Cindy Keene said she had always wanted to be a nurse and had even belonged to the Future Nurses of America in the fifth grade. She must have meant it, because she just retired after being a nurse for 41 years.

Born in Centerville at the old St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital on Main Street, she attended Centerville Community College.

“But somehow when I went to the University of Iowa as a junior, I ended up in pre-law. At some point I realized I really did want to be a nurse and transferred to St. Luke’s in Davenport. It was a hospital-based program, one of the few that offered two-year diploma programs. Today those are almost extinct,” she said.

Keene said the nursing students went all year and it was tough because they didn’t allow people from the Quad Cities to live at home. They couldn’t get married or have kids, either.

She graduated from nursing school in 1967 and was offered a position in ER (emergency room) or OB (obstetrics).

“I would have had to be trained in OB and I knew I wouldn’t stay there permanently so decided against that. I didn’t really want ER, but I had no choice,” she recalled.

“ER nurses are called adrenaline nurses, like those in OB or ICU. Sometimes you have to learn by doing and the cases change daily. There are many situations where you’re called on to do something new. You just always have to remember that it’s a human being you are treating.”

Keene’s roommate had family in Florida and when she went for a visit, she put in applications for herself and for Keene at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Fla.

“It is an excellent facility and both of us got hired. Our pay went from $350 per month to $500 and we felt like we were in hog’s heaven,” said Keene.

“But after we were there for awhile we didn’t want to deal with the large med-surg floor they had with the variety of procedures, and wanted to specialize. We decided to go for coronary care. My roommate went to the Miami Heart Institute and I went to the Memorial Hospital in Hollywood, Fla. The cost of school and our room and board were taken care of by the hospital where we worked.”

Keene said she really liked that field and worked with patients with heart attacks, heart failure, cardiac arhythmia and other heart disease.

One night when she was working an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, the representative from the Human Resource Department made rounds and Keene asked him why they didn’t get paid more since they had more responsibility in patient care. He told her she should get less because she had fewer patients.

“I gave him my notice that night,” she said.

She returned to Centerville and taught the LPN nursing program, thinking she would do it for only one year. Then she found out it takes one year just to get settled into teaching, so she stayed another year.

Meanwhile, Keene was helping out at a bar called Jocko’s near the Silver Spur. Her future husband, Roscoe, came in often.