“Legacies” a podcast dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. Maxine Conder recalls her growing up years in American Fork as a child and later in Tooele, Utah. She describes how she mistakenly signed up for a regular commission in the navy and her nursing career. She describes her many assignments including those in Korea, Guam, many hospitals in the United States, her education, and finally her assignment as rear admiral of the United States Navy Nurse Corps.
“Legacies,” a podcast by Utah Women’s Walk
Season 1, Episode 5: Maxine Conder
For the complete interview, click here.
Episode: Maxine Conder
MW: Education and careers can often put us in a position to serve our community in unique ways. Maxine Conder discovered this somewhat by accident, when a small misunderstanding sent her zigzagging across the world as a Navy nurse. She broke all kinds of barriers along the way, and made sure once she opened a door, it stayed open for other women. Guiding her through it all was a love of the work and an open mind.
MC: I really like nursing and I really like the navy. And because of that, I was willing to work hard. I was willing to take chances and work. If they’d say, How would you like to do this? Sure, I’ll give it a try, why not?
MW: I’m Michelle Welch, and this is Utah Women’s Walk: The Podcast, a show dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. In 1975, Maxine became the second woman ever to achieve the rank of rear admiral in the US Navy. I spoke to her in 2006 about the event and her life leading up to the appointment.
MW: I’d like you to talk about your background first of all.
MC: I was born in Bingham Canyon, Utah. My parents were Theo Adams Conder and Pete Conder, my father. Both of them had been born and raised in American Fork, and when I was about eighteen months we returned to American Fork. So I was raised surrounded by grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.
But I was born in 1926, and of course the Depression started back closed and that in ’29, and so I had brothers and sisters being born, and we were all born and living through the Depression time. We always had food to eat, and I only now begin to think back at how difficult it must have been for my parents, but we seemed to have—we had a good time.
We had horses; I got so I could learn how to ride a horse and Dad was—they would be hobbled in the morning, and so I’d go out and get the horses and bring them back. I was the oldest of seven, and I was quite a tomboy; I really was.
Those were the days we had a lot of polio. And so our summers, we could no longer go the movie matinees because of the polio. And there was no swimming. The only swimming place in those days was Saratoga, but we couldn’t go because it was felt that it was very contagious, and it confined us. We still had the other—we’d play Run Sheepy Run and Cat and you know all those kinds of old days, but during the summer months, we were constricted as far as those things were concerned. And during our growing up years, we all had measles and chicken pox and scarlet fever, and those were the days when we were always quarantined.
We moved to Tooele County, and we moved to a little mining town up, Ophir. But the school was small, so there was only two classes. The first four grades were in one room, and the next four grades, fifth through eighth, were in the other room. I had a wonderful time.
We had roller-skating parties at community hall. They’d hang up sheets and show movies. We do in the winter—we did lots of sleigh riding because we could go down the canyon about a mile, and then when we’d come back up, one of our parents would have chili or waffles or something.
We moved to Tooele when I was in the ninth grade. I guess I was in the ninth grade when World War II started.
MW: What do you remember about that?
MC: It occurred on a Sunday. We heard it over the radio. Of course there was no television; we heard it over the radio. And I knew something terrible had occurred, but I had no idea of the ramifications. I had no idea what it really and truly meant. Monday morning we went to school; we went to an assembly, very early, eight [or] nine o’clock in the morning; the very first thing we went to assembly, and we heard President Roosevelt declare war. There was one Japanese family lived in Tooele at that time, and they were gone. They were already gone.
My father always enjoyed reading the newspapers, and so we always had the newspapers, and I learned words like Iwo Jima and Saipan and Okinawa and Dunkirk and all of those places and so I was learning. We had neighborhood boys who were going in the military. We had families who received word of their sons being injured or killed. They started building the army base out there, and the town was flooded with—it was—Tooele was a small community. Maybe six thousand people, and they would line up. By that time I was working in a café after school and in [the] summer. They would line up the streets trying to get in to get something to eat. Every extra room in any home was rented out and that because they were trying to build the base. That’s why I say that my life changed; it really and truly did. We became very focused, and I truly believe that it’s the only time in my life that I saw the American people totally committed to something.
We rolled up the string. We all had big balls of string. We’d save our dimes to buy stamps to put in our saving bonds box or we’d save so many and then we’d get a bond. Rubber was gone and so tires, car tires; gas was rationed, sugar was rationed. My mother learned to cook very well with honey, and butter was very hard to buy and get. And everyone hitchhiked.
Many of the women went to work out [at] the base—it really changed the population in Tooele because of the big base. You’d see the big tanks; you’d see the big trucks; you’d see military people going by, and we knew they were making bombs, and every once in a while you’d hear one go off and rattle all of the windows in town and all.
And then as we got—well I got into the senior high school, senior class, and it had occurred beforehand, but as I became a senior, I knew I wanted to become a nurse. We went to school in the morning, and then many of the girls went out to the base to work in the afternoon and receive credits.
And in January of our senior year, a good number of our senior class—men—left. They already went in the military. And so that our senior proms and senior hops were really—didn’t amount to much, because, you know.
MW: No guys.
MC: That’s right. And then, the day after we graduated, the rest of the class, male, class, boys, went into the service.
I became more conscious, more aware of national and international affairs and less on local. And to this day I find myself—I like to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. I think because of my career, but also I think it because I was taught early.
So one week after I graduated—I graduated on a Friday, and the following week I went in and started nursing at the University of Utah.
And then I went out to St. Mark’s when it was out on, I think Second or Third West and about Eighth or Ninth North in Salt Lake. And I really enjoyed nursing. It was—I don’t know why I wanted to be a nurse. Had no other family members that had ever been a nurse or a doctor; it just was something that I felt that I wanted to do. I was never sorry one day throughout my career that that’s what I had chosen.
When you went into nursing at that time, we became members of the Cadet Nurse Core. Our training was financed by the government. And we knew that when we finished, we either had to go to in-service or to the military.
I remember the first year we were provided with housing and food and fifteen dollars a month. The next year we got twenty dollars a month, and then the third year we got twenty-five dollars a month and I survived. Once in a while, my parents would help me buy a pair of shoes. That was kind of a big item it seemed like, but I pretty much kept myself on that money.
MW: What did you do for fun?
MC: Well, (laughs) it seemed like we had a good time. We’d got to the movies in Salt Lake, and we’d have parties. I don’t remember us going out; there just wasn’t the young men in those days.
MW: They were all gone to war.
MC: They were all gone.
MC: And it got to the where the Korean War had come along. And I had not served either in in-service or military because I did not graduate until after the war was over. In my heart I felt an obligation that I needed to—had to pay back. I think I had paid back with the work I had done and all, but I still had that feeling that I owed the government. So, I made application for the navy; didn’t know anything about it. I had met a few nurses who had been on active duty, and they spoke highly of it. But I didn’t, when I made application—I wasn’t sure to fill out all of the papers. And as a result, I did not ask to be a reserve officer because I felt that only meant weekend duty, and I wanted to go on active duty. So I put down and requested regular navy. Regular navy meant that I was applying to go into the military, and if everything went well, I could stay for a full career. If I got tired, to get out I had to resign my commission. You don’t do that in the reserves. In the reserves, you serve a certain length of time. You get out, but you still retain your commission. So, it took a long time for me to be accepted in the navy—about nine months I think from the time I applied to. And different people in Tooele would say to me, “Maxine, are you trying to go in the navy?” “Yes.” “Well, that FBI is out here asking questions about you.” But I was accepted as regular navy—one of the few. But it was all done very innocently because I didn’t know the difference.
MW: Tell me about those first places of appointment or where did you go first? Where was your first assignment?
MC: San Diego Naval Hospital in San Diego, the largest hospital that the United States has—very, very busy when I was there because there was a lot of wounded coming back from Vietnam or Korea then.
MW: Korea. When you went first into—when you joined the navy, did you go in as an officer?
MC: I was an ensign. I was the lowest rank in the navy.
MW: Then you did get put on a navy ship?
MC: I went stationed aboard a hospital ship, the USS Haven. I was only there for a few months because I received orders and got to San Francisco to await transportation out to Korean. A lot of our patients on the hospital ship was civilian—Korean civilians—and, of all ages, and of all problems, you know, obstetrics, medical care, burns. We had lots of burns from trying to keep warm, and they’d steal gas and try to heat their places,
If we did happen to go ashore—and I went ashore twice—we had to be escorted by armed male officers. Everything was bombed out. And then I spent a year after that on Guam.
It had been occupied by the Japanese, and so we had taken it back in about ’45 and I was there in ’54, so only nine years after. There was still certain parts of the island that was out of bounds to us because there was live ammunition there, and there was also Japanese soldiers still on the island. They found Japanese soldiers, up to about fifteen years after the war stopped.
They were back in—there was some hills and some jungles and they were back in there. There was no—everything in town had been pretty much destroyed, so there was no stores, no theaters, no restaurants, no transportation. As people were transferred off the base, they’d leave an old jeep, and we used old jeeps to get around. Do any shopping. We went to the military exchanges or PXs. We got our food from the commissaries. We ate—we lived in nurse’s quarters, and so we ate at the hospital.
But I had a good time on Guam. We had some nice beaches and a lot of nice people. In the military, there is never a stranger.
MC: I can honestly say that I can only remember once really being homesick and that’s—I was on Guam. A friend of mine and I were going to Hong Kong, and it was in January after Christmas, and we went to a movie and it was White Christmas, and tears streamed down our face. But I made it a point if I started feeling a little homesick of getting involved. I’d find friends, and you had to work at it.
MW: So after Guam you went back home.
MC: No, I went to Chelsea, Massachusetts. Chelsea is a city across the river, across the Mystic River from Boston. I was there for two years. Chelsea was one of our very oldest hospitals. In fact, it had at one time taken care of Civil War patients.
The northeast had the last, big polio epidemic in the United States, and the northeast got hit hard. The hospitals there were just flooded, Mass General, Beth Israel, and such. The navy over the years had never taken care of contagious patients. If we had a patient with [a] contagious disease, we had transferred them to a civilian facility. The state of Massachusetts asked us, the navy to please take care of their own people with polio. So one day, I was all working on the wards and another nurse walked on and said, “I’ve come to relieve you.” And I said, “Relieve me, where am I going?” She said, “I don’t know. The chief nurse said she’d be in in a few moments, but I’m here to relieve you, so give me your report.” I gave her the report; the chief nurse came in and she said, “Miss Conder, I want you to go over to the dependents building; there’s ward such and such. They’ve been closed for years, but they’ve just been cleaned. I want you to go over there, open ‘em up for [a] polio ward, and you’d better hurry because your first two patients are in emergency room.”
MW: Was this your first experience in kind of a leadership role or being given or had you had that before?
MC: I’d been put in some positions of responsibility beforehand, and so it didn’t really throw me except the fact that there was nothing, and I knew those patients were coming. So we took care of both dependents and active duty of military. And we had a ward full.
It was the first time in my life that I could pick up the telephone and call the Emerson Company or some of the other companies and say, “I need three more iron lungs,” and I had ‘em. They’d say, We’ll be there within so many hours. I didn’t go through commanding officers. I didn’t go through financial officers. They said, Go to it. You’re in charge, whatever you need. The iron lungs was the only thing that helped them breathe
MW: Were you ever worried yourself about?
MC: I didn’t have time to worry. Now that sounds silly, but I wore a mask when I was taking care of patients and usually a gown. And I got very adept at putting patients into iron lungs. (laughs) And it’s funny, they come out, and you have to use a metal clothes hanger to adapt it so that you can get in there and work with them and that. And, you had to know how to (laughs) work those clothes hangers to get ‘em in there. Sometimes they were only in there for forty-eight hours, and then they could start breathing on their own and that. But you didn’t dare take chances. We had one little four-year-old girl that got polio, and she was in an iron lung. Before you put ‘em in an iron lung, you did a tracheotomy on them, so that you could get down there and clean out the fluid if necessary. She after a week, she was ambulatory. She was running all around. And I remember sitting at the desk writing an order for some supplies, and I felt these two little arms go around my neck, and I got a big kiss here on the cheek and I thought, Live polio bugs right smack in my face, but what could I do?
MW: How long were you there in Massachusetts?
MC: I was there for two years. Then I was transferred to Camp Pendleton, California. And I was there about three and a half years, but at that point my chief nurse said to me, “Conder, I think it’s about time you think about going back to school. I was accepted and sent back to the University of Utah for my baccalaureate.
MW: So then you did a tour of duty as a nurse recruiter?
MC: In Seattle, Washington. I was there three years. Now this is during the Vietnam time, and many of the recruiters were not allowed on college campuses, but they accepted nurses. We had no problems whatsoever.
MW: And one of our senior officers that was stationed in Washington, grabbed me by the arm one evening—it was a reception, and she said, “Miss Conder, do you know this lady?” And I said, “No, I don’t think I have.” And she said, “She is dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Washington.” And she said, “Miss Conder is in recruiting out of Seattle, and she’ll be making application for her master’s degree at the University of Washington, shortly.” (laughter)
I wanted a chance to practice what I had been learning and all. But I did as I was told and I was accepted. And I went to the University of Washington and earned my master’s degree in nursing.
And so I was in [the] University of Washington when I was selected for commander. Commander is getting up there. I was the most junior. Every time I was promoted, I was the most junior officer promoted; that’s the way it fell.
I’ve always felt that my navy career was not based on, but was influenced by being at the right time and the right place. Promotions came—were changed about the time I was to be promoted. Schools changed when I was about eligible to be even considered. And so timing was very, very—played a big part in my navy career.
MW: And yet, just as I listen to you, and you have women telling the director of nursing that you’ll be back for your master’s degree. Obviously you had a lot of talent and skill, leadership that they recognized; it had to be a combination?
MC: Well, I think it was, and I think I was fortunate. There was two things. I really like nursing and I really like the navy. And because of that, I was willing to work hard. I was willing to take chances and work. If they’d say, How would you like to do this? Sure, I’ll give it a try, why not? And I had my own druthers at times you might say, but I did what they would encourage. I was really encouraged by a number of my senior officers.
MW: Were they all women, the senior officers?
MC: Oh yes, oh yes, because in those days, we only had women in the nurses corps.
The military did not accept male nurses for many, many years. They would accept them, but only as corpsmen. Would not commission them; we were commissioned, but they were not.
And some of us felt very strongly that that was wrong, and it was in the 1960s before the navy started commissioning male nurses. The marines fought us. The marines didn’t want male nurses.
But I had a friend, this friend in Boston who I was with one day and she said, “Why don’t you come, come down to Puerto Rico and visit?” She was stationed—she was chief nurse in Puerto Rico. And I said, “Oh, I’m going to take Mother and Dad to celebrate their fiftieth to—maybe to Hawaii. And she said, “Bring ‘em to Puerto Rico; you can stay at my place.” And so I talked my folks into going to Puerto Rico, and we went in February because I knew that August when they had been married, would be too hot. So, we went to Puerto Rico, and we were in Puerto Rico when I was notified that I had been selected for admiral.
MW: Oh wow, how did you get the word?
MC: The surgeon general called me; navy surgeon general called me.
The phone system was very—I only heard about half of the words he said because it was very poor, but then the messages started coming out, and my parents were with me down there.
MW: I bet they were very thrilled and proud.
MC: But, really and truly didn’t understand it all, you know.
They had not—I was the only one in the military, and so while I’d keep ‘em posted, they didn’t really have an idea of where I was, what it meant and such. And so there was a number of parties down there and—
MW: Honoring your appointment?
MC: Yes, when the word came out. Well, everywhere I went, people wanted to kiss an admiral. They wouldn’t dare kiss a male admiral, but they had to kiss a female. And so I got a lot of that.
MW: How did you feel?
MC: I had very mixed—I had very mixed feelings. I knew it was a tremendous honor, but I felt really, in many ways, sad. The political climate at that time—a lot of it had occurred with President Nixon when he would have been released. The end of Vietnam—there was a lot of antimilitary, there was a push to change the military. There was just—the political climate was such that I felt pretty uncomfortable about what was going to occur, but in many ways, I felt very, very pleased and happy. And I had some feelings that, Was I up to it?
I also had some things that I wanted to accomplish. I knew without a shadow of a doubt because of the political climate, that I would be the first director of Navy Nurse Corps of many years to serve a full four years in peace time. I knew the American people would never allow us in those years to get back involved in any—
MW: Conflict.
MC: And so I knew that I would be the first director to serve four full years in peace time.
MW: So because of that, did that open opportunities to do other things, I would assume?
MC: Yes.
MW: Such as?
MC: I wanted to provide career ladders for nurses that could be promoted to captain, which was the next highest under admiral, without them changing their clinical specialty. We had had nurses who had spent twenty, twenty-five years in the operating room, and we had big operating rooms, and we were doing fantastic work. Really, wars provide military medical facilities with some outstanding clinical.
MW: Training?
MC: Training and clinical experience and things. But if that nurse wanted to be promoted, she had to get out of the operating room and go into administration. We had nurses in other things that I wanted them to—I wanted clinical specialists to be promoted and not feel they had to go into administration.
MW: Were you able to succeed at that?
MC: We did, we did.
MW: And at that time, you were in charge of twenty-six hundred nurses worldwide, all of their training, all of their—
MC: Recruiting. Their promotions, their assignments, where they’d be promo, where they’d be assigned.
MW: What was the highlight of that four-year assignment? I think you told me about being at the—oh, that was a nice time—the first time a woman had—
MC: Oh, I was the first women officer to serve as a recruit, serve as a reviewing officer at the Iwo Jima Monument.
MW: Tell me a little bit about that?
MC: That Iwo Jima Monument is a big one in Washington D.C. And the marines, that’s their monument. And during the summer months, every Tuesday evening, they have a special ceremony where they have marching marines; they have the marching band; they have the rifle drills, a lot of music. And it’s an area where there’s really no chairs, but it’s a lot of grass. And people come and they set all around the thing and listen to ‘em; it’s a big affair, really worth going to. And they have invited women, and they’ve invited men to serve as review officers. But for the very first time, I was the first women officer ever to be invited to review the troops as they marched by and the drill team and the band and everything. And so that was a real thrill. It was ’76 or ’77 when the country celebrated the two hundredth anniversary.
MW: You mentioned your highlight of the responsibility your trip to China in 1977.
MC: My trip to China, I went with American Nurses Association, and while the military supported me they didn’t want me to get—they kept saying, Don’t let us see your name in headlines. They wanted me to go because they wanted me and the other, the director of the Army and Air Force Nurse Corps—we were the first ones allowed in China because they wanted to send other military offices in, but China wouldn’t let ‘em. And we were the first to—we broke that mold, you might say. And since then they’ve allowed other officers, male and female to go in there.
MW: Were you sorry to see that end or were you ready? Was that a big responsibility and you were ready to let it go up?
MC: I was ready. I was ready. There was a lot of hassle to it. Oh, let me tell you. Political hassle. There were people who could come in there and review your programs. If I had a program for operating room nurses, and they’d say—people who weren’t even in the medical field would come in and say, Oh, you don’t need that; we’ll cut the money for that, and things like that. There was a lot of letters written. I’ve had letters written to the White House, and the White House would send them over to me and ask me to answer them concerning nurses and so on.
There was a lot of pressure for social affairs and I was not—I did not enjoy cocktail parties, and there was lots of those. I went because I represented the women in the military. I do not like small talk. And I’ve attended parties at embassies. I’ve attended parties at the White House. I’ve attended parties at [the] State Department and other big affairs, but I never really enjoyed them.
MW: Did you ever meet the president?
MC: I’ve met President Carter and I think he was the only one. I was invited to attend one of his inaugural receptions, and I went and met both he and his wife, and I’ve met who was his vice president Mondale and his wife. And I’ve met Betty Ford, and I’ve come in contact with Rockefeller, who was vice president. But I think that’s it.
MW: You were just in your fifties at that time, but you were ready to retire?
MC: But I had promoted myself out of a job.
MW: Right. (laughs)
MW: Well let me ask you a couple of different questions that are kind of outside. Who are the women or is there a woman that’s been a role model to you? Someone who’s had great influence on you?
MC: My mother as I said came from wealthy family, and my father came from a poor family, and then they were thrust into the Depression years. My mother had—I think there was five of us children during the Depression years, and her family lost everything too. While we had plenty of food, I’ve heard mother say there was no money for rent or other necessities. I didn’t see that. I was at the age that it didn’t register with me, but as I look back and see how she must have struggled. It must have been very difficult for her.
And I saw gold star mothers in my town, and I saw wounded coming back and I just had to admire them.
There was several chief nurses that I admired their efforts. I had come in contact with several of the nurses who were prisoners of the Japanese, and I’d learned to admire their life.
MC: What do you think was the hardest challenge for you?
MW: I took a shower one day and was standing in front of the mirror and raised my arm and realized I had a lump. I knew I was in trouble right then. I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was a chief nurse at Chelsea, Massachusetts, in about 1973. But I think that was probably the most difficult time, not knowing what was going to happen. Was my career over? Did I need my family? I’d been so independent that I was worried about them more than me.
And went in had a modified right breast mastectomy, and two years later had a simple mastectomy on the other side because there was so many lumps they couldn’t tell what was going on.
MW: What would you say is your life motto?
MC: I can’t think of any other than just the value of hard work. And it was just part of my bringing up in life. We worked hard as nurses. We really did.
MW: So what have you got planned for the future?
MC: Well, just going to try to make it day by day.