One of the historical nights in New York in 1965 was the night of the blackout. We on Staten Island didn't lose our lights, but we heard about it, and all went onto the roof of the nurses' home to look across at what should have been the city lights of Manhatten but was just enormous blackness.

After we'd been in the hospital for two months, our rooms were changed to another wing which was being painted when we arrived. This was also the time when the second half of our internship group arrived. We felt sad to see the older girls go, especially Dorcas and Arlene who'd gone out of their way to help us settle in, but were very excited to meet the new bunch. Ruth Sanson was a well built blond bombshell from up state New York, I think. She lived in the room just across from me. Paulette was small and dark and rather mysterious, with a real Southern accent. I think she was from Virginia. Carol was the shyest and quietest of the bunch. She was from Boston. Kathy was confident and attractive and full of New Jersey charm. Helen Kamm was from a huge family in Chicago and was tall and dark rather quiet but pleasant and friendly. It was interesting that the friendship groups tended to stay with those who came together, with the exception of Helen Kamm, who seemed to fit in better with those of us from the early bunch.

We each had a private room with a sink, and we had two shared rooms one which was a kitchen and the other a sort of living room. The toilets and showers and bathtubs were at the end of the corridor. My room was the very end on the right - the farthest from the toilets and it became a bit of a joke when I developed a bladder infection and had to troop down to the toilets every hour almost on the hour. I didn't know that I had a problem at the time, so it was many months before it was diagnosed and eventually cured and the jokes about my hourly ritual eventually died a natural death.

We worked hard and as well as working on the wards we had projects to do in each section that we were in. For instance in the therapeutic section we had to design posters and teach classes to both groups of patients and employees; in the kitchen areas we had to be comprehesive menu planning, costing of various types of meat regarding edible portion and accounting for cooking losses; we had to time and motion studies; and studies on waste as determined by food uneaten by patients. We also had lessons to learn and homework to do with occasional classes by Lois on certain general aspects of the job.

I remember one poster I had decided to make to put up for the patients enlightenment. It was to have a frame with the different coloured balls all labeled with names of good foods and a slogan about Cueing into a Good Diet. We ate most of our meals in the company of other young medical staff and interns. One of the more senior doctors who still chose to eat with us was called Philip Charney. He was a dermatologist, and I knew he had a pool table at home. So I explained the poster to him one night while we were all at dinner and then asked him what color his balls were. It was the standing joke when I was around for a long time after that.

We each had a three week visit to The National Institute of Health, the big cancer hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington D.C. which was run by the USPHS. We were to go in twos and Ruth and I were the first to go. It was mid October by now, and the leaves were glorious. The weather was perfect too, and the train trip down to Washington was very pleasant. We were met at the station by one of the senior dietitians, who told us that they were all in a panic at the moment, because one of their fellow dietitans had just been shot. She had been driving around Washington and somebody had just shot through the window of her car and killed her. I don't think she had been a target, just unlucky in that she happened to be in the path of a stray bullet. But the whole department were very much depressed by the event.

We were to stay at a motel near the hospital, all paid for by the USPHS, of course, and when we entered out room we found a huge basket of fruit as a welcoming gift from the hospital dietitians.

Our main job during those three weeks was one of observation. There were special balance study units where the food intake was monitored very scientifically with food weighed to the upteenth gram and pulverized and analyzed for every possible nutrient. Food was bought in huge batches so the fruit would all be from the same picking, the butter from the same herd of cows, etc.

The other part of our experience was to do a case study on a particular patient and then at the end present the study to an auditorium of interested staff. We had the use of the medical illustrations unit who made slides for us of our graphs and so on. My case study was on a lady who had a rare type of cancer called choricarcinoma, which develops from placental tissue that is incompletely removed. She was treated with chemotherapy in the form of methyltrexate, and had had all the unpleasant side effects of losing her hair, sores in all her areas of mucous membrane, etc. I found that I enjoyed giving my talk - and that it was well received. I had always felt that teaching was not at all my cup of tea, but that experience changed my mind for me.

As well as the hospital experiences, Ruth and I made good use of our chance to see around Washington and did all the usual tours. We also walked around Georgetown and had a nice meal in a posh restaurant there. We went shopping too, and I went back to New York with a green and blue paisley dress, and green boucle suit, a white blouse with an attached tie, and a pair of elephant bookends.

Most of the interns were attached to guys back home. Kathy was going to be married in the spring; Carolyn was engaged and had the most enormous emerald cut diamond. I embarassed her and myself by asking her soon after we met what the stone was, as I'd never seen a diamond that big or shaped like that before. Helen the first, and Jeanette and Carol had boyfriends back home that they were serious about and Paulette and Ruth tbe second had loads of dates with loads of boys. So that left Ruth the first, Helen the second and me in the market for finding a boyfriend. But of the three of us, I think I was the only one that had made a mission of it.

Decorating things for the holidays was one of our jobs. We had the cooks save all the wishbones from the chickens and turkeys for months before Christmas and we made reindeer out of them with corks for the heads and bodies and the wishbones for the antlers and legs. These decorated the dining rooms and the cooks' room in the main kitchen. For Thanksgiving we made an enormous turkey and pilgrims out of paper mache and crepe paper to decorate the patient's dining room.

It was interesting that most of us 10 interns were Catholic. It was not a religious oriented hospital in any way. But most of us were not only Catholic but had attended Catholic colleges. We decided that maybe that was a way they had of selecting potential interns who they felt would be more maleable to the rules. We were used to having a rigid code of morality put upon us. But whatever the reason we all got along very well with the Catholic chaplin for the hospital. I offered to play the organ for mass at the chapel and he was pleased for me to do it. I actually saw quite a lot of him outside of hospital times too. We went for walks and he took me to meet a friend of his who was a vicitim of thalidomide. The three of us went for a day's outing and when we came back I was told she would spent the night with me. I was more than a little worried by the prospect of helping her take off her arms and legs that night, but she was so used to having people see her undressed and vulnerable that she helped me over my embarrassement. Father Bill used to take off his Roman collar and wear a sport's shirt when we went out places. He was worried that people would think there was some romantic entanglement between us, but of course there wasn't.

Staten Island was very different from how most people would think of New York although it is as much New York as Manhattan is. It has quiet side streets and some rather nice hills that Frank and I used to drive up to see the view over the city. There was a small town feeling about Staten Island. One of the places I went to with Father Bill was a very old wooden building dating back hundreds of years where early immigrants had built their meeting hall or whatever. The parks and shopping places had a relaxed feeling to them, unlike Manhattan which was always bustling and pushy and exciting.

I loved going to Manhattan. We would take a bus from the hospital to the ferry station, then had a beautiful half hour ferry ride past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to dock at South Ferry terminal. Then we could get the subway to whatever station in the middle of Manhattan that we wanted.

I liked shopping in Peck and Peck. I made the rounds of the big department stores like Macy's and Gimble's just to say I'd been in them, but I really preferred shopping in the smaller stores. We actually were paid quite a lot of money for those days- $6,000 for the year, and although we paid a modest amount of room rent and cafeteria money out of that, it still meant that I was richer than I'd even been in my life. So I went shopping and bought new clothes - many more than I needed, just because it was such an exciting experience to have money I'd earned and to be able to spend it freely.

One time when I was in Peck and Peck, I heard the sales lady say to the woman in front of me, "Did you find what you wanted Mrs. Winegarden?" I was flabbergasted, because I thought she meant me, and I couldn't believe anyone in New York knew my name. But in fact, the lady in front responded, and it was she who had my name - another fact that really threw me. In North Dakota the only Wyngardens were related to me, and there were very few of those. So when I got home again I looked in the New York phone book and found about 8 Winegardens and a Betty Wyngaarden, who judging from the more similar spelling of her name to mine, might well have been a distant relative. But I wasn't brave enough to call her to find out.

The thrill of New York was partly to be found in just wandering the famous streets - Broadway, 5th Avenue, Wall Street, and although there was always a feeling of rush and bustle, the people that you might stop to ask directions were friendly and the atmosphere wasn't threatening. I only once felt worried about my safety when I was in New York, even though I often went shopping alone and a few times even went out at night alone.

I never went to the Empire State Building, but when my sister came to visit we went to the United Nations, and wandered the streets of the Village, having our pictures sketched by a sidewalk artist, and lapping up the atmosphere of this very unique part of New York. We also took an around the island boat trip with a commentary on who lived where in the tall buildings surrounding the outside of Manhattan.

I went to four Broadway plays and one off Broadway in the Village. The first one was Fiddler on the Roof. I bought two tickets as soon as I arrived in New York, and when the day came the only one of the bunch of us who wanted to go with me was Kathy. We sat way in the back and up high, but still found it very enjoyable. Afterwards we went to a Jewish restaurant and she talked me into have curds and lox which turned out to be a smoked fish on cream cheese. I wasn't very impressed with it.

Frank and I went to see The Odd Couple which he didn't find funny at all and Wait Until Dark about a blind girl who gets robbed. Lee Remick was in that one but it didn't get very good revues and closed shortly after it opened.

The play I went to see in the village was in the round, and we sat in the front row close enough to touch the actors if we'd wished. I have a feeling it was Death of a Salesman. I went with a man I'd only just met at a medical fair, and that was one occasion where I travelled back through Manhatten alone at night. He asked me to write to him, so I did, and when I started getting phone calls from Hector later in the year, I pretended they were from this guy.

The last play I went to I went with Carolyn just before our year was up. It was Man of La Moncha, which had only just opened. A man in a suit of armour walked the streets before it opened, advertising it. We first went to eat at a place in the village with a sawdust covered floor. The play was excellent but Richard Harris, the star, was flat for much of the time - as if he couldn't hear the pitch of the orchestra.

Another thing Frank and I did in Manhattan was to go around looking at all the moving doll displays around Christmas time and the magnificent Christmas lights.