Ina Ingwersen Family

The Ina Ingwersen Scholarship was established around 2003. Since then Ina and her husband, John, have both passed away and about 725 excellent nurses have been trained in Tennessee’s premier nursing school. There have been many changes at Roane State, and many of the faculty and staff as well as community members who knew Ina have long since gone. Thus there are many people at Roane State and in the community who never had the pleasure of knowing and admiring this lady who has made such an impact on not only our lives but also her church and her community.

Ina Ingwersen was born Clasina Johanna Roostee in December of 1915 in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her father was a businessman and her mother was a homemaker. Ina had two brothers and three sisters.

She attended elementary school in Amsterdam and high school in Arnham. She received a degree in home economics in June of 1935 from the Hyverheids School, Arnhem, Netherlands. In May of 1936 she married Johannes Ingwersen, a businessman, from Hilversum, Holland. On December 20, 1937, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter, Ineke Roostee in Katwisk.

In 1939 Johannes went to Germany to study advanced mathematics at a school run by Zeiss Optical. In 1940 Johannes was sent to Milano, Italy by Zeiss Optical. Ina had hoped to join Johannes in Milano, but her plans never materialized because of the German invasion of Holland on May 5, 1940. After the invasion Ina and Johannes’ life became more complicated, and when Germany and Italy became allies, it was impossible to travel from Holland to Italy or Italy to Holland. In fact, Johannes found himself in a country that was an enemy to Holland. This was a dangerous, terrifying time for Johannes and Ina and their daughter. It is difficult for an American to imagine such a situation or even to understand how Ina and Ineke must have felt when they found themselves on a bicycle in the middle of a German airborne attack on Holland.

During the German occupation (1940 to 1945) Ina started training to be a nurse at a hospital in Hilversum. She completed her training in 1944. During the German occupation Ina and her brother, Tom, were freedom fighters in the Netherlands underground. IN the underground they worked to maintain communications and do as much as they could to interrupt the activity of the German occupation forces. This was very hazardous duty and they were faced with life or death situations almost daily. From 1944 to 1945, Ina was also an anatomy and philosophy instructor in the nursing school in Hilversum. She later became director of a children’s home in Hilversum and during this time Johannas returned home to Holland.

During the period 1947-1948 Ina did private duty, and in late 1948, the Ingwersens migrated to Alberta, Canada. Shortly after arriving in Canada, Ina obtained a license to practice nursing. IN 1948 and 1949 she did general duty in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Barrhead, Alberta, Canada. She later became a scrub nurse in the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In March of 1949 Ina and her family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada and she did general duty in Obstetrics in the Royal Victoria Hospital.

In 1949 the Ingwersens immigrated to the United States and settled in Montclair, New Jersey. They both found jobs and resumed their educations. During the time Ina worked in Montclair she was Head Nurse and Clinical Instructor at Mountain Side Hospital. Between 1956 and 1957 she attended the University of Pennsylvania School of nursing and received her BSN in 1960. Also during this period she worked in research and hemodialysis at the University of Pennsylvania.

From 1963 to 1973 Ina again returned to nursing education when she took a job as an instructor in psychiatric nursing at Bellville Area College in Bellville, Illinois. She also continued her nursing education at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving her MSN in 1962. IN 1967 she became Director of Nursing Education at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Illinois. She continued working at SIU until she retired on June 15, 1976.

Sometime after Ina retired, she and John moved to a new home in the West Shores Subdivision near Kingston. Not too long after she moved to Kingston, she was asked by Dr. Cuylar Dunbar, President of Roane State, to help with the formation of a nursing school at Roane State. Her efforts were successful and the Roane State Nursing School received National Accreditation in 1979. The Roane State Nursing Program has been very successful in producing well-trained nurses capable of passing the state board, and has the best record in the state for producing well-qualified students.

In Ina’s lifetime she was licensed to practice nursing in three different countries and four different states in the United States. She held memberships and executive positions in The American Nurses Association ANA Council on Continuing Education, National League of Nursing, Organization of Continuing Education for American Nurses, and the Illinois Heart Association. She organized, prepared, and presented about 80 workshops on a variety of subjects in many different conferences on nursing. She submitted and was awarded seven different research grants to study subjects including nursing education, Intensive Patient Care, and Hypertension for Nurses.

Ina believed that nursing must be holistic. She never separated the person from the disease; she treated and cared for the whole person, psychologically and spiritually. When she taught her students about heart attacks, they did not learn solely about medical etiology but also about the process of aging, the aspects of stress, and the effects of the home environment. She taught that any treatment given a patient would be more effective if patients could talk at length with their care givers and thus unburden themselves. She maintained that a good nurse will know how to do this.

Ina lived to be 74 years old and died on February 2, 1989. The people who knew and loved her include Linda Clouse, who with Ina’s help became a degreed nurse. Linda became a clinical instructor at Roane State while attending graduate school at U.T. She always referred to Ina as a Super Nurse. The term Super Person also applied to Ina.

Written by Robert Clouse, Ingwersen family friend.