It was June 1944, the country was at war, and Marge Batey was graduating from St. Patrick’s Academy in Sidney, Nebraska. The boys from her high school class were heading into the military, off to the battlefields of World War II. Batey was heading to the Sacred Heart School of Nursing in Spokane.“It was part of your patriotism,” Batey says. “The guys went off to the army, and we went off to nursing. I enrolled in the school of nursing two weeks after I graduated from high school, and that’s the way the guys enrolled in the army.”