River Nurse

By Teresa Holloway, ©1969

Now that her mother was dead, the last thing Barrie Foster wanted to do was to go back to Delta, the small river town where she grew up. But she felt that she owed old Dr. Hamilton a debt for helping to put her through nursing school. Once that debt was paid, she could think about taking a job like the one she’d been offered in Atlanta. But Barrie had no time to feel sorry for herself. Delta was caught in its usual summer outbreak of sleeping sickness. And the town was divided over a hospital project—with the most influential citizen very much against it. To further complicate matters, a young and very handsome doctor, Jon Tyler, had moved to town … in direct competition with Dr. Hamilton. Suspecting Dr. Tyler had been “invited” to Delta to help eventually force the ailing Dr. Hamilton to give up his practice, Barrie soon found herself caught between her loyalty to the man to whom she owed so much, and her growing attraction to Jon …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“One of the minus factors of being a nurse is never getting to finish a cup of coffee.”

“Time’s a lousy measuring stick for anything except how long it takes a virus to grow.”

“An experience like marriage was for the hale.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Barrie Foster is a new orphan, father long deceased and her mother having joined him two months earlier, when she arrives back at her home town intending to serve four years under aging, venerable Dr. Hamilton, the town GP, in order to pay him back for having assisted her financially when she was going through nursing school. Immediately upon pulling into a parking space on Main Street, she witnesses a young girl being hit by a car and runs to apply pressure to the head wound. A man in street clothes steps up as well, and she orders him repeatedly to go get a doctor—classic VNRN mistake!—only to discover that he’s the new medico in town, Dr. Jon Tyler. Ooooh, how embarrassing! And now we can segue quickly into another classic VNRN trope, in which the pair develop “sheer hostility at first sight.” Start shopping for something to wear to the wedding now!

Barrie catches up with girlhood friend Lola Gilreath, whose father is president of the bank and therefore in a position to quash our third VNRN chestnut, the idea of building a hospital in this rural, isolated town of 7,000 which practically speaking is unlikely to be able to support one. But never mind about that, because old dad immediately drops of a heart attack, opening up all sorts of opportunities for Barrie: First, Lola suddenly has room to spare and asks Barrie to move in, and now opposition to a hospital has melted away, and Lola’s house, much too big for two women in a way it wasn’t for Lola and her father, starts to look like a great place to open a convalescent home. It’s a blessing for Lola as well, as she steps into her father’s job and makes a big success of it, even if she is, well, just a girl, and a pretty  one at that: “Whoever would have believed that a brain lives under those blonde tresses?” says Barrie, Lola’s alleged friend.

Dr. Hamilton, spotting a good thing when he sees it, decides to have an attack of his own, but he opts for a stroke, which leaves him partially paralyzed, oddly from the waist down. This means he has to give up his practice to hottie Dr. Jon, but now he has time to putter around in his lab and develop a vaccine for the encephalitis that plagues the town. You will not be surprised to learn that soon a major drug company is knocking on his door offering large sums of money and a “tall and shapely, and with a smile you wouldn’t believe,” lab assistant to wheel him around. This means Barrie is off the hook, so she wastes no time in corralling a dozen women to each get 300 women to sign a petition to get a hospital in town. For those of you who resisted doing the math at home, this is a total of 3,600—in a town of 7,000, which even if half female must have some children too young to heft a pen.

Now all that remains is for Lola to give her house to Barrie for the convalescent home and for Barrie to contract pneumonia, which makes her the home’s first client. While still bedridden, the men who apparently run the town pop in to tell her that they’ve decided to fund the hospital, and soon Jon puts to rest Barrie’s conviction that he is in love with the receptionist, and we can lay the book down.

There are a number of strong women characters—the aged black former domestic of the Gilreaths, who has a quiet dignity and a role supporting the younger women, and Lola stand out—and the book drifts pleasantly along. It’s not a sparkling standout, but certainly the best of the four others of Holloway’s we’ve met (Nurse Paige’s Triumph, which was not; Nurse to Remember, best forgotten; a couple others whose titles don’t make for easy putdowns). Even the cover illustration of this Valentine publication is not as horrific as most of those from this imprint. So while in general not an overwhelming home run for us, this book is a win for Teresa Holloway.

Star Lansing−Arizona Doctor

By Ruth McCarthy Sears, ©1971
Cover illustration by Gordon Johnson

Young and lovely Dr. Star Lansing loved the wild Arizona country where she was born and raised. Here she dedicated herself to helping the poor but proud local Indian tribe, raising needed funds by treating wealthy patients at the exclusive Desert City spa. But Star faced an agonizing crisis of loyalty when dashing Air Force Colonel Whittaker Blake swept her off her feet. Whit was determined to install a missile site in the area, despite heated community protests, and he asked Star to be his ally. Could Star side against her own people? Could she lower her standards as a doctor in the name of patriotism? Was she truly loved, or merely being used? It took a dramatic medical emergency, and a startling revelation of character, to help Star find the answer hidden in her heart.

GRADE: C

 

BEST QUOTES:

“What a gal like you needs is a houseful of rambunctious kids.”

 

“Why would a beautiful gal like you want to be a doctor, of all things? Nurse, maybe, until the right man comes along. But lady doctors scare off the men.”

 

REVIEW:

Star Lansing is a doctor who specializes in tropical diseases. Naturally, she’s decided to practice in Desert City, Arizona, where she caters to the well-to-do folks who come to the area for the spas and golf resorts. There’s a large population of poor Indians on the local reservation, and she moans a lot about the abysmal health care they receive, but she’s too busy cashing checks from her rich patients to help at all on that score; her excuse is that she is burdened with the large, insolvent family ranch that she has to keep afloat.

 

There are two men in her life. Dr. Hugh McEvers is the other local doctor, but he is “disheveled, charmingly irresponsible, and completely incompetent,” not to mention always late, lenient with nurses, and indulgent with his patients. Impossible man! But he’s fun to be with, so she goes out with him on occasion even if “Star wished that Hugh might be more sincere, more reliable, and that she might permit herself to fall in love with him.” Because Star strangely seems to view every man, no matter how unlikely, as a future husband, until circumstances demonstrate what the reader has seen at first handshake, that the guy is utterly and irrevocably wrong for her.

 

Meet the other man in her life: Col. Whittaker Blake, who has come to town to build the missile to end all missiles, or maybe just the world. It’s called, curiously, Baby Doll, and everyone is patriotically gung-ho about the project except Star. Her first objection to the plant is that it’s brought a lot of foreigners to town: “Poles, hillbillies, Puerto Ricans, Southerners, Mexicans, Armenians—” and these ne’er-do-wells just get drunk and beat up the locals. Not only that, but “movie theaters were deserted, except for the missile men and their bawdy women who clapped through the serious scenes and yelled with mirth at the comic ones.” To make matters worse, their jerry-built housing is causing real estate values to plummet, and “even the Indian and Mexican household help had absconded from domestic jobs, lured by the compensation” offered at the defense plant. And Col. Blake just laughs at her when she brings up these hardships! The nerve!

 

But he is awfully cute, so Star quickly gets over her indignation and starts flirting, offering to take him horseback riding out at her ranch, her pulse quickening: “She wanted to know this man in whose hands all the military responsibility rested, really know him.” So she dates him when she can, gets crabby when he doesn’t call, and wonders “when would Whit need and want her as a loving woman? And how long must she wait—wait—until every nerve in her body stopped quivering at the sight or nearness of him and she could utter the words forever crying in her heart: Oh, Whit—love me—love me!” Star is, in a nutshell, a shallow tramp.

 

Anyway, the problem with this little fantasy of Star’s is that every time she’s actually out with Whit, they invariably fight about how hard he drives his crew and how he insists on sham physicals for the workers so as to prevent delays in the schedule, as a regular exam would take everyone off the job for too long. And he thinks Indians are “lazy and incompetent.” But that’s just a minor hiccup for Star, who has visions of nosegays and white organza. She continues to defend Whit, to herself and to the townspeople, telling Hugh that Whit’s “a serious, dedicated person—one who should be an inspiration to all of us,” and never mind about his utter lack of regard for a fellow human being.

 

Then, out to dinner with Hugh one night, suddenly he’s the one her heart is all a-pitty-pat for—maybe because Hugh looked “better groomed.” Amazing what a comb and a tux can do for a guy, “something so tremendous, so steeped in magic that it was almost unreal.” In a twinkle she decides that if Hugh proposes tonight she’ll say yes, and I decide that I am thoroughly disgusted with Star Lansing, and the book’s just half over. But the fairy-tale ends abruptly when the Colonel crashes her date, so she tells him off—and this has nothing to do with the fact that he’s been out dancing at the country club with other women, and she’s been stewing over it for the last two chapters. Whit’s response is to ask her to marry him, but though fickle Star “would have been filled with a joy too great to deny a week ago,” now she’s not sure. “She had waited for him to call, yearned for the sound of his voice—was it only a week ago? What was she made of?” An excellent question.

 

As with many VNRNs, an epidemic pops up to put things to rights. Star and Hugh work relentlessly to track down the cause—good thing she spent all that time studying tropical diseases! It’s leptospirosis, passed around by a litter of puppies sired by her own dog, so it’s curtains for all the canines, including hers—not to mention a few of the missile plant workers, but it’s the dead dog that really puts the kibosh on her lust for Whit, as now she holds him responsible for both the dog’s death and the epidemic as well (though I’m not sure I follow her logic). The rest of the dominoes soon fall neatly into place: A new health clinic for the Indians, a happy ending for Whit and Star’s childhood Indian friend, and—best of all—an engagement ring for Star! So everyone is finally happy at the end: Star can die a happy and complete woman, and we can put away for good this overly long novel about a man-hungry, shallow, and annoying doctor.