My name is Mary Bell. I was born in Lancaster, Wisconsin on June 17th, 1954. My childhood was like a lot of other kids that were born in the 50's, we had a large family, six children, and all of our neighbors had lots of children so there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. I have three brothers and two sisters, and I’m in the middle. I went to a catholic elementary school and middle school then went to public high school. Our childhood was different in that when we were kids our parents were more hands off. We had no organized sports, we just were kind of left to our own, you know? We’d go to the swimming pool all afternoon and the only thing we’d have to know is to be home by six for supper. There were no bike helmets and there weren't seat belts in the cars yet, and I remember all eight of us in our family just piling all into the car (laughs). I had many relatives that were farmers so I spent a lot of time on the farms in that outside of town. My grandparents were farmers and several of my aunts and uncles were farmers so I had a more rural childhood versus city childhood.
“...I thought I was making big money.”
When I was old enough I started babysitting. I started out making 35 cents an hour babysitting and then I did that for a family, I was their regular babysitter and they gave me a raise to 50 cents an hour, and I thought I was making big money (laughs). When I got to high school, I detasseled corn, which is the worst job a kid could ever have (laughs). I was short and you had to be a certain height before you could detassele corn ‘cause you went through the cornrows and pulled the top off the corn, so I fibbed a little bit on the application ‘cause all my friends were doing it and I wanted to do it with them. It paid the most of any job you could do and I was trying to save money for college.
“...what else should I do, well I’ll go into nursing.”
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| Madison General Hospital, pictured on its opening in 1924 Image attribution: University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives |
There was a time for women that the only careers choices were nursing, teaching, and secretarial work pretty much. Now that has changed since the late 60's and 70's. But my mother and both of her sisters were nurses so it wasn’t such a conscious decision it was just like what else should I do, well I’ll go into nursing. So I went to the University of Wisconsin into nursing school. At the time I graduated from nursing school in 1979, there was a nursing shortage, so I was hired at the main hospital in town, Madison General, into the neonatal ICU unit and I worked there for about 7 years. Probably the 6th year that I was working there I met my husband who was a medical intern, and we started dating. He finished medical school and then he went on and had a fellowship in pulmonary medicine and when he finished we got married and moved to Minnesota because he got a job offer at Children’s hospital in St. Paul. So that’s how we ended up here, in Minnesota, it was a job.
“It was a more complicated kind of school nursing...”
When we moved to Minnesota, at that time I had two babies, an 18th month old and a newborn so I stopped working full time and just became an on call nurse in a pediatric newborn nursery. And then when my two boys were in 1st and 2nd grade maybe, I went back to full time work as a school nurse and when I started that I didn’t really intend to stay in school nursing for the rest of my career but it just worked out. I was on the same schedule as the kids and the school nursing that I did was was with children that had medical needs that were in school. It was a more complicated kind of school nursing where I took care of children with seizure disorders and gastrostomy tube feedings and some that had tracheostomy tubes and were on ventilators. I know a lot of people think school nursing is the band aid thing but that’s not the kind of nursing that I did in schools. I did what was called "special ed with medically fragile kids."
“...lots of action.”
I retired from school nursing, and I had already been volunteering as an educator [for the Red Cross], I taught CPR class, first aid class, and babysitter training. When I retired and had more time I became a disaster nurse with the Red Cross. As a disaster nurse for the Red Cross, when people are affected by disasters- it can be something as simple and small as a house fire, which is not simple and small to them, who are affected by it, or it can be a major catastrophic event like a tornado or a hurricane, so nurses with the Red Cross provide help to those people who have lost either their medication, or medical equipment and we can provide replacements for them, and so we respond locally to local things, or we respond by going on what’s called a deployment. And a deployment is where you go to a large national disaster. I have been on four of those. So, about four years ago maybe? A tornado went through Alabama, and it was the same year that Joplin happened. It was also the same year that a tornado went through north Minneapolis, so lots of action. I was stationed in Birmingham, Alabama, and we would go walk through neighborhoods and go door-to-door to see if people needed anything and if we could help them. There was a particular neighborhood that we would go to and it was just destroyed, the homes were nowhere to be found. It kind of looked like people wouldn't recover.
I was walking around and saw some people working with a chainsaw and cutting the rest of the trees down. By the time I finished walking around the neighborhood and came back to where the truck was, that guy that was cutting the tree down had cut his leg with the chainsaw. His friends had carried him over to the truck and this chainsaw had made a major cut on his leg. So it's just like within a disaster, there had been another disaster.
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| Aftermath of the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham Tornado in 2011 Image attribution: Wikipedia |
“...they had nothing.”
It may have been the same day or it may have been a different day, but I was walking around that neighborhood. It was a very low income neighborhood to begin with, and then to have even the little houses that they lived in taken away, it was quite a sight to see. There was just nothing there, the homes and the trees were nowhere to be found. It kind of looked otherworldly. That particular Sunday was Mother's day, and this group of neighbors had a circle of chairs out in the grass and had church that morning. We had been going there for several days in a row, and we parked near where they were having a little church service. There was a man there [at the service] with his little kids and they gave me a mother's day present. When I opened it, it was a comb. For them that was, I mean, that meant a lot because they had nothing. I still have that comb. That was touching.
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