Honoring our veterans this month, Diane Burke Fessler, author of No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses of World War II, spoke at our November meeting. Her aunt was an Army nurse who wrote letters every week from her stations overseas and led Fessler to want to write about her. After attending a reunion of the 166th General Hospital in 1989 with "Auntie Raine" (Lorraine Krause Taylor), she interviewed more than 200 nurses whose stories had not been told. Covering all theaters of war, the nurses remembered their overseas assignments, including the first flight nurses, women at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines, and African-American nurses who served in a segregated U.S. Army.
Diane grew up in Chicago, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Journalism, and lives in Phoenix. She also contributed a chapter about women in Arizona during the 1940s to a book titled Arizona Goes to War: The Home Front and Front Lines During World War II, published by University of Arizona press.
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| Diane Burke Fessler and Jolynn Clarke |
