Wings for Nurse Bennett

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1960

“Office-dressing” … That, Sarah thought wryly, was exactly what she had been as nurse to the handsome and successful Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter. Looking wand-slim and elegant in her white nylon uniform, her heaviest duty had been to stand by serenely while Ralph administered to the imaginary needs of some fawning, simpering female. And now she was suddenly in the wilds of Alaska, newly appointed stewardess of the Alaska Passenger and Freight Airlines, about to board the frighteningly small and flimsy-looking plane for her first trip. But at least, she assured herself, here she could be useful. And perhaps, in this new land, she would get a new perspective on her life. Because she had to make up her mind about Ralph. She had to decide whether she could marry a man she loved—but didn’t respect.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”

REVIEW:

Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one.  She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step onto the plane, subbing on the job formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s Sarah’s third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.

Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…

Meanwhile, the gun-toting head basher puts the plane down in a clearing hundreds of miles off course and hustles everyone except his two co-conspirators off the plane, then takes off again. So now the story’s narrative jumps from the worried air controllers listening to the news, to the passengers trying to survive in dilapidated miners’ cabins in the woods, to Paul Fergis and a passenger who have set off through the Alaskan winter to try to find help. As the passengers trap rabbits and build bedding out of spruce boughs, Al Malcolm is increasingly warming the cockles of Sarah’s heart, though she tries again and again to remind herself that “she was in love with Ralph, she was going to marry him—to her Al Malcolm could be no more than Paul Fergis’s co-pilot.” But there’s just the small problem that Ralph is a philandering ass, and is never set up to be anything but, even to Sarah: “Sarah wished she could think of Ralph Porter without something unpleasant nudging into her mind,” she thinks before we’re a quarter of the way through the book—“Why did she keep thinking of Ralph? Remembering things that made her slightly sick at her stomach.” I wonder how everything is going to turn out?

Of course, the passengers that the bad guys have been kind enough to abandon rather than simply murder outright are prone to all sorts of health issues.  Needless to say, everything turns out swimmingly for the stranded passengers, who have the capable Sarah to steer them through their medical crises, though she is inclined to a hysterical interior monologue: “Oh, God, Sarah thought. Suppose something is going wrong?” she wonders when she’s delivering a baby, which despite her fears—“Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn? After all this—” is perfectly healthy, only now she’s got to concoct something else to worry about, like the baby catching “pneumonia, here—” But it doesn’t, so on to the next emergency: One man, unfortunately named George Jefferson, develops right lower quadrant pain and “Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. Not appendicitis! Please, God, don’t let it be appendicitis.” But it is, and now we have pages of watching George’s temperature rise: “Four-tenths in an hour? Oh, God!” But she convinces Al Malcolm to assist her with the surgery, which she pulls off effortlessly in 43 minutes. Now she’s worried that she’ll go to jail: “What would they call it, practicing surgery without a license? Or—or criminal negligence?” For crying out loud, someone get this woman a Xanax!

Eventually the two men wandering the wilderness are spotted by a rescue plane, the party in the woods is whisked back to civilization, George Jefferson recovers easily and reveals that he is actually an FBI agent assigned to nab the bad guys who hijacked the plane—not a very good one, it seems—and the bad guys, not being very good pilots, are discovered to have crashed the second plane as well and killed themselves in the process. Sarah finds she’s not going to jail or lose her job, and that she does not love Ralph after all. Not to worry, though, someone else is waiting to offer her marriage on the last page, and then—oh, God!—we can finally close the book.

Arctic Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1966
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When beautiful, dark-haired Lori Waters came home to Alaska, she was escaping the memory of heartbreak. She had fallen in love with young Dr. Cliff Randolph, handsome, brilliant, and devil-may-care. But she had lost him, and now she desperately plunged into the excitement and challenge of her work as head nurse on difficult, peril-filled medical missions to distant Alaskan villages. Then, one day, the new doctor arrived. As he descended from the airplane, Lori felt her heart skip a beat, then start throbbing violently. It was Cliff—who now said he loved her. But could she believe him, with his mocking smile and ironic gaze? Could she trust this man who had once so cruelly betrayed her?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“As they drove back to the Littner home, she half-wished that Bob would carry her off like a cave man and end the matter once and for all.”

REVIEW:
Lori Waters is a bit unusual in VNRNs in that she is biracial, half Indian and half white. She was “raised white” by her mother, but her Indian heritage manifests itself in an ivory amulet around her neck that she spends a lot of time fondling throughout the book. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her grandfather, Chief Whitewaters, who is college-educated and holds an important position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Her parents are, as is common amongst VNRN heroines, dead; her mother died of cancer when Lori was in nursing school and her father was killed in the Korean War.) She works as the nurse on a series of clinics run in the remote areas around Fairbanks, which she reaches by plane with doctor and pilot Bob Littner. She is crucial to these missions because her grandfather taught her many Indian languages, so she can converse with the natives.

Bob is a childhood friend of Lori’s who is increasingly putting the pressure on her to marry him. She feels very torn about this: She thinks he would make a great husband, but her heart’s not in it. You see, when she was in training in Seattle, she fell madly in love with upper-crust Dr. Clifford Randolph. He dated her for a year—but after one hot and heavy date, she returned to the nurse’s dorm to find a newspaper left anonymously on her pillow with an announcement of Cliff’s engagement to a society princess. Now, a year later, she’s still not over him.

So when one of the usual Alaskan MDs is away for the summer and a new doc from Seattle arrives to take his place, you should not be at all surprised to find that it is Dr. Randolph who steps off the plane. He tells Lori that his engagement ended last week by mutual consent—“it was one of those deals where we had always known each other,” Cliff tells her, describing, curiously, the same situation as Lori and Bob’s. Upon finding himself single, he has made tracks to Alaska to see her. Indeed, he soon proposes to Lori, and though she is a bit wary of him, she accepts. This means that she is going to have to leave Alaska for Seattle, perhaps never to see her grandfather again. Chief Whitewaters is vehemently against the marriage because, as he tells Lori, “Only you can carry out my dream to better the lot of our people.” Although, since Lori is planning to quit working “for good” when she marries, I’m not really sure how much of a difference Lori is going to make.

It’s the usual formula, with Bob begging Lori to reconsider and moping around a lot, even coming to blows with Cliff, until Lori is finally persuaded that Cliff is—duh—the wrong man. This occurs when there is a major earthquake in the north, coincidentally occurring the day before Lori and Cliff are to fly to Hawaii to meet up with his family and get married. Lori, Cliff, and Bob fly off to the hinterlands, where they spend 24 hours patching people up. But then Cliff, increasingly anxious about the fact that further delay will make him and Lori late for the party his mother has arranged for them in Honolulu, arranges for them to fly with a batch of wounded patients on a Red Cross plane to Fairbanks, where they can catch their jet to Hawaii. Lori, aghast that Cliff would rank his own personal interests first during a major disaster, puts him on the Red Cross plane, alone. “I guess I’m far more Indian than I realize,” she tells him. “I can’t go off and leave them.”

When the disaster is laid to rest and they’re back in Fairbanks, Lori and Bob are having coffee in the hospital—the VNRN romantic equivalent of a candlelight bistro in Paris—when she tells him, “I guess I’m not in love with Cliff after all,” and suddenly Bob is making her eyes light up in a new way. It’s a bit perplexing and way too pat, given the earlier descriptions of how she cried her eyes out for a year after Cliff dumped her and her hand-wringing about how, though Bob is otherwise so perfect for her, she does not love him. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; this entire book is perfunctory and automatic, with little of interest to keep the pages turning.

Nurse of the Midnight Sun

By Mary Collins Dunne, ©1973
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Cory Hanson didn’t consider herself a man-chaser, but it was six months since her fiancé, Paul Farron, had left Oregon for an engineering job with the Trask Valley project in Alaska—and she missed him! After writing Paul that she was flying out for a vacation, she gave up her apartment and her hospital job and boarded the plane for Kovarik. Once she reached the small sawmill town of Datlow Springs, Cory had to wait two weeks for Paul’s arrival. When he finally showed up, it was with the overwhelming news that he had just gotten married. Though Cory wanted nothing more than to return to Oregon immediately, an accident at the mill changed her plans—and laid the foundation for a surprising turn of events in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“How could she convince him that this was for the best? ‘Really, this is all for the best.’ ”

REVIEW:
Cory Hanson met Paul Farron at a party back in Portland, Oregon, when he was in town for a few months as part of his job as an engineer in Alaska. Two months of nightly dates and they were engaged, and three weeks after that, Paul returned to Alaska. Now it’s six months later, early June, and Cory has gotten tired of dreaming about her boyfriend and fighting with the mean old head nurse, so she quits her job and flies to Alaska to be with Paul.

In what should be no surprise to readers familiar with the genre, Paul is not there when she lands at the nearest town, Datlow Springs. There’s no way to get to the mining village where Paul works, so she takes a room at the local doctor’s house, helps out during the day, and waits for him to show up. Three weeks later, he does … wearing a wedding ring, the fickle cad.

The morning she is supposed to leave Alaska forever, there’s the customary medical emergency, in this case a mill explosion, and she winds up accompanying the badly injured patients to the nearest hospital in Kovarik. There, the local doctor, tremendously short-staffed, begs her to stay for a few weeks while one of his few nurses is out on maternity leave. She agrees, and starts dating around. What with women being in short supply up there in the woods, she soon snags a few marriage proposals, including one from Paul, who has left his new wife after a couple of weeks and is in the process of getting an annulment. Have I already called this loser a fickle cad? Cory tries hard to talk herself into marrying the other man, who she likes but does not love; a bush pilot, who has a reputation of being something of a swinger, sets her chaste heart a-pounding but doesn’t make her any offers and is seen around town in the company of a gorgeous blonde, way out of plain little Cory’s league.

I desperately wish that this book, half again as long as most VNRNs at 180 pages, could be summarized in more than these three rather dry paragraphs. But alas, no. While perhaps not quite as protracted as an Alaskan summer day, this book has little to offer in the way of interesting plotting, good writing, or campy poses. Apart from descriptions of occasional Eskimo characters, the sparsely populated villages, and the abundance of sunlight, this book could be set anywhere. So you should set this book down emphatically, and move on to something else.

Nurse Kate’s Mercy Flight

By Virginia K. Smiley, ©1968
Cover illustration by Maurice Thomas

Running won’t help—but I can’t go back! That was Kate’s desperate thought as she fled to Alaska, far from the New York hospital where the young nurse thought she had been fatally and tragically negligent in her duties. Here, in the land of the midnight sun, in the remote settlement where her aunt and uncle ran a bush pilot service, Kate was determined to isolate herself, to hide from love and her duty as a nurse. But she didn’t figure on the dangers the pilots faced daily—those brave cheerful young men who wanted her friendship, and needed her help. Most of all, she didn’t figure on Jeff…

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“He watched them intently as they approached and Kate wondered if her slip was showing.”

“She looked at Jeff and he was so very, very masculine.”

“She knew that even the sight of a cut finger would throw her into a tizzy now.”

REVIEW:
Kate Porter is a nurse from New York who has made a possibly fatal error: She was so intent on sneaking off for an unapproved coffee break with Dr. Jim Lang, “dream price of Memorial,” that she gave little Josy White the wrong medication, which killed her. She responded like a true professional and hopped the first flight to Alaska, where her aunt and uncle live and run an airplane taxi business. This means she meets a lot of pilots, all of them single except the black man, for her to pick over. She also refuses to do any kind of nursing, but no one bothers to ask why. No one—except Jeff Ewing, who is British and also engaged to a young woman who despises Alaska, so the lovers are at a bit of an impasse. Kate does actually unburden herself to Jeff early on, but this changes nothing.

Kate’s moment of truth comes when one of the pilots crashes in a storm and can’t be found. The “mercy flight” of the title is the single mission Kate goes on with Jeff, five days after the crash when the main search has been called off. You’ll never guess what happens! “Suddenly she blinked. Had she seen something red glisten in the sun down there among the trees?” Jeff and Kate hike a mile into the woods to reach the pilot, and Kate proves herself more of a nurse than some VNRN heroines by actually stifling her screams when they find him. Patching up the pilot, “Kate realized more and more that she was being herself again. … She hadn’t liked the gloomy Kate of Alaska.” Funny, she hadn’t seemed all that depressed.

Not much really happens in this book. Kate takes a few sight-seeing trips by plane, like a tour past Mt. McKinley, and to remote fishing villages with the old doctor, whom she refuses to help. She works the lunch counter at her aunt’s diner and bakes pies. She banters with the pilots and goes out on dates with them. And every now and then we are told how broken up about the New York incident. She agrees to go to a baseball game with one pilot, because “she needed it, she told herself. She needed it badly.” Out of the blue, about 80 pages into the book, we find out she isn’t sleeping at night. “She couldn’t cope with her feelings much longer. Her nerves were getting more frayed every day.” Then a page later she’s dressing in a pink linen shift and matching jacket for a date. This book is not laughable or badly written, but there’s no real reason to read a story in which nothing happens. The best thing about this book is the cover, so stop there.