Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Read Online Free Page B

conferred on the state and its schoolchildren a genuine public good.
    In 1897, at the age of eighteen, Bessie graduated with a BE degree—Bachelor of Elements, meaning the elements of teaching, which allowed her to teach in Pennsylvania. Three years later, in the 1900 census, she was recorded as living at home in Espy with her parents—occupation: teacher. This, of course, was just what she was supposed to be doing at this time of life, what most of her classmates did, and what her own mother, Jennie, had done before marrying Captain Boyd.
    But here Bessie’s story takes a turn. For in her early twenties, after six years of preparation and practice, she gave up teaching. What derailed her from it? Was she just bored with it, as one family member suggests she was? Was her move calm and well considered, or rash? Did family pressures of some kind intervene? Or did she simply feel a young adult’s healthy urge to get as far away as possible from small-town Pennsylvania? What we do know is that by early 1904, four years after the census worker had come round to the house in Espy,Bessie wasn’t a teacher anymore but a nurse. And she no longer lived in Espy at all, but in Philadelphia, population one and a half million.
    Her mother figures in Jane’s memories of her adolescence as a prim, provincial figure;what could you expect, Jane would as much as say, coming out of Bloomsburg and Espy? Bessie would become keeper of family scrapbooks, devoted gardener, serious churchgoer—not one you’d immediately figure for precipitously shifting gears, throwing over the past, leaving town, and hauling off for the big city. As we’ll see, it was Bessie’s elder sister, Martha, not she, who was the real dynamo among the Robison children and would go on to make a mark on the world. But just now, it was Bessie who was making changes.
    In April 1904, at age twenty-five, Bessie received her diploma from the Polyclinic Hospital of Philadelphia’s Training School for Nurses, located near Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia; Polyclinic wouldlater merge with the University of Pennsylvania. Nursing education was growing more professional, with first one- and then two-year programs at Polyclinic giving way to a three-year course that required anatomy and physiology, bacteriology and pharmacology, in addition to work on the wards. One of Bess’s grandsons, a physician, would recall how, even as an old woman, she’d sometimes use medical terms left over from her nursing days—a fracture rather than a broken bone, a carbuncle , not a boil. In the years after 1904, Bess became supervising night nurse at Polyclinic, and met her future husband, Jane’s father.

Jane’s mother, Bess Robison Butzner, in 1907, when she was a nurse. She lived to the age of 101. Credit 1
    Around the time Bess joined the ranks of Polyclinic nurses, John Decker Butzner was receiving his MD degree from the University of Virginia and coming north to Polyclinic for a year-and-a-half-long residency. After that, perhaps in late 1905, he may have served briefly as physician in aWest Virginia mining town. By 1907 he had joined an existing practice in Scranton, sharing an office on Wyoming Avenue, the city’s Doctor’s Row. Just how, during their overlapping years in Philadelphia, he and Bess met, and how their relationship deepened, we don’t know. One family story tells how nurses often got stuck doing the personal laundry of the physicians, that Bess regularly got onepile of undergarments that stood out as particularly worn, shabby, and shredded, that she sewed them, mended them, fairly rescued them—and in this way came to the attention of young Dr. Butzner.
    Dr. Butzner had come off a farm in the rural South. Not cotton country, not the Deep South of the great plantations, but still distinctly the South—Spotsylvania County, in the tidewater region of northern Virginia, midway between Richmond and Washington, D.C. All his lifehe spoke with a soft southern