Ora Pierce Hicks married John Hicks at a German prisoner of war camp in Arizona. She has a twin brother named Otis. She was born in February 1911, the same day and year as President Ronald Reagan [Annotator's Note: Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States]. She was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. She had 16 brothers and sisters. She was number 12 and is the only one left. It was a lot of fun growing up. She had four brothers who were always with her. They would go on the highway and name cars that were theirs [Annotator's Note: as a game]. They did not have a lot of toys. Her mother was a very religious Christian and sometimes she would talk with her mother all night. Hicks loved her mother more than she loved everybody in the world put together. Her mother helped her go to school. Hicks taught school for three years in Varnado, Louisiana. When she finished grade school, she did not know how she would get to college because her father was a farmer. She prayed a lot and got to go. A man from Kansas City [Annotator's Note: Kansas City, Missouri] came down and asked her how she liked teaching. She said she liked it but wanted to be a nurse. He got her into Kansas City for nursing training. She spent three years and became a Registered Nurse in 1936. She worked at Charity Hospital in New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] for almost five years. On the radio, she heard that soldiers were dying because there were not enough nurses. She volunteered for the Army [Annotator's Note: Army Nursing Corps, 8 August 1941]. They said she was 30 pounds overweight, but they would take her. She went in through Camp Livingston, Louisiana where she spent two years. She volunteered to go to Fort Huachuca, Arizona and was transferred there. While there, her mother fell ill so Hicks took her first airplane ride back home. She nursed her mother until she passed away.

After returning to the camp [Annotator's Note: Fort Huachuca, Arizona], Ora Hicks was transferred to a German POW [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war] camp in Florence, Arizona [Annotator's Note: Florence Prisoner of War Camp, June 1943 to May 1946], 100 miles out in the desert. All of the White civilian nurses left and 35 Negro [Annotator's Note: used as a term for a person of Black African ancestry] nurses were sent there to replace them. Hicks was the supervisor. She was sent to school in physiotherapy [Annotator's Note: disease treatment by means other than drugs or surgery]. Afterwards, she had to talk to the doctors about it. She was nervous about that and did not sleep all night. All of the doctors, patients, and soldiers were white. She stayed there about three years. The German prisoners were sent back to Germany and the nurses were to be discharged. Hicks told the commanding officer's wife some of them would like to stay in. She gave their names to her husband. After two weeks, five of them were transferred to Halloran [Annotator's Note: Halloran General Hospital], Staten Island [Annotator's Note: Staten Island is one of the five boroughs in New York, New York], New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York]. The others were discharged. Hicks was stationed at Halloran for a year or two then was transferred to Fort Dix, New Jersey. There were a large number of patients coming in. The soldiers were training to go to Germany and getting sick. They got penicillin, aspirin, fruit juice, and dry clothes. They did not lose a single patient. [Annotator's Note: The camera is reframed.] Hicks was called to the commanding officer's office with four white nurses. She thought she had done something wrong. They were transferred to the Navy Hospital [Annotator's Note: Naval Hospital St. Albans, Long Island, New York] on Long Island [Annotator's Note: as part of the desegregation of the Armed Services under Executive Order 9981, 26 July 1948]. She worked in the tuberculosis wards. While there, she got a severe case of hives and was hospitalized. It lasted a year or more. She was then transferred to Honolulu, Hawaii. She was stationed there in the psychiatric ward. She got to travel while there. She spent three years and then went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center [Annotator's Note: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland] in December, warm Hawaii to cold Washington D.C. She then went to Frankfurt, Germany by plane. She had a suite of rooms for her last tour of duty in the Army [Annotator's Note: Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany]. She traveled all over. [Annotator's Note: Hicks stops to look at her notes and then names more places she visited.]

Ora Hicks was one of the nurses to attend Yale University [Annotator's Note: Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut]. She was a recorder for the Nurses Council in Hawaii and served on the Council in Washington D.C. There were alcoholics on her ward; they were often misclassed. She asked if she could attend a course at Yale. When she left Yale, a preacher rode with her and she told him things he should or should not do. [Annotator's Note: Hicks does not want to talk about it.] The preacher knew Hicks was a psychiatric nurse. He discussed his life with her. He wrote her for a short while and she told him to stop. He wanted advice and pointers about working with people. When she had arrived at Walter Reed [Annotator's Note: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland], there were officers locked up on her ward. One of them was there for a year. That patient had told his wife he could not shave because they would not give him a razor. On rounds that night, he could not be found. They searched and found him with his wrists cut with a razor his wife had brought him. They had 72 beds there and never had more than two empty. There were never more than five Negros [Annotator's Note: used as a term for a person of Black African ancestry] and most of the time there none. Some of the soldiers would call her "mama". She spent a lot of time listening to them and asking them to pray. She would read the Bible to them. She only had trouble once with a patient who would not turn in his eyeglasses at night. He said he would not give his glasses to a "nigger-woman" [Annotator's Note: a derogatory term for Black people]. Another patient told him not to call her that. She had no trouble after that. The patients were getting shock treatment. The first dose of Thorazine [Annotator's Note: antipsychotic drug] was given while she was there. It was an outstanding drug. She spent five years there and then three years in Europe. She was glad to get home. She then spent ten years in private nursing. She worked the night shifts but was never afraid. [Annotator's Note: Hicks talks about the Bible and her faith.] Hicks feels she could not work with people who are sick and angry without being a Christian. She had a man on his ward who did not speak for a year. After shock treatments, he told her he could hear her but not answer. She spent a lot of time with them. They had at least 70 patients and she would listen to all of them. She met with doctors and told them everything that happened during the day. It was like a close-knit family. The nurses explain a lot to the patients to help the doctors. She did not take her work home. She would read a lot. She would go to the horse races where she could holler [Annotator's Note: yell or scream] all she wanted to. That got rid of the pent-up emotions. She was married. Her husband was in another country from her often and they finally separated. She lives alone now and has a quiet life. She is not afraid and has her house secured. [Annotator's Note: Hicks talks about prayer in her life.]

Ora Hicks went to Kansas [Annotator's Note: Kansas City, Missouri] for nursing training in 1933. She had taught school for three years in Varnado [Annotator's Note: Varnado, Louisiana] and made 75 dollars per month, a lot of money then. The banks were about to go bankrupt [Annotator's Note: during the Great Depression] and she took her money out. Money was hard to come by. Her father was a farmer. Her mother worked too and had a lot of children. [Annotator's Note: Hicks talks about a news story and her faith.] When she was a nurse, she would talk of her faith to her patients. Her mother was a strong Christian. Hicks attended nursing school from 1933 to 1936. She learned pediatrics, surgical, OB [Annotator's Note: obstetrics; branch of medicine concerning childbirth]. They worked all of the different sections [Annotator's Note: of the hospital]. She liked the children's ward. She lived in the building there in an open ward. They each had a bed, dresser, and chair. She became deathly sick with acute appendicitis. A law had been passed that they could not operate on a student without parental consent. Her parents were way out in the woods. She did not know her mother was ill in New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana]. There were White and Colored [Annotator's Note: an ethnic descriptor historically used for Black people in the United States] hospitals. The head of the White hospital said to go ahead and operate. They saved her with an emergency appendectomy [Annotator's Note: surgical removal of the appendix]. It was very cold there and she was not used to it. After she left training, her niece went there for nursing training. She advises to get an education. Without it, you can only do the low jobs. After her service, she worked for the United Methodist Church at the local and state levels. The state level was all White people visiting various cities in Louisiana. She worked with the city for five years as a volunteer. She taught adults how to read and write. She would go to homes to talk about patients in the hospitals. She attended a lot of nursing conventions across the United States and wrote for the Nursing Council. She kept reading and kept busy. She saw so many people die. She had a patient who had been drinking and was really drunk. Her sister came to see him, and he kept telling her to leave because he knew he was going to die He did so as she left the room. Sometimes visitors would come and sing and in the middle of the song, the person would die. She calls that a smooth death. A lot of patients really struggled.

Ora Hicks worked as a nurse for five years at Charity Hospital [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana], from 1936 to 1941. The hospital was undergoing construction and patients were place around town. When the wards were completed, the patients were moved back in. Hicks heard that the Army needed nurses, so she volunteered. She was at Camp Livingston, Louisiana then she volunteered to go to Huachuca [Annotator's Note: Fort Huachuca in Cochise County, Arizona]. She was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant. She took the oath at the Red Cross. She was overweight but they let her in. She read that soldiers today are being turned away for being overweight. She did not go through much training other marching. They were needed badly. The Army was segregated and so were the hospitals and living quarters. She was so busy it hardly crossed her mind. They were used to it in civilian life. They knew in time it would not be like this. The first day she went on, there was no nurse for night duty, and she had to work a double shift. That happened often. She helped Baptist Hospital [Annotator's Note: now Ochsner Baptist Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana] desegregate due to that; the White nurse did not come on duty one night. They asked Hicks to stay on and she said she would but only if she got to eat in the regular dining room with the other registered nurses and doctors. They said okay. That was the first time a Negro [Annotator's Note: term for a person of Black African ancestry] ate in that dining room. This was in the 1960s.

Ora Hicks entered the military at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. She then went to Fort Huachuca [Annotator's Note: in Cochise County, Arizona] and worked as the dietician. She made the menus for the cooks. All officers and civilians ate in the nurse's dining room. This was around 1944. She was also at the German Prisoner of War camp [Annotator's Note: Florence Prisoner of War Camp in Florence, Arizona]. Then she went to Halloran in New York [Annotator's Note: Halloran General Hospital in Staten Island, New York], followed by Fort Dix, New Jersey. Then she went to the Navy Hospital on Long Island [Annotator's Note: Naval Hospital St. Albans in Long Island, New York]. That was followed by Walter Reed [Annotator's Note: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland] and then Germany [Annotator's Note: Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany]. She then came home. She loved nursing; she was married to nursing. She worked the TB [Annotator's Note: tuberculosis; transmittable disease infecting primarily the lungs] ward. The doctors asked her why because Negros [Annotator's Note: a term for a person of Black African ancestry] were more susceptible to TB than Whites. She did not care. She would tell the soldiers if she did not look them in the eye, they were not there. She said for them to make her see them. She would also not sign in for other nurses. She would come in a night early to get her mail and see what was going on. She was at the German POW camp. It was a dust storm center. There were 20 wards. The Germans were fine to get along with and they had no trouble. [Annotator's Note: A German drew the picture of her that is behind her in the frame.] It was hard at first because of the language barriers. The Germans were good teachers. Some could speak English and teach the nurses. A lot of the corpsmen were Germans. There were no Negroes. Hicks had to be operated on while there for her teeth. There were thousands of Germans and four or five hundred that were sick at any one time. The nurses had to count the prisoners every evening. Some of the Germans would try to get Germany on the radios. She said all of them looked alike because their heads were clean shaven. Hicks was working in physiotherapy [Annotator's Note: disease treatment by means other than drugs or surgery] there and was put in charge of that department. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer stops the tape, and it restarts mid-conversation after a tape break discussing being stationed with an unnamed person.] Hicks worked for ten years with mentally ill patients. [Annotator's Note: They reframe the camera shot. Someone talks offscreen to Hicks and she looks for pictures.] The Germans worked with under the corpsmen and nurses. They had no trouble with them. They liked to talk about home but very little about combat. They did say they had seen Negro soldiers. They just wanted to go home. One of them married a Negro nurse after the war. She was a beautiful girl from Massachusetts and used to White men.

Ora Hicks treated injured soldiers using physiotherapy [Annotator's Note: disease treatment by means other than drugs or surgery]. There were not many of them because they were mostly young, healthy men. Hicks left [Annotator's Note: the Florence Prisoner of War Camp in Florence, Arizona] after the war because they [Annotator's Note: the prisoners] were sent home. The nurses were going to be declared as surplus and separated out of the Army. Hicks had found a home in the Army and did not want out. The wife of the commanding officer was Hicks' patient. Hicks told her to get the names of the ones who wanted to stay in. They cried when the orders came because they got their wish. They went by train to New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York]. Hawaii had been nice and warm and at Walter Reed [Annotator's Note: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland] it was ice and snow. In Hawaii, she went to an island and thought a volcano might erupt. She was worried about it. She was very lucky in that she got to travel all over the world for free. The only time she paid was when she went on her own vacations. She took a train to Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany] once. When you are young, you are not afraid. She went alone. She rode all night long to see a Passion Play [Annotator's Note: a dramatic play about the last days of Jesus Christ]. She stayed with a German family and had breakfast with them. The play lasted all day long. There were thousands of people there and had a program in their language. She had learned some German from working with the POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war]. Some of them knew English. They were never unkind. She worked at Walter Reed in the psychiatric ward in the 1950s. She came out of the Army in 1961. She left Walter Reed for Germany in 1958. She took college courses at night and got a two-year level. She was always going to school. She went to Howard University [Annotator's Note: in Washington, D.C.] on the G.I. Bill. Adjusting to civilian life felt funny. She had been called Major Hicks and could not get used to not being called that. In the military, everybody respected everybody. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer speaks of an incident that happened to Hicks with an aggressive patient.] Hicks believes the other patients would have helped her if necessary. One came at the man and told him he could not call her a nigger [Annotator's Note: a derogatory term for Black people]. That was the only incident that happened. She has some letters the patients wrote to the doctors about her care of them. [Annotator's Note: Hicks speaks of her talking about faith to the patients.] A lot of the patients came from Europe to Walter Reed before going home. They had to watch a lot of the patients who were suicidal. She had a patient commit suicide in Germany when she was off duty. Another soldier cut himself with a razor his wife brought him. She was working in Detroit [Annotator's Note: Detroit, Michigan] and a patient died. She thinks the patient saved her pills every night. One morning she did not get up. She had died during the night after taking all of the pills. Some patients would ask her not to leave them when they were dying. She would talk to them kindly.

Ora Hicks has had an interesting life. If anything went wrong, she did not take it to heart. There is always another day and it could have been worse. She came back from Europe on a big ship. They ran into three hurricanes and did not think they were going to make it. Everybody was very sick. She understands why people kiss the ground when they get off a ship. When they traveled, they all traveled as one. There was no segregation then. [Annotator's Note: Hicks looks for her notes and talks to someone off screen. She shows some pictures from July 1944 to the interviewer.] Hicks was inspired by General Davis [Annotator's Note: US Army Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr., the first African-American general in the regular Army] and their Chief Nurse who was a Negro [Annotator's Note: a term for a person of Black African ancestry].