Since the days of John F. Kennedy and Camelot, since the era of mini-skirts and party lines, the three-ring binder of letters has made its way merrily across the country.
From Nebraska to Arizona to Colorado and Texas to Illinois and back to Nebraska and off to West Virginia, tucked safely inside a sturdy box.
“When we started this letter business, we weren’t out of school very long,†says retired nurse Ann Kirk. “We were all together at someone’s apartment talking and somehow or other I got to be the coordinator of it.â€
The 1961 graduates of the St. Elizabeth School of Nursing were a close-knit class, all of them young Nebraska women, all of them single — No married women allowed! — who lived together in Trabert Hall, eating Spam and hot dog casseroles, studying anatomy and biology, earning their white caps, perched like doves on their heads in their final class photo.
People are also reading…
Kirk was Ann Hauschild then, and she’d grown up around the corner from the Catholic hospital on 11th Street with a big-brick dormitory for nurses next door.
If Kirk looked out her dorm corner window, she could see her mom in the yard on Stillwater Avenue.
“And that was not a good thing,†Kirk said Tuesday. “Not a good thing at all.â€
She laughs.
The Keeper of the Binder is standing in the living room of her home in Meadowlane, the place she and her husband Rich lived for nearly 50 years. Rich died last year of pancreatic cancer and, when she sticks her new letter in the binder, she’ll add a few photos, too.
The two of them holding their newest great-grandchild on a day Rich felt good, his hair growing back between rounds of chemo, before the scan showed two new tumors.
She’ll add a photo of their four adult children and one of all the grands and greats gathered to dedicate the maple tree they planted at St. John’s Catholic Church, a few blocks away, honoring Rich’s life and work.
She’s happy the binder is back where it belongs, after what happened this spring, when a Priority Mail box ended up at Phyl’s house down in Texas, torn and tattered with nothing inside.
* * *
A round-robin letter is like a group text message from the age of ballpoint pens and stationery.
That first year, the binder started with one letter from each nurse mailed to Kirk, who compiled a list of names and addresses and sent the bundle off to the name at the top.
Edna read each letter — news of new marriages and new careers — and added an updated letter of her own and stuck it at the back of the binder.
Kay in Denver did the same, mailing the binder to Paulette, who mailed it to Delores, who mailed it to Sharyn and, eventually, the letters arrived at Ellie’s in Decatur, whose job it was to return the binder — now filled with new letters — to Ann.
Then they started all over again.
“Take the old letter out and put a new letter in the back,†Kirk says. “Then head off to the post office and get a priority mailbox and off it goes.â€
It went on like this through marriages and babies. Through toddlers and kindergartners and high school proms.
Through LBJ and Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the Bush years, through Clinton and Obama and Trump. (The nurses rarely wrote about politics, by the way.)
“We wrote about our jobs and our kids,†Kirk says. “Now it’s grandkids and great-grandkids.â€
They wore out binders and eventually they all retired. (Kirk went from nursing school to the operating room at St. Elizabeth and put away her scrubs in 2000.)
It takes the binder 18 months — sometimes more — to make its way to each nurse and back to Kirk in Lincoln.
It takes time to read all of those letters and write one of your own, looking over last year’s version to make sure you don’t repeat yourself, copy a few family photos (or dig out old ones from their school days), slip them into a plastic sleeve and pop the page into the binder.
“Dear Gals, Can you believe that it was 60 years ago this fall that we all walked through the doors of St. E’s School of Nursing to begin that 3 year journey?,†Kay wrote in her last letter Dec. 31, 2018. “And how blessed we were to have had each other?â€
The women remain bound together through their letters.
Eight of the nurses in their class have died — Joan was the first in 2001. Then Dorothy and Cleo and Mary Ann in 2004. Then Jacque, Yvette and Karen. They lost Gwen just last year. Her final letter is still in the binder.
If you were a stranger reading those letters, you’d feel like you knew the nurses from St. Elizabeth, watched over and prayed for by the Sisters of Saint Francis.
Paulette, who has a granddaughter studying to be a nurse practitioner. (“She was so annoyed at having to learn to do IVs and injections on a manikin, until I told her we learned to do that on each other.â€)
Karen, who sends a page of pictures. Posing with a nephew. Smiling with her daughter. Dressed in a frilly gown and carrying a wand. (“Yes, Kay. I still play dress-up sometimes.â€)
Linda, who dictated her letter to her granddaughter Rachel (who will be graduating soon from Southern Utah University and is a manager at TJ Maxx).
You feel sad about Lili, Sandy’s standard poodle who died.
For the mother of a daughter who has cancer and the mother of a son with cystic fibrosis. (Pray for him, please.)
You are happy for Elaine, who moved in with her son Tom and his family this year. (“I am glad not to be living alone.â€)
You feel for poor Jan, who wrote a letter and lost it and then kept the binder for weeks and weeks forgetting it was there. (She’s sorry.)
And envious of Dodie, who's been traveling, her old letter still there, a bookmark until she returns.
* * *
Nurse Kirk is an orderly woman and she kept the binder shipshape.
A few wore out over six decades bouncing from mail truck to mail truck and when one went kaput, she’d pick up a new one at a garage sale and transfer the current round of letters.
She’d tuck in an updated address list and a list of rules: send Priority (the extra money is worth it to safeguard their precious letters), call the next person on the list so they know the binder is on the way and aren’t away on vacation or packed up and moved to a retirement home.
“Most of us are 80 or close to it,†Kirk says. “You’d think we’d be staying put, but we aren’t.â€
And she always did one thing more. On the cover, a typed note: “If this book is ever lost in mailing, please return to Ann F. Kirk …â€
She included her address and city, state and zip code.
Just in case, she always thought.
Just in case came nearly six decades after those young nurses first licked 4-cent stamps and sent Kirk their first letters.
It was early May. The binder had arrived safely at Judy’s house in Mansfield, Texas.
Judy’s letter was full of news. She’d lost both her sisters last year. She and Ron were in assisted living now. She’d been diagnosed with late-onset Alzheimer's, but was taking her medication and working to stave it off.
“Ron is typing this for me,†she wrote. “I send my love to each of you. Thanks for all the memories.â€
Then Ron stuck the binder in a Priority Mail box and sent it down the road 200 miles to Phyl’s place in the East Texas countryside, where the mangled and empty box arrived on a Friday morning.
“She called me right away,†Kirk said. “Of course, we were all just sick.â€
Phyl dutifully drove to the post office on Monday morning and filled out a form, but the employees there didn’t give her much hope that the binder would pop up.
Two weeks later in Lincoln, Nurse Kirk’s doorbell rang and Nurse Kirk answered to find her mail carrier smiling on the front porch, holding out a binder full of letters wrapped in plastic.
Everything was out of order, but it was all there.
* * *
After the snafu was resolved — letters organized, binder updated — Kirk sent it back to Phyllis Osburn in Texas.
And, boy, was that nurse happy. Osburn grew up on a Sandhills ranch before heading off to Lincoln and nursing school in 1959. She and her husband moved to Denver after graduation and then settled in Texas.
So far from her old classmates, but the letters seem to make the time fall away.
"I know when we're reading it, we're still picturing the gals in the dormitory like it used to be."
Phyl caught up on the lives of her old classmates, removed her old letter, stuck a new one in the back and sent the binder to LaVerna, who mailed it to Carol, who mailed it to Verla, who added three pages of old photos.
A trio of nursing students on the beach at Fremont Lakes. Young nurses-to-be, dangling unlit cigarettes on someone’s bed. Picnicking in the park.
Joan hugging a skeleton, its feet dangling off the ground. (“Always looking for tall guys.â€)
The binder travels back and forth in space and time.
There’s Karen on the phone, a long cord snaking from the wall. (“One phone for the fourth floor. What would our grandkids do without their smartphones?")
There’s Paulette and Ann and Sandy and Lou Ann, Carol and Phyl and Joyce crammed in front of a tiny Christmas tree in their robes and PJs.
The class was scheduled to hold its 60th reunion this summer, but COVID-19 put a stop to it.
Maybe next year.
The far-flung friends took note of the pandemic in the last letters of this version of the round-robin that keeps going and going and going.
A grandson’s canceled high school graduation. A trip overseas postponed. Volunteer commitments shut down.
“Sometimes the world around us seems a mess and definitely hard to understand,†wrote Jan.
“My love and prayers to everyone during these turbulent, traumatic times,†wrote Lu.
“Wear your mask and stay safe,†wrote Ellie, before ending her letter and mailing the box back to Lincoln on July 27.
The binder is safe in Meadowlane.
Kirk isn’t sure when she will get her letter written.
Or what she’ll write.
Last month, the folks at the postal service in Washington got wind of the binder and wrote a story for their national newsletter.
It told the tale of a group of retired nurses and their round-robin letters, how the box they were shipped in became “damaged in transit†and the binder and letters became separated.
It quoted one of the nurses who praised the post office and a postal employee who marveled at their dedication to the lost art of letter writing.
Kirk got a copy of the story and promptly sent it off to the women of the round-robin.