Eunice E. Smolak

Robert Rither writes:

My aunt Eunice E. Smolak was a member of the USCNC.  She graduated from Lancaster MN High School in 1941.  Following graduation, she entered nurses training at the Grand Forks Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing, in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  At commencement exercises held on February 23, 1945, she received her coveted nursing pin and certification as a Registered Nurse.

Ms Smolak enlisted in the U. S. Cadet Nurse Corps and was assigned to the Bushnell General Hospital (also known as the Army and Navy Masonic Service Center), a 1,500-bed military hospital on a 235-acre site a mile and a half south of Brigham City, Utah.  Most of the patients treated at the hospital were American servicemen wounded in battles in the Pacific theater of operations.  A section of the hospital grounds also housed German and Italian prisoners of war.

After serving in Utah, she was assigned to the nursing staff at a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, (I do not recall the name of that hospital) where she remained until the discontinuance of the Cadet Nurse Corps in 1948.  She then began her nursing career with the U. S. Veterans Administration with assignments in Washington, D. C., Shreveport, Louisiana and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I have some of the items she saved from her career as a Cadet.