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Why can’t nurses have a Hall of Fame, like sports?” This was the question posed two years ago by Pilar de la Cruz-Reyes, chief nursing officer at Fresno Heart Hospital. She, along with Mary Lopez, director of critical care and dialysis services at Community Medical Centers in Fresno, were part of a task force within the San Joaquin Nursing Leadership Council. The group was discussing how to showcase positive images of nursing and at the same time recruit the brightest students into the nursing profession.

The committee’s idea was to inaugurate the Central San Joaquin Valley Nursing Hall of Fame, which would honor prominent contemporary nurses and inspire future ones. Outstanding nurses would be selected from the seven-county area comprising Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, and Tulare and their names would be permanently etched on a plaque located on the campus of California State University, Fresno.

“We were all volunteers,” Lopez says. “We’ve worked on many efforts together and continue to strive for the unattainable.” Sponsorship came from the Department of Nursing at CSU Fresno, Sigma Theta Tau International, Mu Nu Chapter, Honor Society of Nursing, and the Nursing Leadership Council of the Central San Joaquin Valley, with additional funding from Johnson & Johnson and private donations.

Nomination packets were mailed in April. Criteria for selection focused on the nominee’s career, leadership, mentoring, and professional achievements. The first two inductees into the Nursing Hall of Fame, Marilyn Hawkins, RN, BSN, MHROD, of Fresno (presented posthumously) and Charlotte Brandt, RN, BSN, PHN, MSA-HCM, FNASN, of Bakersfield, were honored Sept. 15 at an awards luncheon.

For the kids

“I have always been a nurturer,” Brandt says. “Animals, gardens, people.” When her family left her native Atlanta, the nuns at her dad’s (a doctor) hospital gave her a small-sized student nurse uniform as a going-away gift. “I grew up watching movies of surgeries on the bedroom wall after office hours so my dad could learn the latest techniques,” she remembers.

A candy striper at a Bakersfield hospital as a teenager, she received a BS from the University of San Francisco School of Nursing in 1965. Among other things, she learned the importance of “leadership skills and a commitment to bettering the nursing profession.” Deciding to go into public health nursing — “I felt I could make a difference through health education” — Brandt eventually became a school nurse for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools in 1980, and remained there until retiring in July.

“My main role was in assessing children for social, health, and educational needs,” Brandt says. She became particularly concerned about childhood obesity in the early grades — “I saw its damaging effects on self-esteem” — and helped develop a statewide health curriculum for overweight students and screening protocols to diagnose Type 2 diabetes. She also focused on teen pregnancy — “I saw the life-changing, generational elements of it” and administered a grant, Parenting and Childhood Enrichment, that placed the teen back in high school, learning parenting skills and graduating.

Brandt provided support to staff and parents when babies in the Infant Development Program died. She helped medically challenged students receive the care and special classes they needed.

She had amusing experiences, too. “I can say,” she says with a laugh, “that people’s lack of knowledge about their own bodies leads to educational opportunities where one must keep a straight face while explaining how the body works and where ‘things’ are located!”