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October/november 1981
12 years ago By admin
Volume32Issue6
When Harvey L. Morris of La Palrna, California, opened the February/March issue, he was astonished to find himself looking at his mother. She is the Red Cross nurse on page 87, bathing the eyes of a gassed soldier.
“Her name was then Ida Marie Lichtsinn of Indianapolis, Indiana. She took nurse’s training at Fort Wayne Lutheran Hospital, graduating in the class of 1912.
“She enlisted as a nurse at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. Before going overseas she was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington, where she met my father, a patient of hers and a private in the 91st Division. (Years later they met again, and one thing led to another, et cetera, and they were married in 1928.)
“The years 1917–18 found her serving in France and Belgium. Toward the end of the war she was wounded in action during a shelling, suffering a severe leg injury for which she received veterans compensation until her death in 1975. Many times during the Depression, it was all we had to go on.
“Incidentally, she never received the Purple Heart, as technically nurses were not in the armed forces. How about that for an injustice?”