The Arizona Nurse Honor Guard presented a Florence Nightingale tribute to Sedona Winds resident Lorraine Anderson on Tuesday, Oct. 8, for her lifetime of service in the nursing field.
“I just loved it,” Anderson said of her feelings toward the career she had for more than 50 years.
Anderson’s professional career started as a summer job in 1946 while she was in high school, with a position as a nurse assistant in Springfield City Hospital, in Springfield, Ohio, before she started a three-year work-study program at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio the following year. She attributed her decision to her high school principal’s influence.
“He helped me by taking me over to the nursing, he got me signed up for some tests and [the tests] came out nurse or social worker,” Anderson said. “So he said, ‘If I would take you over to the nursing, would you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Yes’ … When I was there, I remember having the feeling, ‘this is for me.’ I really liked the nursing atmosphere in the hospital.”
Her first work experience as a professional nurse came in 1950 in the surgery department of Miami Valley Hospital before she moved on to Greene County Memorial Hospital in Xenia, Ohio, where she specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, in 1952. Anderson later had four children of her own between 1952 and 1962.
“But as soon as I was 11, she went back to school,” her oldest daughter Carolyn Anderson said. “We were living in Pennsylvania then, and because it had been a diploma program that she graduated from, originally, to get a bachelor’s in nursing, RN, she had to go through the nursing program again at Villanova University.”
Anderson graduated from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1969; she had started working at Methodist Hospital in Omaha the previous year. She then received a master’s degree in public health in 1976 from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in nursing from the University of Indiana in 1986. She was an assistant professor in the nursing graduate program at Indiana University for the next three years.
“She’s a real survivor,” granddaughter Chenoa White said. “She’s shown me the importance of getting things done … Her ability to no matter what comes at [her] to go through and persevere. That’s the core of what she’s done in her life.”
In 1989, Anderson became administrator of Community Services and Clinics for the Bureau of Community Health Services at the Marion County Health Department in Indianapolis. She held the position for five years before relocating in 1994 to Tucson to work as a public health nurse for the Pima County Health Department. After her retirement in 2000, she spent the next six years volunteering with the Area Agency of Aging.
“We’ve been established since 2017 and we have 67 nurses that belong to the group. We started serving Maricopa and also Yavapai County, but we honor nurses through central and Northern Arizona,” Arizona Nurse Honor Guard Founder Toni Conde said, and added that the length of Anderson’s nursing career stood out to the 501(c)(3) organization. “We started our mission honoring nurses that have passed, but this year, it’s grown to honoring nurses and living tributes.”
“I don’t think she has honored herself, so this is really a wonderful thing,” Carolyn Anderson said. “Talking with her [about] stories from her nursing career leading up to this event, it got us thinking. I realized she didn’t recognize how much she’s given to other people.”
