Chapter 01: An Early Interest in Science

Chapter 01: An Early Interest in Science

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Description

In this chapter, Mrs. Hermes sketches her family background and her early interest in the sciences. She also talks about her education at Jamestown High School and Jamestown College and her transfer to University of North Dakota. She sketches her experiences during the years of the World War II, particularly her impressions that the public was given little information about what was actually going on. She compares WWII coverage with coverage of the Vietnam War.

Mrs. Hermes then notes that she went to college as a premed student (BS in biology and chemistry conferred in 1950). She had been inspired by her chemistry and biology teachers in high school as well as her work in a hospital. She applied, but was not accepted at medical school.

Identifier

HermesKL_01_20180122_C01

Publication Date

1-22-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

Educational Path; Personal Background; Educational Path; Cultural/Social Influences

Transcript

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

All right, our counter is moving, and we are recording. Today is January 22, 2018, and this is Tacey Ann Rosolowski. Today, I’m in Tyler Texas, at the home of Kay Hermes , and am I…?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Hermes. (“Hermiss”) T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Hermes, okay, thank you for that correction, Hermes. I’m very excited about our conversation, because Mrs. Hermes worked with Eleanor MacDonald [oral history interview], in the early years of the Department of Epidemiology, and this will be an exciting insight into the early years of that department, and also of the institution. Let me also just say for the record, it is about twelve minutes of eleven, and this interview is being conducted for the Making Cancer Voices Oral History Project, run by the Research Medical Library at MD Anderson.   T.A. Rosolowski, PhD So, why don’t we start in the traditional place I usually start in and let me ask you where you were born and when and tell me just a little bit about your family.

Kay Hermes, BS:

Okay. I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, um, [chuckles] I’m forgetting my birthday. August 6, 1928. I lived there until I was about—my father was a lawyer there and my mother took care of my brother, my sister and myself. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD And your father’s name and your mom’s name.

Kay Hermes, BS:

My father’s name was Andrew Loram, L-o-r-a-m. My mother’s name was Emily, E-m-i-l-y, Loram.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

And brothers and sisters?

Kay Hermes, BS:

My sister was ten years older than myself and my brother was nineteen months older. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD And their names?

Kay Hermes, BS:

So I was the youngest one in the family. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Their names?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Well, my sister’s name, her married name was also Emily, Tillemans, T-i-l-l-e-m-a-n-s. My brother’s name was John Loram, L-o-r-a-m. Both of these siblings are deceased now, as are the parents of course. So, in any event then, I think I was about maybe seven or eight when we moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I lived until I was about eleven or twelve. Then, I moved to Jamestown, North Dakota, where my mother and my brother and I lived with my grandparents. I went to school there, in Jamestown, and graduated from high school. All through high school, I was very, very interested in science, was the thing I was interested in, but I also was editor of the school annual, a project that I liked very much. I participated in the drama group, which was called Playmakers, and I liked that very much as well.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Now let me ask you, were your parents divorced, or your father was deceased?

Kay Hermes, BS:

My father, unfortunately, was a hopeless alcoholic and wandered off into the great blue yonder, and that’s the reason we moved, to live with my grandparents. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Well, resilient mother, tough mother.

Kay Hermes, BS:

She was a tough mother, she really was. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Yes, absolutely.

Kay Hermes, BS:

And then after, she took care of my grandfather, who needed some care. So, we fell, fortunately, into somewhat of a needed situation, because my mother then, could take care of my grandfather. My aunt lived in the house also, my mother’s older sister, and the older sister worked all of her life at a newspaper, the Jamestown Sun. So anyway, that was the family group and when my grandfather died, my mother and my aunt and my brother and I moved then to a smaller place. My brother went in the Marines when he was sixteen and World War II had started, and he was just sixteen. Actually, he was only sixteen when he participated in the April 1st invasion of Okinawa. So, he was in the service quite a long time.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Now what were the war years like for you, I mean that was kind of an interesting time for women who were working.

Kay Hermes, BS:

Well, one of the things that I remember very well about it, in my high school class, you see I graduated from high school in 1946 and of course the war would have come to an end. However, in my probably sophomore and junior years, the noteworthy thing was how few young boys were left in school. Many of them had joined the Navy when they were sixteen and some did well, and some never came back. The war years were very different from, say the Vietnam War, because we did not have the kind of documentation. I don’t know if you saw the motive, the [Ken] Burns movie on the Vietnam War. Well, I watched every bit of it. Now, in World War II, in a little town like Jamestown, you had the newspaper, the Jamestown Sun, and then if you—and a radio, that had I guess NBC News, I don’t remember what the station might have been, and your only other really news information would have been going to the movies. If you went to a movie, there was always a fifteen or twenty minutes, or I don’t know just exactly how many minutes, but there was always what was called a newsreel. Those were our impressions of World War II, and they were, I would say fairly limited. John was not able to write very much. He returned from Okinawa and he stayed in the Marines for a while, and the only thing I remember his telling me about it, is that they were the first—his company was the first wave to invade Okinawa, and he said there were only three men left in that company after that. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Oh, wow.

Kay Hermes, BS:

He was much scarred by his war experience also. But, as I said, I thought it was wonderful, to watch that movie, the Vietnam War, because we did not see what was happening on the spot. We of course were very shocked to learn of the liberation of the concentration camps, but even that was not in great detail. We heard, of course, President Roosevelt, we heard Truman, and we of course heard all the information about the atom bomb, but we really didn’t see much of it, I mean the technology was not there, the news technology was not, certainly not in a little town of five-thousand people in the Midwest. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Right.

Kay Hermes, BS:

So my experience in World War II was largely, as I said, to finish high school, to be aware of all the young men that had gone into the service when they were sixteen, which would make them about juniors in high school. My graduating class was very shy of a number of young men that I had gone to school with for some time, and of course that is a remembrance that stays with you.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Sure. Now, what were your post-high school plans?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Pardon me? T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Your post-high school plans. What did you do after high school?

Kay Hermes, BS:

After high school, I went to the first year of college. I went to Jamestown College there in Jamestown, and I didn’t have any money, so I had three jobs. I worked as a nurse’s aide in Trinity Hospital, on the weekend, I sold shoes at a little store, S&L Store was the name of it. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Did you go to nursing school?

Kay Hermes, BS:

No. I went to the University of North Dakota.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Oh, okay.

Kay Hermes, BS:

Not then though. I finished my first year in college and that tuition was rather high. It was a very good, small, I think Presbyterian school. But anyway, I was very anxious to transfer to the University of North Dakota, in [Grand Forks], which I did do. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Now, what were you interested in majoring in?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Science. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Okay. And did you have a sense of—

Kay Hermes, BS:

Pre-med, I was pre-med all the way.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Now, no one else in your family was in the sciences, or were they?

Kay Hermes, BS:

No, no. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Okay. So, you were a pioneer in a sense.

Kay Hermes, BS:

Well, I think I was inspired by a high school science teacher. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Yeah, tell me about that.

Kay Hermes, BS:

Well, I don’t remember his name.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

That’s okay.

Kay Hermes, BS:

I can just see his face. He was a very inspiring chemistry teacher. No, my chemistry teacher was a woman, this man taught biology. Both the biology and chemistry teachers, I think had a good deal to inspire me and also, the fact that all those younger years, I always worked in a hospital part-time. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Now, what did you do when you were work—what sort of jobs did you do in the hospital?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Oh, I was like a nurse’s—I suppose in today’s world, you’d call it a nurse clinician. We didn’t call it—we had no such fancy title. We were simply aides, and we were assigned. It was a Catholic hospital, run by Sister St. Mary, I don’t know of what order, but in any event, we were assigned certain patients to look after, and we did everything—not the nursing duties, but we did everything that was needed for that one patient. We cleaned the room, we emptied the wastebasket, we gave the patient a bath, we changed their bed. It was kind of a one-person operation, to have the person ready for the nurses and doctors. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Now, when did you decide that you wanted to be a physician?

Kay Hermes, BS:

Oh, I think ah, I think when I was in high school, that was a great dream of mine.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD :

Okay, okay, yeah. And so, it was the academics that inspired you? It wasn’t like an experience with someone’s illness or at the doctor?

Kay Hermes, BS:

No. No, no. It was the academics, actually. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD Yeah, very neat. And then your work experience, that really showed you…

Kay Hermes, BS:

Yeah. I was very interested in it. I did give some thought to going to nursing school, but I really wanted to do the pre-med course. Now, they didn’t have that course at Jamestown College, but your first year is, you know? Well, I did take a chemistry course there, one chemistry course, but the rest of it was pretty liberal arts. T.A. Rosolowski, PhD And then you transferred to the university.

Kay Hermes, BS:

And then I transferred to the University of North Dakota, and I majored in science. I graduated in 1950, and I was one of the first women applicants for the University of North Dakota Medical School, and I was not accepted. I think if I had made better grades, I might have been, but I would have had to have been Einstein, I think, and so I was not admitted to medical school. I really didn’t have any money to go to college. There were no such thing as student loans. The only government help for people going to college is the Bill of Rights had been passed for service men, and their tuition and housing and everything was paid for through educational grants. There were no student loans that I was aware of, or I would have found them if they were there, so I did have to work a lot. I worked in a hospital, from three to eleven, and went to school from seven to three, and I did that for a year or so. Then, I think in my junior year, I was able to land a very nice job, operating the switchboard for the university. If you can imagine how ancient technology this was, I mean you called the university and I answered, and you asked me for such and such a department and I plugged you in, and you got your phone call. So, it was ancient history. Anyway, so then I graduated from the University of North Dakota.

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Chapter 01: An Early Interest in Science

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