My Mom - The Public Health Nurse

Author: Idie Benjamin

I am the proud daughter of a public health nurse. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s my mother was the public health nurse for Woodbine, NJ. Woodbine was a poor, rural town of a little over 2000 people right in the middle of Cape May County, the foot part of very southern South Jersey. It has the distinction of being the only whole Jewish town ever incorporated in the United States.

My mom was a Woodbiner and had returned there after she graduated nursing school. She was an excellent high school student, but there was no money for college. But World War II started, and the Army needed nurses. The Army contracted with nursing schools to train their nurses. In exchange for free tuition, room and board, my mother agreed to stay in the Army for several years after she finished school. The war ended as she started her final year. Now the Army didn’t need so many nurses; they could finish their training and not serve at all. 

The older nurses who trained them had seen a revolution in treatments and medications since they had been in school. But when the new antibiotics and other medications were not available because they were going to the troops, they relied on their first training and used effective “folk remedies.”

When she returned home, my mom worked with the infants and toddlers in the hospital at the New Jersey State Home for Disabled Boys. She worked there until I was born. When my brother was a year or so, she joined the Public Health System. At that time, each county was divided into territories with a public health nurse assigned to each one. The nurses were responsible for the health of all of the children from birth to 5 when they would go to kindergarten – vaccines, checking on development, and arranging for health care when there was a problem.

This was a part-time job. My mother’s other job was as the half-time school nurse. So, she took care of children from their birth to their 8th grade graduation.

Our town had one doctor. It was a very general general practice. He had some kind of lab and an x-ray in his office. He worked long hours, made house calls, and once treated me when a horse bit my arm.

It was frontier medicine. There was no insurance, Medicaid, welfare, or SNAP. Some people paid the doctor with a chicken. I had measles three times and chickenpox—and a tetanus shot when the horse bit me. My best friend in kindergarten, the daughter of the town doctor, had polio. She wore heavy braces on her lower legs (and still ran with the rest of us at recess). Her twin brother hadn’t gotten it.

When a child needed surgery, the public health nurses had to find a doctor to do it pro bono. They would stake out the surgical floor of the county hospital looking for a doctor to corner. They were relentless despite the doctors efforts to avoid them. I remember one night at dinner my mother triumphally reporting had she had literally cornered a surgeon and gotten him to agree to fix a child’s hernia. “Then I told him – Take out the tonsils while you have him out, so I don’t have to come back to nudge you to do that.”

Several times, I got home from school before my mother had finished what she needed to do. My younger brother and I were put into the back seat of the car as we drove into the wooded areas around the town. We stayed in the car while my mother went into tar paper shacks and old, rusty trailers.

The nurses were trained in child development and how young children learned and could be helped to learn. Once a very poor mother cried to her that her baby would never be smart because they had no money to buy educational toys. My mom kindly asked her if she had a nickel to buy a box of straws. Then she took the mother into the kitchen showed her how her pots fit into each other and how the measuring cups did as well and explained that everything in the kitchen (well, not the knives) could be a toy. The straws could go in and out of the colander and other places. She talked about talking and singing. It wasn’t going to be easy though in Woodbine. The library closed in the summer of 1959.

Another time, she had to visit a family where the children had whooping cough. Mom was checking to make sure they were keeping down enough fluids and were safe to stay at home. It was a warm, May day and the windows of the little house and our car were open. From the car, I could hear the children coughing or better “whooping.” It sounded just like the cranes in the Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom nature program we watched on Sunday nights.

Our kitchen was the neighborhood triage center, and I was the – no fainting or retching allowed – assistant when particularly bloody children were brought by for patching up.

I have vivid memories of the polio vaccine clinics mom organized when they vaccine on a sugar cube became available. She organized Sunday clinics at the Legion Hall over a couple of months. 

However, when I think of all the stories I know about my mom as a nurse, this to me is the most remarkable and captures her fierce, strong, determined, take no nonsense personality completely. Early 60s and for years afterwards, domestic violence happened and the police did nothing to stop it. One night, the phone rang in the middle of the night. Someone was calling to ask my mom to come right away. A husband was severely beating his wife. The police wouldn’t come and they didn’t know who else to call. “I’ll be back,” she said to dad as he went back to sleep. She drove to the place and charged in. With only her determined presence, she stopped the beating. She bundled up the wife and took her to her mother’s house. Then she found the wife’s brothers and told them what had happened. Mom said he never laid a hand on his wife again.

That was my mom – in the 50s, a women who worked after she was married and worked after she had children, and did what ever she needed to do to care for the children and sometimes mothers in our town.