Home-run RNs Take Their Places
in Nursing Hall of Fame

By Betsy Bannerman
October 18, 2004

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!”

The award-winning Brandt was president of the California School Nurses Organization for several years. “Many school administrators do not know what their nurses are doing or are capable of,” she says, “and many parents still think there is a school nurse on every campus.” (In California, about 3,000 nurses serve some 6 million students.)

Brandt believes the Nursing Hall of Fame will help the profession “celebrate and enhance its own visibility.” She is “very humbled” to be honored along with Hawkins. “For a nurse to be remembered six years posthumously, she must have been quite a contributor,” Brandt says.

A lifetime of care

Hawkins gave 37 years of her life to health care before succumbing to breast cancer in 1999. She grew up in Fresno and Santa Maria, and, according to her parents, Erwin and Audrey Tally, was already, at the age of 4, “very caring and determined to be a nurse,” just like her aunt. She went into the nursing program at CSU Fresno right out of high school, graduating in 1962. She also received a master’s from the University of San Francisco in 1995.

Hawkins began as a surgical scrub nurse, was a junior college nursing instructor, school nurse, and hospital supervisor at Sierra Community Hospital. She was the only nurse on the negotiation team that worked on the merger of University Hospital and Community Medical Center in Fresno, and took nursing leadership to a new level as the first female senior vice president, chief operating officer, and chief nurse executive for Community Medical. In this role, she led the development of the medical program during construction of Community’s downtown regional medical center.

Some of her innovative ideas included pushing for nurses to be at the center of hospital decision-making (before the concept of patient-centered care was a popular model) and developing the short-stay surgery unit. Her own battle with breast cancer led her to improve patient delivery systems, such as the Innerlink model at Sierra.

Highly honored and respected among her peers, Hawkins had a passion for her profession. “She loved nursing and made it a fun job,” her parents say. Lopez adds, “She led with her heart, and looked for leaders with this quality. … You can see a little bit of Marilyn in each employee who worked with her, since she had that level of impact on so many. … From Marilyn’s example, we learned the following: stay true to your values and principles, embrace change, nothing is impossible to achieve, take risks, there is value in teamwork, be there for people, and, finally, you gotta have fun!”

Nomination packets for next year’s award will be available in April. The form will list the criteria for nominating qualified nurses.

Look for flyers at various events, or go to the www.nursingmunu.org or www.csufresno.edu websites.