Kitty Larkin Carbone

Only 17 when graduating from Malden High School, Kitty entered the Cadet Nurse Program at Lawrence Memorial Hospital for her accelerated training. "There were no aides, no LPN," she recalls. "We did it all. We cared for the whole patient" but she found it to be good teaching and good discipline that benefitted her career as a nurse.

It was a challenge, balancing the hours of accelerated instruction in the classroom with long shifts with large numbers of patients to care for in the hospital but the driving force remained the rush to get certified and thus increase the labor pool of nurses. The need was just as critical immediately following the end of hostilities with enrollments at peak levels in civilian, military, and veterans hospitals. Following graduation, she worked in Pediatrics at the Boston Floating Hospital.

Kitty joined the U.S. Air Force Nurse Corps following the war and was commissioned a 2nd Lt. in the Reserves, but her unit was never activated. Most of her working life was spent at the New England Medical Center, most of that time on the front lines in the emergency room. Later service would be in area nursing homes which were also closer to home.

Many years had passed since that young girl sought the realization of her dreams through the Cadet Nurse Corps and she can look back on a long career of dedicated service that took root in an effort to help America win the war.

-adapted from The Foxboro Report, Thursday, November 12, 2009, p. 5