Adeline (Berg) Blundy’s recollections of her time at St. Francis School of Nursing are a little bit fuzzy, but then that’s not surprising. As a member of the Class of 1941, it’s been almost 80 years since she graduated.

“That’s a long time ago,” said Blundy, who turned 102 on Aug. 5, 2019.

Despite the long march of time, some things about Blundy’s nursing school days still linger in her memory.

Blundy was the firstborn child of Emma and Iver Berg of Blair, where Iver ran an auto repair shop. She recalls working for years to scrape together the $750 cost of the three-year nursing school program at St. Francis.

“That was quite a bit of money back then,” Blundy said by phone from her home in Phoenix.

She had always been precise and meticulous, something of a perfectionist, and entering the nursing school at the age of 21 she was quite serious and mature, ready to buckle down and learn.

“I didn’t have any problems with school. I didn’t give them any trouble,” Blundy recalled with a chuckle. “I did all right.”

Blundy did have one spot of trouble one winter, breaking her ankle after slipping on the ice, but she was determined not to let that keep her from her studies. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “I had to navigate through the snow with a broken ankle.”

Being a Lutheran going to a Catholic school wasn’t a big deal for Blundy, and she remembers the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration ran the school well. “It was a good school. They treated everybody well,” Blundy said.

All these years later, she still fondly recalls Mary Aquin Geisler, FSPA, who was only four years older than Blundy and went on to serve a decade as assistant director of nursing education at St. Francis School of Nursing.

When she was in school, Blundy provided a vital commodity for some of her classmates: biscuits. She was among the few students who had cooking skills and with money being as tight as it was at the end of the Great Depression, Blundy baked a lot of biscuits, a cheap source of sustenance.

After graduation, Blundy went to work at a Milwaukee hospital, but in 1943 she enlisted in the Army nurse corps, following her three younger brothers—Alton, Landis, and Ronald—into the service as World War II raged on two fronts.

“I was young and single and that was the thing to do, so I joined the military,” she said.

Blundy’s service got off to a rough start. She traveled to Battle Creek, Mich., to report for training, but her bus got in late, so she checked into a hotel. Once in her room, she propped a chair against the inside of the door as a protection against intrusion by the rowdy soldiers in the hotel.

As it turned out, Blundy was supposed to report directly to the base when she got to town, so she was AWOL before she even started her military service. She overcame the rocky beginning and shipped out to England in 1943 as a second lieutenant, later being promoted to first lieutenant. She and seven other nurses shared a stateroom during the transatlantic voyage on the Queen Elizabeth. The male soldiers had to settle for sleeping in a bunk one night, slumbering on deck the next.

One early summer day in 1944 she noticed an unusually high number of Allied planes flying overhead, not knowing that the Allies were about to launch the D-Day invasion.

Blundy’s brother, Landis, was seriously wounded in France on July 9. Blundy hoped to get to his side, but he died two days later. Her brother, Alton, lost a leg in the Philippines, and her brother, Ronald, suffered a broken neck. Only the youngest Berg brother, Otis, came out of the war years unscathed after his father successfully pleaded with the draft officer not to take another of his sons.

While stationed in England, Blundy struck up a romance with Willard Blundy, a sergeant from Illinois who served under her command. “There were a lot of romances over there,” Blundy said. “They didn’t approve of it, but there was a lot of it.”

They were married in a civil ceremony in Salisbury, England, less than a week after the Japanese surrendered, afterward going to a restaurant with friends for a simple celebration with tea and crumpets.

The couple moved back to Wisconsin, and Blundy worked in Whitehall for a time. Then a friend of hers from the war years offered her a job at the state mental hospital in Phoenix. In July 1959, the Blundys (with daughters Mary and ­Madeline) arrived in Phoenix, where the high temperature was 115 degrees that day.

Blundy worked at the state hospital for 20 years, and while she has enjoyed coming back to Wisconsin to visit family and nursing friends from the old days, she’s quite happy she made the move to Arizona. “You don’t have to shovel sunshine,” she said.

She’s also happy she made the decision to pursue a career in nursing, even if it meant having to catch a leg after amputation surgery. “I enjoyed being a nurse. I liked my jobs,” Blundy said. “It was what I always wanted to do.”