Kobishop, Mae, 1992 November 6, Stevens Point, Wisconsin:
Recorded interview and transcript available online.: Mae Kobishop was born in 1922 in Minnesota, and raised in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Ms. Kobishop graduated from Stevens Point High School, and worked as a checker in a local grocery store before joining the WAVES in 1943. She worked as a corpsman at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland until being discharged in 1945, when she briefly returned to her job in the grocery. After a few months, Ms. Kobishop decided she missed working in a hospital, and began working as a nurse's aide at St. Michael's Hospital. She entered nursing school on the G.I. bill in 1947 and graduated from Eau Claire's Luther Hospital in 1950. The Navy recalled her for the Korean War, and she served most of the war on a hospital ship, the USS Repose, anchored off Inchon. She returned to the states and worked at various government posts, including Zeblocki Hospital, in Milwaukee. For several years in the mid-sixties, she worked as a registered nurse in the Alaska Native Health Service. Ms. Kobishop retired in 1980 and has since become very active in the Polish American Congress.
After briefly describing the mood in Stevens Point after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Ms. Kobishop described her duties as a grocery store checker, and the effect of rationing on the store and its customers. She then discussed social life in Stevens Point during the war, including concern about the troops, attending high school basketball games, and the ways people stayed in touch with friends and family members who were serving in the armed forces.
In 1943, Ms. Kobishop joined the WAVES, the women's division of the Navy. A good part of the interview was spent discussing her decision to join, her training in New York and then Massachusetts, and her duties as a corpsman in Annapolis. Ms. Kobishop described relations between the male doctors and corpsmen and female nurses, and among the other female corpsmen themselves. She also provided detailed accounts of contemporary medical procedures, including the many hours spent simply listening to patients.
