Kingston school of nursing graduates gather for one final journey into the past
Graduating classes of of Hotel Dieu Hospital's school of nursing in 1964, 1974 gather for one final reunion.
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During her decades-long career as a nurse, Dale Gilad travelled the world. Literally, she and two of her colleagues went on a globe-trotting journey that took them around the globe in nine months. In her career, she worked in Los Angeles, the Middle East and wherever the wind would take her, but the Oregon resident’s next journey, later this week, will see her journey back to where it all began: Westport, Ontario.
“I fly out of here on the 30th,” the sweet, spry and razor sharp 80-year-old said in a telephone interview ahead of her impending journey. “I fly to Toronto for a few days. My sister actually lives in Toronto.”
From the Big Smoke, she and her sister will then travel to Kingston to be part of an impending — and significant — gathering as the graduating classes of 1964 and 1974 from the Hotel Dieu Hospital school of nursing will be holding their annual reunion luncheon for the final time. In 1954, Gilad graduated from the school, which opened in 1912 and trained nearly 1,700 nurses over the course of the next 60 years before closing in 1974. Ontario hospitals had nursing schools until nursing education was centralized through colleges and universities in the 1970s.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the graduation of the final class, and four members of that cohort are expected to in attendance along with 260 other alumni for the final time. Gilad will be among them.
“My sister and I will then drive down to Kingston,” she said.
More than a decade after she hung up her scrubs, Gilad said she looks back with great fondness on those formative years studying nursing in the halls of one of Ontario’s most hallowed hospitals.
“I was pretty young,” she said. “I graduated high school when I was 17, so it was really the first time away from home. I came from small-town Westport and it was my first time away from home. I remember my mom saying, ‘We paid your tuition, so you’d better do good here and you’d better enjoy it.’ Then my dad, God bless him, said, ‘If you don’t like it sweetheart, you just call and we’ll come and get you,’” Gilad said with a chuckle.
Wide-eyed and full of enthusiasm, the 17-year-old recalled shaking the early jitters and settling into a career that would afford her all the comforts life could throw at a personal professionally.
“It was my first time living at a dorm,” she recalled as though it was yesterday and not six decades earlier. “We lived in the Jeanne Mance residence. I don’t know how, but I had a private room, it was around the third or the fifth floor.”
For Gilad and many others, city life in Kingston was a new experience.
“Most of us were coming from farming communities,” she said. “There were some who were coming from the city, but I think there were 41 in my class and a large number of them were from rural areas, so to us, Kingston was a big town, if you can believe that. We thought, ‘Oh this is a big city.’ It was a lot of getting used to just living away from your home, from your parents, like any kid going to college.”
Gilad herself came from the family’s dairy farm north of Kingston in the picturesque village of Westport.
“We had a wonderful childhood,” she said, her smile evident even through the phone. “Growing up in a small town in a rural area, it was a great place for a kid. My dad was very much into sports so he made sure that we got into Westport, which had a skating rink, or he would set us up with a pond and we could skate. I’ve had a great life.”
In Gilad’s college days, the school, like the hospital, was overseen by Catholic nuns.
“I remember the nuns generally as being very good, good-hearted people,” Gilad said. “There were a few kind of whacky ones, but most of the ones that dealt with us were really gentle, kind, what you would hope for in a Catholic nun. The ones in the hospital were perhaps a little bit hardened to the life of being at the hospital and there were some tough nuns in the hospital, but all and all, they got us through, and we all turned out to be good nurses, I would say.”
In those days, it was trial by fire, Gilad recalled, adding that for the first six months, you had what was called a probate, which were just classes.
“Then you gradually were shifted into the hospital working a few hours here, a few hours there. And then you would kind of get to the point where you might be up to four or five hours and have the rest of the day in class. It was a hard curriculum. It really was a hard curriculum. In those days, we had to do like three months in each different department.”
After a stint in the operating room, it would be a stint in general medicine and so on and so forth, she said, adding the toughest stint came when it came to studying mental health, which included staying at the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital.
“That was the toughest rotation because you had to actually live there,” Gilad said.
It’s not every day that Gilad gets to reminisce about her youth, but given the opportunity, she was more than happy to wax nostalgic.
“It was all interesting, and looking back on it, it was probably the best education that any nurse could get because when you left Hotel Dieu, honestly — and I would imagine it was the same at KGH, although there was rivalry between the two — I would imagine that we all came out as really good nurses because we had had so much clinical time. We had spent so much of our time actually on the front lines of hospitals. So we came out with a good, solid education. I had that to be very thankful for.”
Gilad also said she met many wonderful folks in her time in the program, some of whom she’s still close with today, six decades on.
“I’ve still got some really good friends from there,” she said. One classmate, Judy Clarkson, even packed up and moved south with Gilad when they graduated from the nursing school.
“Judy Clarkson and myself decided we had to get out of there,” Gilad said. “In those days, people who graduated — I graduated in 1964 — most girls were getting married. Most people graduated with an engagement ring. Judy and I failed on that boat, but we both failed intentionally because we thought we’d worked so hard, we wanted to see something of the world. So, we decided we’d come to California.”
After graduating in the spring of ’64, the two set out to find work in the bright lights and sunny skies of Hollywood. In January 1965, they did it, landing work at the famed Mount Sinai Hospital.
“We had a year’s contract,” Gilad said. “That kind of led us on our way to exploring the world. After that, she went back, got married and then she went to Moscow. I had my RN, I could make a good living, I could travel. I travelled the world with it. I’ve had a great life.”
When her year in L.A. was up, she and two girlfriends had saved up enough money to travel the world, each purchasing a ticket for $1,200 for a round-the-world journey.
“We had it all figured out,” she said. “We managed to get around the world in nine months. We did whatever we had to do, but we had a great time. Again, thanks to the nursing school behind me, because that’s where the money had come from. Even back in the day, we made a decent living.”
Following that, Gilad remained a nurse for her entire career, which included an eight-year stop in the Middle East.
“I lived in Israel and was a nurse over there, from ’74 to ’82,” she said. “It was an interesting experience. Very tough language to learn. I kind of butchered their language, but I had an outgoing personality, so I made friends in whatever language. I was working with Russians, Arabs, Israelites and somehow or other we always figured out what the other people were saying. It all worked out great. I travelled extensively.”
Gilad, who recently turned 80 with a surprise party that saw her family all travel to Oregon to surprise her, said she’s looking forward to the reunion, which she said will be both a happy and sad occasion.
“The only other reunion I’ve been to was 10 years ago when I came to our 50th,” she said. This one, I think is our last one, so it’s more meaningful.” After a Friday night dinner with friends and family, Saturday will be the main event, a luncheon that will feature a small number of her own classmates among a total of 260 expected to gather for the final tie. “There’s a big luncheon where I guess we all get to say goodbye. That sounds sad, doesn’t it?”
The next day, Gilad and her sister will make the trek home, to Westport, where it all began.
“My sister and I plan on Sunday going to down to Westport and then we always visit St. Edward’s Cemetery because our mom and dad are there, our grandparents are there and our great-grandparents are there. We spend a long time wandering around the cemetery saying, ‘Hi, how are you, hope all is well in Heaven.’ We’ll be getting there one of these days. We always have to go and greet them all.”
Looking back, Gilad conceded that few professions have undergone as much change and advancement in the last 60 years than nursing and medicine.
“Nurses have really stepped their game up, getting their credentials, getting their degrees. They’re much more professional, I would say, than when we graduated,” she said. “I would say that we were professional by the standards of the ’60s, but now nurses are graduating with a lot more knowledge. Maybe not the hands-on experience, but they have a lot more knowledge now. And they need it because medicine has advanced so much, procedures have changed.”
Take simple procedures of the day that we now take for granted, she said.
“When I was in nursing school, if you had a gall bladder out, just a simple little gall bladder removed, you might be in the hospital two or three weeks,” she said. “Now, you have a gall bladder removed, you go in at 5 in the morning and you’re home at 5 in the afternoon. I can remember people having cataracts and we would have to put sandbags by their head because they couldn’t turn heir heads. They’d be in the hospital for three weeks. Now it’s a 45-minute procedure. You can’t drive home, but you can get home and take care of yourself. The advances and the advancements in cancer treatments, things that killed people 60 years ago, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, they’re not killing us anymore. Even awful diseases like pancreatic cancer, which was a death sentence not that long ago. It’s still an awful thing to get, but there are people walking around eight, 10 years after getting pancreatic cancer. That never happened back then.”
Not all the changes, however, have been for the better, she said, noting the huge wait times and strain on the medical system that exist today were not issues in the ‘60s.
“The advances are astounding, but if I were to go see a specialist now, it would probably take me three months to get in to see a specialist. That’s just the name of the game anymore. I’ve been retired quite frankly for 12 years. Things have changed in that time, too. The medicine itself has changed for the better and the access to it is maybe a bit more complicated.”
At least for one more day, Gilad can take a trip back to those simpler times.
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