100-year-old nurses' association comes to an end
The long history of the Butler County Memorial Hospital Nurses' Alumnae Association officially comes to an end next month.
The group's officers will meet with an attorney and formally dissolve the 100-year-old organization.
The association will leave behind plans for a scholarship and a showcase of student nurse memorabilia, located in the main tower of Butler Memorial Hospital, between the glass doors and the Nixon-Sarver Education Center.
The cabinet and its contents are a reminder of the nursing school, which was open from 1901 to 1974 and produced 1,143 graduates of its three-year course.
The alumnae group offered the children and grandchildren of its members a $500 scholarship if the recipients were attending nursing school, as well as a chance to aid the Red Cross, Meals on Wheels and the Hospital Foundation.
Joyce Cranmer, Class of 1968, the association's vice president, said the group will make five final $500 scholarships and then work to set up a scholarship for nursing students at Butler County Community College.
“At our meeting in March, we voted to dissolve our organization,” Cranmer said. “Most of the active members in the organization were older than me, and I graduated 55 years ago.”
Cranmer said some members were busy raising grandchildren, some were in nursing homes themselves and many had moved out of the area.
“We sent out 425 mailings,” said Linda Cunningham, Class of 1970, the association's final president. “At our last meeting in March, we had 21 people show up.”
She said attendance at the group's three-times-a-year meetings had been slipping.Cunningham said, “The executive board and the committee chairmen didn't want the group to just dwindle away.”Good turnoutCranmer said the annual banquet the alumnae association would have at the Tanglewood Center in Lyndora on the first Friday in May would always bring a good turnout. Unfortunately, unknown to the members, the banquet in 2019 would be the last one. The COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 banquet. And the association voted to dissolve before one could be staged this year.The group did more than put on an annual banquet. In addition to scholarships for the descendants of members, the alumnae association arranged educational seminars to satisfy its members' need to take continuing education units.Cunningham said the association also had fundraisers for and donated to Goodwill, the Blind Association and the Community Free Clinic.“Sometimes members would bequeath us money when they didn't have any relatives,” Cunningham said.“We used that money to furnish a room in the Visiting Nurses Association hospice,” she said.
The group also named an Alumnae Nurse of the Year, a practice it discontinued in 2013, said Cranmer.School of nursingThe association is made up of the graduates of the Butler Memorial Hospital's school of nursing.The three-year course included three-month classroom stints at Slippery Rock University before returning to the Butler hospital in the fall, when the students boarded in Sarver Hall. They attended classes in its basements before working shifts in the wards of the hospital.“I graduated from Slippery Rock High School and, three days later, I started nursing school,” Cranmer said.“When I graduated, the bill for three years was $999.99,” Cranmer said. “That included laundry, room and board and books. It was the best $1,000 my father ever spent.”Courses included nursing theory, anatomy and children's diseases.Her stint at the nursing school solidified her future career. Cranmer, as a student, did a stint in the operating room, which set her on a path that led her to becoming a traveling interim director of surgical services, assessing operating rooms and assisting them in making changes.Butler student nurses did stints at Pittsburgh's Children's Hospital and Cleveland City Hospital.The last class graduated in November 1974.Growing popularityCunningham said the growing popularity of four-year nursing schools that granted degrees cut into the three-year school, whose graduates had to pass state board examinations to become a registered nurse.Cranmer said of the nurses alumnae association's end, “I'm very ambivalent. I don't like to see our organization dissolved. It's the graying of America. It impacts the organization. We are never going to have any new members.”
The nurses' alumnae association may soon be gone, but it won't be forgotten.Its display at the hospital will remain.The cabinet contains artifacts, mementos and uniforms from the nearly 73-year history of the nursing school.Dolly Bertuzzi, Class of 1955, the historian for the association, said at its 2015 unveiling it took two years from the time the cabinet was proposed at a September 2013 association meeting to become a reality.She said members had to be canvassed to provide the yearbooks, pay stubs, “Nightingale” lamps, medical instruments and nurses' caps for the exhibit, and the cabinet itself needed to be designed and built.Bertuzzi said first-year students wore a cap with one stripe, second-year students a cap with two stripes and third-year students a cap with three stripes. A graduate wore a cap with a black stripe across the top.The association is leaving more than memorabilia behind.
Cunningham and Bertuzzi said the group will make a small bequest to the hospital.“We are giving a little bit to the hospital,” Cunningham said. “It was very good to us, giving us places to meet and doing printing for us.”Endow scholarshipThe rest of the association's remaining funds will go to the Shaffer School of Nursing and Allied Health at Butler County Community College to endow the Butler County Memorial Hospital Nurses' Alumnae Association Scholarship.Lynn Ismail, interim assistant director of the BC3 Education Foundation, said the college is working on an endowed scholarship agreement with the organization.Cunningham said the scholarship should be set up by the end of May.After that, people will be able to make donations to the scholarship fund by sending checks to Butler County Community College, P.O. Box 1203, Butler, PA 16003-1203.“The nurses who graduated from Butler County Memorial Hospital School of Nursing and the BCMH Nurses' Alumnae Association set a very high standard for care in our community,” said Ken DeFurio, president and CEO of Butler Health Systems. “They were fine nurses who cared very deeply about our friends, families, neighbors and our community. We will strive to honor their legacy today and in the future.”The association has one final step before it officially disbands.“When we file our taxes, that's when, on the end page, we will sign that we are dissolving,” Cunningham said.She said of the members: “We will probably try to get together. I would like to get together with local ones and have a picnic.”
