Reta Rowley (right) was six years older than Mom, though it doesn’t necessarily look like it in this photo. Although they didn’t live all that far apart before coming to nurse’s training in Portland (Mom in Tallman, Reta in the Sweet Home area), I don’t have any evidence that they’d met before.

When I saw the name “Rita {sic] Rowley Forbes” written on the back of this photo, I was curious. It was not a name I remembered hearing before as a nursing classmate of Mom’s. So I tried to find out what I could about Reta.

She was born in Michigan in 1904, where her father worked in a mill (lumber, I guess). The family moved to Washington about 1908 where her father worked in a lumber camp and her mother cooked there. The family then moved to the Sweet Home area about 1912, where they farmed. They evidently remained there the rest of their lives. Reta was the fifth of eight children.

She was probably a year ahead of Mom in nurse’s training. She married William Forbes in January 1931 in Linn County.

After marriage, Reta seems to have spent most of the rest of her life in the east Linn County area. At the time of the 1940 census, she and her husband had a farm north of Lebanon and had three children. Reta was working as a private nurse.

Her husband passed away in 1977 and she passed away in 1984.

Mom remembered enough about Reta to write her married name on the back of this photo decades after it was taken. And yet even though Reta lived fairly close to Mom through much of her life (certainly in comparison to Mom’s close nursing friends Dorothy Holmes and Shirley Briggs, both of whom lived in California through the majority of their lives after nurse’s training), I’m not aware that Mom had any contact with Reta.

I’m not suggesting she should have. But it indicates that Mom and Reta weren’t necessarily close friends in the way that Mom was with Dorothy and Shirley. This doesn’t seem particularly surprising, considering that Reta was significantly older than Mom and apparently in a different year in nurse’s training.

One thing is certain: Reta and Mom were in nurse’s training together and we have this photo as testimony to that fact.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I think the nurse’s capes are pretty cool. I won’t repeat the joke I made in that post about nurses being superheroes. But it seems a pretty appropriate title in this present period of virus pandemic when nurses are literally putting their lives on the line to help those who are sick. Thank you, nurses everywhere!