100-Year-Old Recalls Life As WWII Army Nurse

100-Year-Old Recalls Life As WWII Army Nurse

Ora Pierce Hicks One Of 500 Black Nurses Serving At Time

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- There are not many people who make it to 100 and fewer still with a story like that of Ora Pierce Hicks.

KMBC's Bev Chapman reported that Hicks is a living legend to her family and to those who know about her service in World War II.

She is one of 17 children who grew up in a poor black family in Bogalusa, La. Hicks said her mother nursed the children of white women who couldn’t care for their own in order to make a little money.

Poverty didn’t stop Hicks from dreaming big. Hicks wanted to become a nurse. After working for two years as a school teacher and saving her money, she did it. She met a man who knew the director of a nursing school in Kansas City. He gave her a contact and in 1933, Hicks was enrolled. She graduated in 1936, returned home to Louisiana and probably would have stayed there working as a nurse were it not for the war.

“I heard on the radio that soldiers were dying because they didn’t have enough nurses,” Hicks said. “I wanted to help.”

She enlisted at a time when the Army was desperate for nurses, but not anxious to hire black nurses. They accepted Hicks and the experience changed her life.

One of her first posts was to a P.O.W. camp in Florence, Ariz. Later, she worked in a psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Hospital.

At the end of World War II, there were 50,000 in the Army Nursing Corps. Hicks was one of about 500 who were black. She rose to the rank of major before retiring.

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Life As WWII Army Nurse