and she announced: “I am fed up to the teeth with you Name of Classmate ” blah, blah, blah.” I never said a word until she stopped and then asked if she was done and left. I then wrote my resignation and brought it to her office 2 days later. Since I was leaving anyway I was bolder than usual and said that I had “my own philosophy of nursing” and it didn’t agree with hers. I also, to my shame today, told her it wouldn’t hurt if she cracked a smile now and then. And this is when I found out what a gracious and wise woman Mrs. Wright was. She refused my resignation saying she was glad that I had “my own philosophy of nursing” and that she thought I would make a good nurse and she asked me if  what I said was  really what I  thought of her. I said smiling was a good thing. Later, to punish me I guess, I was assigned to Mrs. Wright when she was a patient and again I was amazed at how gracious she was. She had to know that for a student nurse to be assigned to her, had to be a humbling, scary experience but she never acted superior, she was quite different from her “Director of Nursing” persona, and she actually smiled, not a pinched smile but a real smile! She put me quite at ease. It all seems so, so long ago all these memories…

Who remembers how many times Mrs. Wright tried to teach us to be proper ladies? Check out our website under the Memorabilia Graduation section for a picture of her pouring tea at a Graduation Tea hosted for our class by Mrs. Steeves who lived on the Salisbury Road.