The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  Trainees wore caps simplified from the days of Florence Nightingale, and they were starched until they were stiff and pinned firmly to the back of the head. At City Hospital the uniform was a finely striped, girlish, pink-and-white full-skirted dress with a stiffly starched white bib apron worn over it, and with white cuffs and collars, like the cap, starched until they could stand alone. They must have been uncomfortable to wear, and were the height of impracticality as they were required to be pristine at all times, meaning endless washing, starching, and ironing by the hospital laundry. But not only were they a proud emblem of office, they acted also to establish a limit, a buffer zone, between nurse and patient. I can only think that this, too, had to have stemmed from the Florence Nightingale era when nursing was viewed as most improper work for young women.

  There were attractions, however, for young Saskatchewan women to enter nursing training rather than university. Girls lived free in the dormitories, and their uniforms and other necessities were provided, while families of university students had to pay for their children’s room and board, as well as for tuition, fees, and textbooks. A number of young women must have entered the nursing profession because their parents were anxious for them to have training “to fall back on,” but couldn’t afford to send them to secretarial school or to college, and this may have been one of the reasons that a girl as clever as Alex didn’t acquire a university degree. Or else, bright as Alex was, and she was very bright indeed, academics was simply not where her interests lay.

  Alex wouldn’t have known it when she set off for Yorkton in the fall of 1958 to join her class of fifteen young nurses in training, but soon those Victorian dorms would be history. The reason that young women didn’t have to pay tuition and got their room and board free was that the three-year program included, in the end, one full year of providing virtually free labour to the hospital where they trained. As one former nursing instructor in those days told me, a touch of the old anger still in her voice,”The hospital service component always had a way of taking precedence over the teaching component.” But already, senior nurses were meeting with government health committees to begin a movement to take control of their own professional training.

  Eventually, nursing training would be severed from hospitals, the program would become two years instead of three, and the dorms would be shut down. When Alex entered training she was part of the transition program where teaching was centralized, and for a three- to six-month period each year all the students would go to either Regina or Saskatoon to take classes, where they could devote themselves to their studies and not have to work in hospitals as well. I asked several nurses whether Alex and her class would have gone to Regina or Saskatoon—Yorkton is closer to Regina—but some said one, and some the other. In any case, her program was three years long, and aside from during the centralized teaching period, she was in Yorkton from the fall of 1958 into the summer of 1961.

  Alex’s second-oldest sister, Pearl, lived in Yorkton with her husband and children, and sometimes Alex and her girlfriends would stay overnight with them when they had stayed out too late and missed their curfew. More likely, though, they had all signed out to spend the night at Pearl’s—whether Pearl knew this or not—because missing a curfew was a serious business, one that, if done too often, could get you sent home. (In the early fifties, when my mother caught those nurses sneaking in the window at the sanitarium long after curfew, all of the nursing and sanatarium hierarchy were involved in the disciplinary action.)

  Alex would drop in to visit Pearl and her nieces and nephews sometimes by herself, and sometimes she also must have babysat for Pearl’s children. During this period, after having become close to her older sister Ann—five years older—in the last years at home, before Ann left for good, and then close to her oldest sister, Marie—eighteen or so years older—during the four years of high school when Alex lived with her in Saskatoon, she now began to grow closer to Pearl. Alex’s was a close-knit family, despite the ten children and the large differences in age between the oldest and Alex, the youngest, and it’s clear that Alex was welcomed, protected, and loved by her big sisters, and probably also bossed by them, as they acted as stand-ins for her parents.

  I found this dictum in the Yorkton nursing school’s yearbook for 1960, when Alex was in her second year there:

  Golden Rule for Nurses

  Do unto others as ye would

  That others do unto thy mother,

  Angels themselves can do no more.

  And yet, when she graduated, instead of applying to an airline—which nobody seems to have heard of her doing—Alex took a job nursing, and so I am inclined to think that in the three years after high school, the idea of stewardessing began to seem less attractive. Perhaps that was because after going through the very hard work that nursing training was in those days, she had begun to value her profession for itself, and to want to practise it not just when there was a plane crash, or when some businessman had too much to drink and needed an aspirin. Maybe the delight in being a beauty queen and the attentions of so many young men had confused her. Or, maybe she had just been biding her time, trying to sort out all the imperatives we thought we had no choice about, and to find what it was she really wanted, how much she would risk, or dare.

  In those years Alex blossomed into a very attractive young woman, and men began to pursue her. Her family thinks that she had no special boyfriend, but chose to go out in gangs of girls and boys, but others remember her dating regularly. One Yorkton man I talked to remembered going out on double dates with Alex and her escort, and his girlfriend, who was also a student nurse in Alex’s class. He described Alex as “cuddly,” a girl who thought nothing of hugging men she knew if she ran into them on the street, or at a party, long before hugging was the commonplace it is today. She was little, he told me, and with a cute figure (having slimmed down by then), and men flocked around her. After thinking for a moment, he added that she was perhaps more naïve than the other girls. After another pause, and with some emotion (common among the men who had known her when telling me about her), he said, “I always thought of her as a precious little jewel.”

  Everybody describes her vivacity, her enthusiasm, and her general delight in being alive, and nearly everyone, both men and women, seems to have liked her, and enjoyed her company. One nurse, though, who had trained when Alex did, remarked to me that she always thought of Alex as one of those girls who “could do no wrong,” meaning that she was recognized by everybody as something special and perhaps got away with things other girls couldn’t have, that she was sometimes treated with special consideration. Not everyone shared that view. One of her nursing instructors, Alice Bittner, now retired but for many years supervisor of the operating rooms at the Yorkton hospital, who took the students on a three-month rotation there, recalled Alex as not standing out in any way as a student nurse, but as a pleasant, willing, quick, and hard-working “little girl.”

  Although I never did find one person who had disliked Alex—or, at least, would say so—one of the women who also grew up in Endeavour and graduated from the same nursing school a couple of years after Alex did, remarked, “Every class had one of those girls: very pretty, lots of boyfriends, always cheerful.” She went on to say that she didn’t think that Alex had had a lot of close girlfriends. “Other girls didn’t want to get too close to a girl so pretty, one all the boys wanted to be with. She went out in a group; she was always cheerful and fun, but I don’t believe she had any really close friends.” Alex’s 1960 yearbook class note reads,

  Alexandria is her name;

  Being in by 10—what a shame

  Grand little nurse she’s going to be,

  For she is our Queen you see.

  As if to underline the pleasant, good-spirited and capable young woman she undeniably was, in 1961 when she was still in training in Yorkton, the family’s priest, Reverend B. Shwartz, published an article about her in the Ukrainian Herald, in which he praised her for being an exe
mplar of Ukrainian girlhood, in that she spoke the language, attended church faithfully, was making something of herself. Alex, he wrote, brought respect and honour to her parents and her family, and to Ukrainian society as a whole. It was perfectly true that Alex was all these things, but nonetheless it was a commonplace for Ukrainian girls to be fluent in Ukrainian and to be churchgoers in an age when most people went to church, and often, as members of the first Canadian-born generation, their families worked hard to be sure their children acquired an education. This article was written, I think, after she had been singled out as “special” by winning her first beauty contest. I can’t help but suspect that the good priest, as with all the men who saw her, was charmed by that exceptionally pretty face.

  It seems to me, though, a girl of the same time, that this must also have been, if only unconsciously, confusing to her: on the one hand, to be achieving independence at last and to be loving every second of it, to feel the world opening up to her, and on the other, to be celebrated as an exemplar of a severely traditional view of womanhood. Many girls of that period remember well this inner war.

  I was only eighteen and nineteen when I went to work for five months each of two summers at the same hospital where Alex would start her career as a nurse. I was a summer-replacement ward clerk and I rotated for two days on each ward to fill in for people on vacation. This included, in my second summer, the operating room, a terrifying place with rituals I had no notion of, a place, I now think, I probably should never have been—not because I couldn’t cope with the actual work I was supposed to be doing (although sometimes I couldn’t) but because I was completely ignorant of simple medical matters that operating staff needed to know. I remember the day that a doctor had to take the phone from my hand—I was supposed to be booking surgeries—and say “gastroenteroscomy” for me because I’d never seen the word before.

  On all the other wards it was my mundane task to deliver diet cards to each patient each day, which they would—if they were able—fill out and return to me. There were rules about what rooms I could enter with or without knocking, and what signs I could safely ignore, but once I walked in on an elderly man who was dying of bowel cancer, and a senior student nurse who was changing his dressings. When I pulled back the curtain surrounding his bed to slip through, I saw his pain, I saw the bloody, diseased abdomen, I saw the old man seeing my shock, and especially, the way he looked away from my appalled face with a kind of hopeless resignation, to stare at the ceiling. On another occasion I was told to deliver a message to a doctor who was in a room with a patient who had just suddenly, virtually inexplicably, died. I remember the doctor sitting in the nursing station with the chart open on his lap and saying plaintively, painfully, to no one, “But I just saw him; I was just here. As he stood with family by the bed, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at my first dead human being.

  And there was the day a four-year-old boy was brought in unconscious and alone, to the pediatric ward. All that long summer afternoon a senior intern on the other side of the glass sheet between the boy’s crib and my chair and desk worked to save the child’s life, as we gradually learned that he was a foster child, that he had eaten fertilizer left out on the lawn, and that a neighbour had found him and called an ambulance. The intern set up intravenous drips of mysterious substances, he discussed in muted tones what to do with staff who came round, he gave injections, he slapped the boy’s face gently and called his name again and again; his anguish was controlled, but palpable. Hours later, the child never having regained consciousness, the intern gave up. The child was dead.

  I saw other things: a woman recovering from a beating by her husband so bad that she didn’t leave her bed for a week, a man to whom she would soon return, the nurses talking about her in hushed tones in the nursing station; the nurse who wore long-sleeved sweaters over her white uniform even in summer to hide the big black bruises on her arms; the doctor talking to the police on the phone in the ward office where I sat diligently putting blood pressures and temperatures into charts for a woman who had come in claiming she’d been raped, and him telling the police officer on the phone that she’d had “multiple” intercourse, the implication being that she was—probably—a prostitute. Apparently she was beneath consideration; she would get no help, sympathy, or justice.

  I was merely a summer-replacement ward clerk, and I saw things I will never forget; I saw them when I was as young and green as anyone could possibly be, and I saw them without support or explanation. The things I saw changed me forever. How very much harder for young women such as Alex and her classmates, who would be the ones with their gloved hands inside that raw, bloody abdomen, who would be handing equipment to the senior resident, and cleaning the befouled bed afterwards, and for whom it would be mandatory not to show their fear or their horror. What a bizarre notion—that they were “little girls,” that they had to be guarded and protected, kept virginal and under control, even as they were being taught to gain rigid control over their own instincts and emotions, including revulsion and compassion, even as they were companions to suffering and death.

  I have said that I remembered Alex as a plain girl, and that others remember her as having a pleasant face, but that no one who went to high school with her would describe her during those days as a beauty, or saw any reason to expect that she would soon become one. But a beauty queen she definitely was. First, in 1960 she was chosen by her own Student Nurses’ Associations to represent them in the Kinette’s Ice Carnival in Yorkton. She won, and was named the Queen of the Ice Carnival. She was then picked by a local service club, who named her Yorkton Wheat Queen, to represent the city of Yorkton in the 1960 Saskatchewan Wheat Queen competition; there she was runner-up. Less than a year later, in 1961, after she had graduated from nursing and had returned to Saskatoon to live, her sister Marie and others, without telling her they had done so, entered her in a Saskatoon radio station’s beauty competition being held to promote the upcoming concert by a not-yet-famous American country-and-western singer named Johnny Cash.

  Alex was chosen to be his “Girl in Saskatoon,” and in front of fifteen hundred people in the Saskatoon arena she was crowned, given an armful of long-stemmed red roses, and then she smiled up at Cash as he sang “The Girl in Saskatoon” to her. It was a humorous song, but in the newspaper photo of Alex holding her flowers and gazing, starry-eyed, up at him, it’s apparent she hadn’t noticed the silly chorus: “I’m freezin’ but I’m burnin’ for the girl in Saskatoon.” (I am told that when Cash was informed that his pretty “Girl in Saskatoon” had been murdered, he never again sang that song.)

  I know that I must have seen in the newspaper that Alex had been chosen to be Cash’s “Girl in Saskatoon,” but I have no memory of it. Maybe I ignored the account because by that time I cared only about jazz, or maybe I saw it but didn’t recognize that pretty girl smiling up at Cash as someone I’d once known. Not having read the article, I wouldn’t have known that Alex had moved back to the city, and anyway, my focus was the university campus, while hers was City Hospital. The wide river flowed between them; our paths would not have crossed.

  I have wondered about this transformation of Alex’s from ordinary-looking to beautiful, more than I have wondered about any other of the many unknowable details of her inner life. She was a short, dark, plump, pleasant, but essentially ordinary girl much like all the several hundred others of us in high school, and suddenly, only a year or two later, she was a girl so pretty she became the Yorkton Wheat Queen. Some of it is easy to see: she lost weight, and with her new, attractive body she grew more self-confident, more mature.

  Her face and body were not the material of beauty queens of the period. Blondes were the movies’ favourite, and Alex was dark—she had dark eyes, dark hair, and she lacked the greatly admired, pale complexion of the blonde. Her face (by this time) was heart-shaped, rather than the classic oval we’d all been taught was most beautiful, and although she had a small nose, a dainty chin, and an exquisitely sha
ped, full mouth, she lacked the perfect, unapproachable, willowy beauty of a Grace Kelly. The category Alex fell into was the same one that the queen-of-cute, Debbie Reynolds, belonged to, as did the very blonde, pretty, baby-faced Sandra Dee and Carol Lynley.

  I think that her beauty-queen-calibre looks stemmed more from the rich colour in her face, from the brightness in her eyes, and from the glow of excitement and pleasure that she could not help giving off, than from any perfection of form, although that was present too. She hadn’t expected any of this; she wasn’t raised to this. She had been brought up to be decent, hard-working, and responsible, and not to assume that life owed her more. Her character shone through that pretty face, her surprise at such wonderful good fortune, and the hope that went with it for a dazzling future. This, rather than that overweening pride and self-awareness in their own good looks that you sometimes see in the faces of famous beauties as they pose, in a practised way, for the camera.

  In a widely circulated newspaper photo of her sitting on the hood of a car, her left arm propping her into a sitting position, her left leg stretched out before her, her right leg bent at the knee, her gaze directed away from the camera—you can almost hear the photographer saying, “Good, now lift your chin, a little more, more—that’s it!” before he snapped the shutter. Her right arm is extended straight from her shoulder and downward (she wears a wide bracelet on her wrist) so that her hand rests, fingers spread, on the shin of her right leg, and it is easy to see that the sophisticated wartime-pin-up pose designed to emphasize her slender waist and nicely shaped bosom was not one with which she was entirely comfortable. More sophisticated girls would have arched their backs provocatively, gazing not forward but up at the sky—or been persuaded to do so by a photographer—in order to emphasize their breasts. Not Alex; despite the pose, her back is straight, her feminine contours present but not flaunted.