Penelope Johnson, Big Horn Basin’s First ‘Woman in Blue’

The public health nursing program began in the United States at the turn of the century, but even by 1931 there were no public health nurses in Wyoming. In January of 1936, Wyoming had drawn up a plan for maternal and child health services. The program, the beginning of public nursing in Wyoming, was designed to provide preventive medical and public health services to prenatal, infant, preschool and school children. 

In 1936, Penelope Gordon, Ethel Moss, Eliene Goodall and Lillian Retzloff were hired as Wyoming’s first field public health nurses. Although they were all registered nurses, they were inexperienced as public health nurses, so before they received their field assignments they were sent to the University of California at Berkeley for four months of training. The four spent three months in lectures and classroom training and the last month in field experience in Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

When it was time to graduate, they were asked to select the uniform to be worn by Wyoming’s Field Public Nurses. They chose a navy blue dress with a white collar, a navy blue hat and navy blue oxford shoes. When they returned to Wyoming, they helped with a statewide survey of crippled children in the state, then they were given two weeks vacation, instructed to buy a car and get ready for their assignment. 

That is where we meet Penelope Gordon Johnson, the first public health nurse in the Big Horn Basin. She found lodging in the K.B. Russell home, took her meals at the boarding house next door and rented a garage down the street for her new car. Her pay was $100 a month. Her first office was in the Hyde building on the corner of 4th and C streets, where Russell park is located now. 

Learning the ropes was not easy for Penelope. One of her most embarrassing memories was seeing what she thought were diapers on a clothesline. She stopped and asked to see the baby and was informed quite haughtily that, “Them’s not diapers, them’s dish towels!”

Checking for head lice and educating teachers and school officials about them was also part of the public health nurse’s job. While discussing the issue with Orville Wright, superintendent of Basin Schools, he admitted that when head lice were suspected he would have the teacher seat the student near the heaters, that way the lice would become active and the child would start scratching madly. It worked every time. 

Penelope, or Penny as most of Basin knew her, drove long distances on bad roads to educate the rural residents of the Big Horn Basin about preventing disease, good nutrition and cleanliness. The challenges were great, but Penny met them all head on. 

In 1938 Penelope married Fredrick Johnson, They lived most if not all of their married lives in Basin, raising their children here. Penny’s daughter Marylou Doyle remembers her mom saying that when her oldest entered college she decided she better get a job to pay for the college. 

“Mom worked at the State Tuberculosis Sanitarium,” Marylou remembers. “She really enjoyed the night shift, working 11-7. That way we were in bed before she left for work and she was home in time to fix our breakfast and see us off to school. My fondest memory was her always doing dishes when I headed out the door and she would take my glasses and run them through the dish water and rinse then dry them on the dish towel. I always started my day with sparkling clean glasses.

Penny worked her way up to being the director of nursing at the “San” and the Wyoming Retirement Center. She was truly a servant of the public as a “Woman in Blue” where she began her career and the director of nursing at the state facility where she retired.