The Cherry Ames Page: Careering from Job to Job

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Careering from Job to Job

"Oh me, oh my," Cherry had cried in dismay. "Do I know enough to do that?"

He smiled his encouragement. "I don't think you realize, my dear, how much experience you have had in your brief career."

--From Cherry Ames, Clinic Nurse, p. 4

Cherry really can hold a job. Really. It's just that she's in such demand, and there are so many patients to comfort and so many mysteries to solve. After all, what's a girl to do when she can't even take a vacation without a job falling into her lap?

You're in the Army Now

After her three years of training at Spencer Hospital (Student Nurse; Senior Nurse), Cherry, with her entire graduating class, joins the Army Nurse Corps; following basic training at Fort Herold, she is sent to work at an army hospital in Panama (Army Nurse), and then to the Pacific, to Island 14 (Chief Nurse).

Cherry Ames, War Nurse: Fiction Meets Reality

Learn the details of Cherry's army years and service in World War II. Click here to read more!

She trains to be a flight nurse at Randolph Field, Texas, and is later stationed in England (Flight Nurse), then she completes her army enlistment by nursing at Graham General Hospital, an army rehabilitation hospital specializing in orthopedics, in Trumble, only thirty miles from her hometown of Hilton, Illinois (Veterans' Nurse).

Private Duty, Public Health

At the behest of her mentor, Dr. Joseph Fortune, she takes a couple of private duty cases near Hilton, nursing a pneumonia case and a chronic heart case (Private Duty Nurse), then becomes a Visiting Nurse in New York City, along with five of her Spencer classmates (Visiting Nurse).

After a little over a year, on a working vacation, Cherry becomes the ship's nurse on the Julita during a Caribbean cruise, caring for passengers and crew members with minor ailments and nursing a little boy with croup (Cruise Nurse), before returning to her Visiting Nurse job. Incredibly--for Cherry, anyway--she actually serves as a Visiting Nurse for two full years. During this time, she goes to college part time and takes advanced courses in public health nursing, though we don't learn about this till Rural Nurse.

Hospital Nursing, Mostly

Cherry returns to hospital nursing at Spencer Hospital, working with children who have hearing problems and helping a diabetic boy (At Spencer). She continues her postgraduate training and works briefly as assistant to the superintendent of nurses at Spencer, then gets plenty of obstetrical experience as night supervisor at Weatherly Hospital in Weatherly, Pennsylvania, while watching over teenager Midge Fortune, who is a summer volunteer there (Night Supervisor).

Cherry returns to New York City, apparently as a private duty nurse in a hospital, taking care of a Mrs. Jensen. To help out when her friend Bertha Larsen is laid up in an accident, she works temporarily in a small, isolated community called Heartbreak Hollow, in the Kentucky mountains (Mountaineer Nurse).

Then it's back to Hilton for Cherry, when she takes a job at the Hilton Group Medical Practice Clinic, where she works with Dr. Joseph Fortune and Dr. Wilk Wilkinson, and unexpectedly assists in surgery for a gunshot wound (Clinic Nurse).

Job Hopping

Soon she's on a temporary assignment as nurse at the Hacienda de Dos Montes (Twin Mounds Guest Ranch), a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, caring for asthmatics (Dude Ranch Nurse), but returns to Hilton as the head nurse of the newly opened Wayside Rest Home, where the patients are new mothers and a variety of convalescents (Rest Home Nurse).

While Cherry is visiting her old friends in New York, Dr. Lex Upham recommends her for a job as an office nurse in Sleepyside, New York, in the Hudson River Valley (Country Doctor's Nurse). After the nurse she replaced returns from a trip, Cherry heads back to Illinois to work as a school nurse at the Jamestown School for Girls, a boarding school in Jamestown, where she nurses an elderly maid injured in a fall and two men hurt in a car accident, as well as the students who come down with colds and upset stomachs (Boarding School Nurse).

She "inherits" a position as nurse in a New York City department store, Thomas and Parke, from old friend Ann Evans Powell, who must leave to attend to family matters (Department Store Nurse). The following summer, she is one of two nurses at a summer camp for girls, Camp Blue Water, in Pennsylvania (Camp Nurse).

Hello Hilton, Goodbye Hilton

Cherry again returns to Hilton, as a staff nurse in men's orthopedics at Hilton Hospital, and nurses a puzzling amnesia case with a broken leg (At Hilton Hospital). She takes a leave of absence from Hilton Hospital to accompany an ulcer patient still in need of nursing care when he returns to his home in Canada (Island Nurse).

Seeking Nursing Position ...

Exciting new jobs generally just fall into Cherry's lap. But suppose she needed to put together a résumé--ever wonder what it might look like? Click here to read more!

Cherry then decides to become a public health nurse in Sauk County, Iowa, where she nurses a woman with a fractured ankle and people poisoned by a bogus "medicine" (Rural Nurse), but she's soon on her way to Hilton again, as a staff nurse in women's orthopedics, caring for an arthritis patient and helping organize the second year of the hospital's Junior Volunteer program (Staff Nurse); she helped set up the program the year before ("The Pinafore Club").

While Cherry is vacationing in New York, Gwen Jones offers her the chance to accompany a patient with a broken arm to England, so, of course, she grabs the opportunity (Companion Nurse). Just before she is due to return to the United States, she runs into a doctor whom she had met a year before while on a special private duty assignment at St. Luke's Hospital in New York; he needs a nurse to accompany him to a Kenyan village that has experienced an outbreak of sleeping sickness, so Cherry naturally decides to help out (Jungle Nurse).

New York and Switzerland

Then she works as an office nurse in New York City (The Mystery in the Doctor's Office). But soon a letter from former classmate Marie Swift lures her overseas again, to Switzerland and the Eagle's Peak ski resort, where she again takes care of patients with broken bones (Ski Nurse Mystery). She is then accepted for a "special position" at a college hospital in the United States, but, sadly, that book was never written.

The stories in the various Cherry Ames Girls Annuals detail even more nursing assignments, most of them private duty cases outside the hospital, in places ranging from Bermuda to Texas to Hollywood, though Cherry also appears as a school nurse , a temporary Visiting Nurse, and a hospital nurse in New York City.

This article appeared in slightly different form in the November 1996 issue of The Whispered Watchword.