Elsie Schmied Knoke - Shirley Caspersen Claussen Memorial Nursing Scholarship

My family lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during my childhood. My desire to become a nurse probably stemmed from my admiration of the Milwaukee Health Department nurse, Miss McMahon, who visited our home frequently. I grew up during the Depression and my brother, Roland and I managed to catch and share most of the usual childhood diseases. The first one I remember had high fevers and dark rooms: I developed scarlet fever when I was almost six. After Doctor Johnson diagnosed me, Miss McMahon came and placarded the outside doors with a Quarantine sign. During the three weeks I was ill, she visited often. The day we were to be released, my two-year old brother came down with it. Three weeks later when the sign was finally removed, our activity was restricted for a year. Over the next years we shared measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, always during school vacations, and all of which required quarantine and visits by Miss McMahon. Today, of course, antibiotics prevent scarlet fever and other diseases have vaccines. Placarding is passé’.

The one disease we missed contracting was polio, or infantile paralysis, as it was called then. During the hot summers, all children were restricted to their own homes when the polio epidemic first began. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a recovered but crippled victim of the disease and began The March of Dimes, which everyone supported. Even during those Depression years, we managed to put dimes in our little containers until we could send them to the fund. Each year, many children died and more were left crippled from polio. It would be twenty long years until Dr. Salk developed a vaccine to prevent that disease.
I was in third grade when Shirley Caspersen moved to our neighborhood; she and I became best friends for the rest of her life. We attended the same high school and took the same courses. The United State entered World War II when we were teens. We volunteered for all the activities to help win the war, saving scraps, joining youth groups and writing to servicemen. I took a part time job after school until my mother took a job at a war plant and needed me at home. My father was over draft age and worked, also. After graduation, since Shirley was three months younger than I; when I entered Milwaukee Hospital for nurses training, she had to wait six months to start.

After six weeks of classes all day and study hall at night, we students took care of our first patients. Classes continued for shorter periods and patient care was three hours each day at first. Study hall continued all three years every night unless you were on duty. By our second year we worked full time plus class, sometimes on nights or evenings. Many RNs had joined the Army Nurse Corps or the Navy Nurses and doctors were also in the service, so students learned to do everything from serving meals to assisting in surgery, changing dressings and helping with deliveries of babies. During my three months at Children’s Memorial Hospital, I learned to do Kenney Packs for children crippled by polio. My three month’s experience with Public Health was usually for well-baby visits, although once, I visited a newborn baby whose two older siblings had such high fevers, I ended up calling the office to see them: it was measles.

My letter writing ended up with my marrying a sailor, Walter Schmied, right at graduation. Shirley was my maid of honor. She married Werner Claussen soon after her graduation.

Walter and I both took jobs working nights, I remained at Milwaukee Hospital on a 48 hour week until pregnancy intervened. We had three children, Paul, Linda, and John and moved to Chicago, where our youngest, Donald, was born at Passavant Memorial Hospital, which happened to have been founded by the same doctor who founded Milwaukee Hospital. During the next ten years I worked part time At Passavant when Walter was at home. By then he was working for the Railway Mail Service.

Our youngest child was ten when I had an opportunity to become a head nurse; the only caveat was that I had to take some college courses. All the family agreed I should do so and I enrolled at Wright Community College for two night classes. Our children and I did our homework around the dining room table. At work I kept getting promoted, still taking two classes at a time. When I had enough credits I transferred to Roosevelt University, again taking night classes while working full time. By then I was working with the Director of Nursing, helping her with budgeting and scheduling. My staff and I developed a study to identify how much care each patient required and translated that into staffing required. When I had enough credits to graduate, my oldest son, Paul, was also graduating from college, as was my son-in-law. I had the pleasure of having my family and Linda’s young daughter at my graduation in 1972.

Meanwhile Passavant Hospital and Wesley Memorial Hospital, which was diagonally across the street, in conjunction with Northwestern University, planned to build an intensive care/ dental school building on the third corner. After a few false starts, I was selected to represent all patient care components and purchase the equipment in connection with the planning and construction, with the help of consultants… And to add to all this, Northwestern University started a new Masters of Management degree program at night. I was accepted in the first class and concentrated on organizational behavior .as well as management. For my final paper, I submitted one describing the staffing program my staff and I had developed at Passavant. It was returned with an “A” and a comment that it should be published.

I sent my paper to the American Journal of Nursing, who printed it. A publisher contacted me and asked me to edit other articles on the subject into a book. “Maintaining Cost Effectiveness” became a bestseller and was followed by the sequel, “Organizing for Care”, which was not.

The hospital building was completed successfully and named for a donor; it is now The Olson Pavilion”. I was granted my master’s degree in 1977 and my husband and I took a well-earned vacation to Hawaii where our son, John, was stationed with the Coast Guard.

In 1983 I was recruited to Southern Baptist Hospital in New Orleans, as an assistant VP in charge of nursing services. It took the staff awhile to get used to a Yankee but we soon developed a good working relationship. We implemented my staffing program, to their great delight, as their previous director of nursing had no way of proving she needed to have enough money to hire more nurses. Within two years we had an RN on duty on every shift in every unit. Personnel changes in other departments meant I was responsible for all patient care services including radiology and emergency, physical therapy, etc. Patient census kept dropping, so we recommended closing some units while we developed new programs to avoid letting staff go. We soon had a Visiting Nurses Program, a Home Health Program for our patients, set up a Respite Care Unit for weekends so families could have a break, and others.

It was 1986 when Walter’s health now required more care and politics at work were tense. It was time for me to retire. My parents were living in Oak Ridge near my brother and his family and we had no more ties in New Orleans, so we moved there. His health continued to deteriorate but he appreciated the seven years he lived there before his death in 1995.
I’ve always enjoyed writing. In high school I worked on the school paper and edited our senior annual. I wrote a number of articles for nursing publications, and after retirement, I expanded to fiction and nonfiction with mixed success. I won a number of awards in the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conferences. I spent five years writing a weekly book review for the Oak Ridger newspaper and volunteered for twenty years recording for the blind until the studio closed. I’ve been singing in our church choir for twenty years. Now I also sew quilt tops for World Relief.

And during all that activity, I met and married Cal Knoke in 1997, whom I met at our church during the pastor’s grief support sessions.