Years old and moving: ​Traverse City nurse looks back

Two weeks before her 100th birthday, Helen Christopherson Rafeld was asked what she remembers most about starting nursing in Akron, Ohio in 1944—replying that the key detail was simply that it was “free.” She said the federal U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps program paid her tuition and enabled her education. Rafeld later trained in hospitals, worked across Michigan, and became head nurse of the six-bed cardiac intensive care unit at Redford Hospital near Detroit, where nurses read heart rhythms by eye. Her daughter Jennifer Rafeld said she was skilled at identifying P, QRS and T waves. Nursing became a multi-generational family career.