Before Col. Rosemarie Mahoney ’55 enrolled in UD’s Bachelor of Nursing program, her fellow Hahnemann Hospital School of Nursing students tagged her in their yearbook as “One in a million … specialty — mischief!”
After a lifetime serving as a nurse and teaching, Mahoney made a bequest of more than $150,000 to UD with no directions on how to use it. That’s one-in-a-million kind of mischief of the most Marianist spirit. Mahoney died in 2016, and the University knew she would have wanted to support the school’s renewed nursing program.
“Nursing is a very different undergraduate program,” said Tonya Breymier, director of the nursing program at UD. “Our students complete clinical work up to three eight-hour days each week, so they have significantly less opportunity to earn their own money.”
Breymier noted that UD’s nursing students won’t be working directly with COVID-19 patients, but their clinical work will free up other people to help on the frontline of the pandemic.
Mahoney, a Bronze Star recipient during the Vietnam War as noted in her obituary, knew the front line well. She cared for injured American and Vietnamese soldiers and 120 children a week when she served in Quang Tri province as chief nurse of the 18th Surgical Hospital. A 1973 New York Times article said the province may be “the most brutally punished area of any in the long history of warfare.”
It’s good to know that a Flyer was there helping — leading and serving humanity. Her endowed scholarship ensures that future UD nursing graduates will do the same for years to come.