Janet Lowe

On July 11, 1923, Janet was the first baby girl born at Banner Good Samaritan, known then as Arizona Deaconess Hospital. Her parents’ hospital bill totaled a whopping $59.75; the most expensive charge was for the room at just slightly more than $51. 

“My mother was a nurse and wanted me to be born in a hospital,” said Lowe. “She worried that the facility wouldn’t be open on time but it had just opened to patients when she was admitted for my birth.”

Growing up, Janet and her mother would regularly ride past Good Samaritan on the Brill Line electric streetcar on their way to Downtown Phoenix for shopping. And, about 20 years later in September 1943, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and joined the hospital’s three-year nursing school.

“A few months later we were given the opportunity to join a government program called ‘Cadet Nurses,’” she said. “It required a commitment to serve in the Armed Forces upon graduation and we received a stipend of $5 per month for our first year.”

But World War II ended before Janet graduated in November 1946 and instead of joining the frontlines, she married Lewis Lowe, a United States serviceman who had been a prisoner of war in Poland.

By 1948, the couple was expecting their first child – a daughter, also born at Banner Good Samaritan. The daily newspaper even ran an article on the women, the first mother-daughter pair to be born at the same facility.

Story courtesy of Banner-University Medical Center, Phoenix, Arizona