Nurses club to mark 30th Veterans Day program
For three decades, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Registered Nurses Club has honored military nurses.
This year is no different.
The club’s 30th annual Veterans Day program is scheduled for noon on Nov. 11 at the South Park Nurses War Monuments on Corrigan Drive.
“Not everybody else (honors these nurses),” explained Noreen Dott, who is in her third year in charge of the program. “Everybody honors the gentlemen who fought in the war, but the women were so important. The nurses saved many, many lives through all of these wars. The women were never honored as much as the men. I think they gave as much as anybody.”
This year’s guest of honor is Karin Warner, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing.
Warner, a Peters Township resident and a 1981 graduate of Peters Township High School, had a 34-year career in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, where she held numerous senior health-care facility and enterprise-wide leadership positions in facilities in the United States, Italy and Asia.
Music will be provided by Brad Wilson on the bagpipes, and the Rev. John Brzek, a retired Navy chaplain, will deliver the invocation. The Nightingale Pledge, a modified version of the Hippocratic Oath specifically for nurses, will be recited, and a floral wreath will be placed on the monuments to remember all nurses who served in the military.
Dott, who served 43 years in the nursing field and retired from Jefferson Hospital, said the nurses club will be joined for this year’s ceremony by members of the Library Memorial VFW Post 6664. That post had a Purple Heart monument to honor combat-wounded veterans dedicated in August.
Members of that post will have a 21-gun salute. That salute returns after an absence of a couple of years due to limitations created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dott, a Whitehall resident, does not have a military background, but her aunt, Helen Devine of Garfield, was drafted into the Navy in World War II.
“When my sister and I would walk in South Park we would stop at the monument and say a prayer to Aunt Nell,” Dott said. “So, when somebody asked me to take over this project, I was happy to do it because of my aunt’s service.”
Dott said the primary purpose of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Registered Nurses Club is to raise funds for scholarships for student nurses. The organization holds two major fundraisers each year – a spring lunch and a Christmas lunch. Enough money was raised for scholarships for three students last year.