Nurse Nina Poore has singlehandedly inspired me to dare to be great in my 80s some day.
“Nina won’t tell you” I heard repeated about Nina around town. She won’t tell you about being Arizona Daily Sun Citizen of the Year in 1990 or that Governor Rose Mofford awarded her a clock for her work with preventing substance abuse among children. That might be characteristic of inspirational leaders, it occurs to me: they have more important things to do than blow their own horn. She will tell you stories about a life that ranged from Hawaii to Fresno to Virginia. And how she arrived in Flagstaff in 1962 with her husband Dr. Henry Poore after pulling an 18-foot Airstream trailer across the country to the Northwest and down to Arizona.
“It was night, we stopped in Arizona at a place where we could park the trailer,” she says, “and when we got up in the morning, we could see snow-covered peaks, and I could breathe.” The search for Western air that could help her allergies had led them to Gallup which felt too wind blown, so they moved on into the night to a stop by Walnut Canyon, and before heading down to camp in Oak Creek Canyon, Dr. Poore sought medicine for his three kids and met Dr. Sechrist who made a house call to the campground. A fishing trip to Beaver Creek in red rock country convinced Henry they’d settle in Flagstaff. Lucky Flagstaff.
Nina says her parents taught her to trust exploring: they had left the mainland to move to Hawaii. Her father was shaving when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She “manned the pineapple factories” as a high school student to support the war effort. And she surfed and canoed in Honolulu where there were only three hotels on Waikiki and she would see “water buffalo in taro patches at the beach.” She always knew she wanted to be a nurse.
“If I was going to have an adventure,” she says, “I thought I should probably go as far as I dared.” This meant flying to Los Angeles and taking the train across country to the all-male University of Virginia where the only females were grad students or young women seeking a nursing diploma. There she had her first look at winter snow and fall colors and spring wildflowers and graduated as a registered nurse. After six months training in midwifery from the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Ken., she joined an outpost nursing center in eastern Kentucky where nurse midwives rode horses and drove jeeps to get to homes in the “hollers.” A charming photo of Nina in a white shirt and black tie shows her weighing a newborn with a handheld scale, cabin porch in the background.
“We delivered babies and did family practice,” she says, according to strict protocols that included getting first-time mothers to a regional 25-bed hospital for birth. She laughs to recall their “cookbook approach” to family medicine and how once a fellow on a mule looked skeptical about fetching her. “Are you 18?” he asked. She earned $25 a month doing the work for three years and then wanted to do “something exciting” so she agreed to go to Bolivia to train midwives. But a chance change in an evening of double dating resulted in her meeting Henry.
They married while he was in medical school and she taught in the first degree-offering nursing program there. Because he owed three years of rural practice to Virginia they decided on the small town of Virgilina to grow a practice and a family. Civil rights tensions in the ’50s and her bad allergies nudged them west, but they still return to Virgilina regularly to tend two farms they bought and improved to raise grass-fed beef.
“Nina won’t tell you” about the trip to D.C. to be honored by Nancy Reagan. And she didn’t start our conversation with news of her seven kids and 13 grandkids. But, she did say she’s proud of the Poore Medical Clinic and the fine staff and practitioners there who provide such tender service that a woman called recently wanting to get her care there not because she couldn’t afford to pay elsewhere, but because she’d heard such good things about how patients are treated. Instead of settling into a rocking chair, Nina Poore, at 81, wants to be in that clinic “making it work, getting it going until it’s sustainable.” And that includes gathering community together for a party at the Orpheum on Sunday when, she probably won’t mention, two of her sons will be there from Australia and Virginia to play music with Henry.
“Beans and Rice: A Fundraiser for Poore Free Medical Clinic” happens Sun, Aug. 12 at the Orpheum Theater from 6–9 p.m. Tickets are $10. For details, call 213-5543.
