A May 1921 article from the Republican-Gazette announced the first graduates from St. Rita’s school of nursing. Sister Miriam Hall, a native of Lima, was director of the school of nursing from 1942 to 1951.
St. Rita’s hospital opened its doors in December 1918 at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic. Lima native and newly minted nurse Miriam Hall arrived soon thereafter.
In 1973, more than a half century after the recent nursing school graduate walked through the doors of the new six-story hospital at the southwest corner of High and Baxter streets, Sister Miriam Hall left for a new assignment. She had devoted 34 years to St. Rita’s.
During St. Rita’s early years, nuns like Sister Miriam filled many positions at the hospital. “Not only did those nuns of old serve as nurses and pharmacists, they did bookkeeping, laundering and, eventually, X-Ray. They also ran the hospital’s school of nursing,” the Lima News wrote in March 2007.
“I remember when our nursing students were housed in residences around the hospital and I walked the street making bed checks,” Sister Miriam told the News in 1973. Many graduates of St. Rita’s School of Nursing, which graduated its last class in May 1971, remembered Sister Miriam, who was director of the school during the 1940s and taught basic nursing there from the mid-1950s until 1969.
In a book of memories compiled during a 1991 alumni reunion, a 1947 graduate wrote that she recalled “being met by Sister Miriam at the chapel door each morning and having Sister check the length of my uniform. She liked them long and I preferred them shorter,” the graduate wrote. A member of the class of 1953 remembered “Sister Miriam and the summons to appear in her office. I think we all, at one time, found our names on one of her notes pinned to the bulletin board.”
A class of 1957 graduate recalled one of Sister Miriam’s favorite sayings: “If you haven’t learned one thing each day, consider that day wasted.” Few days were wasted. “You had to work hard and do things right,” another graduate wrote. “But you knew nursing after three years. I am proud to say I’m a graduate of St. Rita’s School of Nursing.”
Sister Miriam was born October 6, 1897, in Lima, the daughter of Benjamin and Mary Jane McDole Hall. She graduated from Lima High School and, in 1918, the Mount Carmel School of Nursing in Columbus. In 1919, after working briefly as a nurse at St. Rita’s, she entered the Sisters of Mercy, the religious order that had been invited in 1917 to operate St. Rita’s.
“They give their lives to the sick, the injured and the poor. Their door is always open to the needy,” Judge Fred Becker, who led the campaign to raise funds for the new hospital, told the Lima Republican-Gazette in March 1917. “No one, white or colored, is ever turned away by them. The Sisters can make a dollar go further than any charitable organization known. They each get less than forty cents a day for food and clothes.”
Sister Miriam professed her vows with the Sisters of Mercy in Toledo in 1925. A year later, she was graduated from the University of Toledo’s College of Pharmacy and in 1941 she received a master’s degree from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and became a member of the National Honor Society of Nursing.
“She was at Mercy Hospital, Toledo, until 1925,” the News wrote in April 1970 when Sister Miriam celebrated her 50th anniversary as a nun, adding, “Sister Miriam has shuttled between St. Rita’s Hospital and Mercy Hospital, Tiffin, from 1925 and 1968, with a brief spell at St. Charles Hospital, Toledo, in 1953.”
From 1942 to 1951, Sister Miriam was director of the St. Rita’s School of Nursing, for which she received editorial praise from the News. “Congratulations and sincere good wishes are extended to Sister Miriam and Sister Mary Joan, Lima nuns of the Mercy order, who observed the silver anniversary of their profession Monday,” the News wrote January 10, 1947. “Their self-sacrificing work for the betterment of humanity for the past 25 years is a credit to them and the order they represent. May they live to celebrate many more anniversaries in their chosen profession.”
After leaving Lima in 1951 for a stint in Toledo, Sister Miriam returned to St. Rita’s in September 1954 as nursing arts instructor, completing her teaching career in 1969. She also served as acting director of the nursing school in the early 1960s.
“For the past five years Sister has worked with the public relations department stationed in the lobby greeting patients as they check into the hospital,” the Lima News wrote in November 1973.
“I’ve had enough to keep my fingers busy all these years,” she told the News. “I’ve always been interested in science and have used what skills and knowledge I have acquired. I finished my formal teaching career in 1969. I have trained more than 1,000 nurses and I’m very proud of this accomplishment. Of course it wasn’t all work, because I enjoy being with young people so much,” she added.
Asked if she regretted spending so much of her time in Lima rather than traveling, she replied, “I’ve loved my work here and gotten to do all the traveling I wanted. I have been to New York, California, Canada, Nevada and more. In fact, I even stopped in Las Vegas on one trip and left with a little extra change.”
As for her many years of service, she noted, “I can’t say that if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t do things differently, but I’ve had a good life.”
Sister Miriam was transferred one last time in 1973, to become hostess of St. Bernardine’s Home, a facility for retired nuns, in Fremont. She died there January 21, 1983, at the age of 85.
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SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
