Chapter 04: MD Anderson in the Fifties – addressing race and gender
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Identifier
HilkemeyerR_01_20000523_C04
Publication Date
5-23-2000
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Keywords
MD Anderson Culture; Building/Transforming the Institution; MD Anderson Culture; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Critical Perspectives on MD Anderson; MD Anderson History; MD Anderson Snapshot; Women and Diverse Populations; On Texas and Texans; Cultural/Social Influences; Women and Minorities at Work; Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Religion; Diversity at MD Anderson
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
Now, in that early period, of course, the hospital, as we know it, did not exist. It was located off campus, you might say, of the Texas Medical Center. What were the conditions like that you were working with?
Renilda Hilkemeyer, RN, BS, Dr.P.H.:
Well, let me tell you, when I came here, I came in September of 1955 as the Director of Nursing. They had just opened the new building, the new pink marble palace, in the year before, though they didn't have hardly any of it open. They had just opened the "buildings." We had the barracks and we had the old facilities that were located away from here. And some of the patients were over there, cared for over there, and they were brought back and forth to, say, the clinic for treatment or something like that. They did not have a nursing staff over there and one day, Dr. Clark said something about would I like to go over and look at it? Well, I didn't even know it was there. So, I did go over and look and I had a fit when I found out what was going on because the care was very poor, and there wasn't anything there to even do care with. Patients weren't even clean. So, I thought, well, they said something, and so, we got with it. And I put LVNs [Licensed Vocational Nurses] in those buildings over there, so at least we would have somebody that had some sense of responsibility and knew how to do some care. And then, had to bring them for care. We didn't have Texas, Houston, was exceedingly short of nurses. Period. And the LVN schools, the licensed vocational nurses, did not come in until about the mid-1970s. So, you didn't have those people. So, you really did have two classes. You had the aides and the nurses. Those two. And the nurses primarily were diploma graduates because the hospitals here all had diploma programs also in the Medical Center. So, we had some of those people, too.
Now, the other thing that was very interesting, and it was something that had never even hit me in the head because I wasn't used to it. When I came here, I wasn't aware of the race business. And so, I didn't know about the black and the white. We had one black ward in the new marble palace that had 32 beds. Only blacks went in there. Only black staff were on there. We did not have only black aides. No white aides. Just black aides because that was the way it was set up. And the people in the area would not hire the black nurses, even though Prairie View was dishing them out like nobody's business. They wouldn't hire them. So, I thought to myself, you know, sometimes I think I must have been crazy. I was doing things that I don't even know what I was doing half the time whether it made sense or didn't make sense. I just did it if I thought I needed it, you know. They were kidding me at the convention the other day and they said, "You would do most anything to get what you needed, wouldn't you?" And I said, "If it took that, that is what it took." So, I said to the business manager, I am going to start recruiting for black nurses. And he said, "You are probably going to have trouble." I said, "No, I am not going to have trouble because I am only going to recruit good ones. I am not going to recruit anyone mediocre. Only top, which I did. Well, the people that squawked the loudest were the directors of nursing in the Medical Center here. They just had a fit when I started hiring black nurses. "What are you doing that for?" I said, "Well, I've got patients who need to be taken care of and so I am going to use them." And I did. It was really kind of crazy.
Then we got to the point where we had more patients than we could handle in the hospital and we had to start looking at all of the beds, not just part of them. So, Mr. [Joe] Boyd said to me one day, he said, "Hilke, how do you think it would be if we decided we wanted to integrate those beds? Do you think it would any problem?" I said, "No. I don't think it would be any problem. You've got a black head nurse on that floor and that's fine. And you've got black staff up there. I would be willing to bet you if you put a white patient in the black room tomorrow morning, nobody is going to say a word about it," and they didn't. And that is how we integrated. We just did it. Period. And got started off on that basis. But see, I had to learn that you didn't call an aide Miss or Mrs. They were Mary, Suzie. I was a nurse, so I was Ms. Hilkemeyer. But you were John Doe or whatever your name was.
We had two cafeterias -the black one and the white one. We had two sets of locker rooms and bathrooms --the whites and the blacks. And that was a hoopla. I wasn't used to that stuff, you know, but I had it. And you were dealing with that along with everything else because when you had to start making changes, you had to consider all of those things. And I can't tell you how long it took us to get a name tag with your name totally on it. Not just Joe Blow, Brown, or something like that. We had meeting after meeting. And then, the pant suits came in one day and somebody said, "Can the nurses wear pant suits instead of white uniforms?" And I said, "Well, I don't know." That almost tore the institution apart because we had to have a meeting with the boys to tell us whether we could wear pant suits or not, you know. Administration. So anyway, they were humming and hollering. You can't show too much of your bottom. You can't show too much at the top. You've got to have it long enough. You've got to do this. You've got to do that. And so, Frances Goff, who was still here then, and Frances was a very good person...I said, "Well, do you know what we ought to do? Why don't you go out and get a couple of models and put a decent looking suit on and parade them in front of the fellows and that will take care of what pant suits?" That is exactly what we did! I'd better not have all this on tape, had I?
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
I think it adds a little spice to the tape! How did the doctors take the changes, the integration of the wards?
Renilda Hilkemeyer, RN, BS, Dr.P.H.:
It didn't bother them, really. I'll tell you why it didn't bother them: because I don't know how many times we went through the business of .... you had seniority and you had seniority to service, and you had seniority about how many patients you had.
Recommended Citation
Hilkemeyer, Renilda RN, BS, Dr.P.H. and Marchiafava, Louis J. PhD, "Chapter 04: MD Anderson in the Fifties – addressing race and gender" (2000). Interview Chapters. 1598.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1598
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Open
