Practicing medicine at the air base

Walt Sehnert

Mildred Zink, now of McCook, is the granddaughter of Russell Loomis, one of Red Willow County's first white residents. She finished her nursing training at the Denver General Hospital in the early '30s. She and her fellow graduate new nurses were dedicated to saving lives, but worked under severe limitations.

Many of the medicines, laboratory work, and medical procedures, which are commonplace today, were unknown. For instance, drugs to treat pernicious anemia, diabetes, pneumonia, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, tetanus, childhood diseases, polio, and hypertension were either unknown, or just coming into use.

About the only effective drugs available for treating heart disease were digitalis, for treating abnormalities of the heart, and morphine, for controlling pain. For pneumonia the standard remedy was a semi-effective remedy to control severe coughing and mustard plasters for the lungs. The mustard plasters were tricky to use and probably burned the patients as much as they helped the disease.

Furthermore, nurses in training at that time, were required to assist in duties that were out of the realm of regular nursing. Once Mildred was asked to assist an undertaker in getting a body ready for burial. Though she considered this to be a necessary practice, it was unacceptable to her, personally. As a nurse she clung to the hope that her patient would get well, and did what she could to insure recovery. Undertaking, on the other hand, was so very final. When Mildred returned to McCook she accepted a position as Dr. Willis' assistant, at the Willis Clinic, in the practice of general medicine. In this position she was required to handle a number of chores, from keeping Dr. Willis' books, to managing lab work, taking X-rays, and assisting at in-house surgeries, as an anesthetist. Tonsils and a number of other minor surgeries were routinely performed at the office. After the surgery the patient was put in a basement recovery room and Mildred attended the patient, watching for complications (bleeding), until he was allowed to leave the clinic later in the afternoon.

In addition to her duties for Dr. Willis, Mildred often worked as a special nurse at the hospital and got to know all of the doctors in the community. She remembers the dedication of those doctors to their patients. She learned to recognize the various doctors coming to the hospital at odd hours of the night before she saw them -- Dr. Leininger's quick step in the hallways, as contrasted with Dr. DeMay's slow plodding gait. She could always tell when Dr. Reed was in the hospital because the smoke of his ever-present cigar preceded him. Sometimes Dr. Morgan would come to the hospital to see a patient after a Boy Scout meeting -- dressed in his short pants uniform of the Scout Master, accompanied by his young son, Donal, in his Cub Scout uniform. She remembers Dr. Batty, sitting by the bedside of a critically ill patient throughout the night, poring over medical texts desperately searching for something, anything, that might help his stricken patient.

Later, Mildred accepted the position of director of nurses for the Cambridge Hospital when it first opened after World War II, and was on the team entrusted with the organization of that facility.

Mildred remembers that during the devastating Republican River flood in 1935 Dr. Willis, and Mildred as his assistant, were extremely busy, not only in treating the sick and injured, but in other related activities. For a time they were without running water and electricity, which pretty much closed down the clinic until those services were restored. During that period they got a report that a person had been washed ashore near the Red Willow elevators, east of town, and they rushed to the banks of the river, but were unable to find the reported flood victim. Later that same day a tornado ripped through the countryside west and north of McCook. A call came from a farmer in that area that the Franz Zander place had been hard hit and they needed the doctor immediately. Mildred Zink was from that area of the county and often accompanied the doctor on his house calls to be sure he got to the correct farmstead. This time the doctor went alone, but was unable to drive all the way to the Zander home.

Toppled trees and debris from the storm made the roads impassable. Some of the neighbors of the family met Dr. Willis some three miles from the farm with horses and they finished the trip on horseback. What greeted him at the farm was a tragic scene.

The farmstead was totally destroyed. Dr. Willis was able to treat Mr. Zander for cuts and bruises and set a broken leg, but Mrs. Zander and the couple's two sons, Franz Jr. and Gerhart, were in the wreckage of the house and had been killed by the tornado.

In 1943 Mildred was chosen to be the chief industrial nurse during the construction of the Air Base north of McCook. Promise of good wages and a chance to help the war effort brought hundreds of workers, not only from the area, but from all over the Midwest to lay the concrete for the runways and construct the hangars, barracks and outbuildings for the Air Base.

These workers were not always carefully screened. Most of the men were upstanding citizens, but a few bad apples slipped through.

Mildred's job was a busy one during those hectic construction days, before the airmen arrived. Since many of the men working at the base were not trained in the work they were called upon to do there were perhaps more accidents than there would have been under normal conditions. And the work at the base continued round the clock, seven days a week. Three nurses, operating 8-hour shifts, saw that the tiny clinic was always staffed. There were no doctors on duty, so severe cases were taken to St. Catherine's Hospital in McCook.

Again Mildred was called upon to perform many tasks not directly connected to her medical duties. As chief nurse, keeping up the medical records occupied a great deal of her time, and as one of the few female personnel on the base she received a great deal of attention from workers at the base. Many of the men were lonesome and wanted to visit, and she was sometimes hard pressed to keep the line of men moving quickly through her little medical office.

One fellow, the foreman of the crew that was pouring the concrete runways, was especially friendly. He went out of his way to do little errands for Mildred and the other nurses and was good about picking up things in McCook that she might need. He was not aggressively friendly, but just very polite, and liked to talk with her about his home and family in Iowa.

One day Mildred was surprised when two men in civilian clothing stopped by her clinic to ask about this fellow. Mildred told them what she knew, which wasn't very much, and they went away. She wondered about the men, who they were, and why they were asking about her friend, but soon became busy with her work and forgot about the incident.

The next day when she came to work the whole base was abuzz with a story that concerned one of the base's own workers. Mildred learned that the members of the FBI had entered Modrell's Café (now Sehnert Bakery) and arrested the concrete foreman as he was eating his breakfast.

It turned out that the fellow was wanted for murder back in Iowa, and had been working at the air base, in a very important capacity, under an assumed name.

Mildred was considerably shaken. To think that this fellow, who posed as a friend to all, was in reality a murderer on the lam.

It was some time before she was able to accept new people at face value -- without suspecting ulterior motives.