Life Has Come Full Circle for Carolyn Morrison
Carolyn Morrison’s life has come full circle. Once the manager of Acute Care at Scheurer Health, Carolyn now enjoys her retirement at the same place that she worked…right here at Scheurer. As a resident of Country Bay Village and an active member in the Scheurer Auxiliary, it comes as no surprise that she is such an ambassador of the great culture and environment that Scheurer provides to everyone.
Born in a “small” town in Iowa (about the same size as all of Huron County combined), Carolyn has always loved that feeling of small-town living. She grew up as an only child in Marshalltown, Iowa and loved how slow-placed it was and being able to simply walk across the street to get to school. When her mother passed from cancer when she was 13, her life’s journey decided to bring her out of her small town roots to the big city. After finishing up the ninth grade with only eight other students in her class, her father moved the family to the Motor City for a fresh start after marrying a home economics teacher. “Moving to Detroit was quite a transition,” Carolyn expressed, “When I first came to Detroit, I had to take a public transportation bus from where we lived to get to school every day. I graduated from Southeastern High School in Detroit in 1959 with 500 kids in my class.”
There, Carolyn decided to pursue a career in nursing at the University of Michigan, “In the age that I grew up in, a woman had three career choices.
"...You could be a nurse, you could be a teacher or you could be a secretary.”
“When my mother was ill with cancer, she was in the hospital bed in our house for over a year. This was back when there was no such thing as chemo to help with the cancer. From that experience with my mother, I wanted to pursue nursing.”
Carolyn did just that at the University of Michigan (U-M). While studying and enjoying life in Ann Arbor, Carolyn was approached by a dormmate to go on a blind date with Don, her fiancé’s friend. Don was studying psychology at U-M and was asked to take his friends out since he was one of the very few that had a car at the time. Don agreed but only if he had a date to accompany him. Luckily, Carolyn turned out to be more than a carpooler and the couple was inseparable moving forward. The pair dated for two years and it was only a month after Carolyn graduated in 1963 that she and Don married. From then on, life happened quickly for the two. Don went on to work at General Motors (GM) in the computer world and Carolyn became a teacher of nursing at Nazareth College’s St. Joseph School of Nursing in Flint – one of four colleges in Michigan at the time that offered a bachelor’s degree in nursing.
“The funny part about all of this is that my first ever job as a nurse was being a teacher at a school of nursing,” Carolyn grinned, “It was a full-circle moment considering I did not want to be a teacher but ended up teaching anyway.”
After two years of teaching, Carolyn became pregnant with their first child, Scott, who was born in 1965. Soon after, they had their second child, Lynn, who was born in 1967. This time around, Carolyn had switched job paths and was now working at an obstetrics office in Fenton, MI. This venture was short-lived as Don needed to be in the GM office so they uprooted their family to Beverly Hills, Detroit where Carolyn worked as a pediatric nurse and gave birth to their third child, Kathy in 1972.
With Carolyn’s dad growing older, she had decided to have him move into their bustling family home so she could take better care of him. It was during this time that Carolyn had their fourth child, Elizabeth.
As a surprise to no one, the family had run out of all available space and decided to build a house in Rochester to accommodate their growing family. Her father had lived with the family for several years before he passed and Carolyn expressed gratitude for being able to have him in the house with her family for all those years.
The move to Rochester brought about another new adventure for Carolyn. She took a job at Ascension Providence Rochester Hospital formally known as Crittenton Hospital, working in the Emergency Department until Don retired from General Motors in 2000. It was then they decided to move the family up
to the Thumb of Michigan.
“In the eighties, we bought a summer cottage on Sand Point. We’d come up for the weekends with the kids and enjoy spending time on the boat,” Carolyn beamed, “At the time it was
just a summer home; it was only a two-bedroom and did not have any heat. But with four kids, we decided to add onto it and make it into a year-round home.”
That’s where Carolyn’s journey at Scheurer began as the manager of Acute Care. She continued her career at Scheurer for 10 years as the manager before she retired in 2010.
“It was very interesting starting work at Scheurer because it was much smaller than the facility I had worked at in Rochester. It felt like being back in Iowa with the slower, small-town feel. When I first started at Scheurer I, of course, did not know everybody but I got to know them quite well since everyone is so friendly and caring. Right after my husband died (in 2005), everyone thought that I was going to move back down to Detroit, but I said ‘no’ just because I liked working up here so much and everyone was so kind and generous when that happened.”
One of the first jobs that Carolyn was tasked with was to find a computer system for the start of digital medical records. Up to that point, doctors were still writing all orders by hand.
“My team and I had to go out, research and find out what kind of computer system we needed for our small, independent hospital. We had three different trips to small hospitals that set up their own digital systems. We traveled as far as Maine to see what we could do back home at Scheurer.”
Carolyn ranks implementing a digital medical record system as one of her biggest accomplishments, “It was great to get into this new world of computers and convincing the doctors that they needed to get on the computers and send us the orders rather than writing them out. It completely changed how we did our work.”
Dwight Gascho was the President & CEO of Scheurer at that time and tasked Carolyn with that massive overhaul. She always had a great relationship with him and in fact, only lived a few houses apart.
“If the weather was bad enough, I would get a call from Dwight saying that he was going to pick me up and take me to work, so I didn’t have to worry about getting to work in the snow. I thought that was extremely nice of him to do, but with that, I would always tease him that I would never get a snow day. When the CEO offers to pick you up and take you to work, you go to work, you know?” Carolyn laughed.
Winter and the offseason on Sand Point would get a bit lonely for Carolyn so she figured she would stay at Country Bay Village just for the winter months. As she got older, she decided to make her full-time with Scheurer Senior Living.
“It’s been amazing living at Country Bay. Everyone is so caring and you still get to be very independent. You get a menu each week and get to choose what you would like to eat which is nice to be able to customize your lunch meals. Two days a week we have an exercise class that allows us to stretch and move around in a proper, instructed way which has been absolutely wonderful. We also get to play bingo once a week where we each play until everyone gets two prizes. We also play dominoes, Skip-Bo and euchre, watch movies and put together puzzles. I’ve been at Country Bay for two years and I am always
finding something to do. I am never bored.”
After schooling everyone in a game of euchre or dominoes, Carolyn is also known as an avid quilting ace. Several quilts are adorned throughout her apartment, proudly displaying her work.
“I still get together with some of my friends to sew together,” Carolyn gleamed. “We called ourselves ‘The Bernina Sisters’ because we all had the same German-made Bernina sewing machines. After work on Wednesdays, we would go to the dining room in the hospital and sew for a couple of hours, grab something to eat, and then sew until about seven or eight o’clock. Then we would pack it all up and go home. We did that every Wednesday for several years; it was a great time.”
Despite her ever-busy schedule, Carolyn was recently appointed as Secretary for the Scheurer Auxiliary. “I am excited to start my new role as Secretary. It’s quite amusing that throughout my life I was able to be all three careers that a woman could choose back then: a teacher, a nurse, and now a secretary,” Carolyn snickered, “I am excited to see what is next for me. Who knows, I might just go back to school next!”
