Irene Marguarite (Freiburger) Freeman (1911 - 1998)

Following is the story of how my mother ended up a nurse and owner of a 16 bed hospital with nursery room with several cribs and an X-ray machine and operating room. My mother lost her father in 1926 from stomach cancer when she was 15 years old. My grandmother with four daughters and two young boys tried to run the farm just north of Argyle on her own. She also made some money assisting the country doctor delivering babies. The school in Argyle only went to the tenth grade from where my mother graduated in 1927. She then spent the next year living with and helping care for Jim and Rose Morell's 21 children on their family big stone house and farm just south of Argyle. She was paid $7.00 a week which she turned over to her mother. She then moved to Cass City with her younger sister Reva to finish high school. She was allowed to skip the 11 th grade because the country kids were so much smarter than the town kids. She and Aunt Reva boarded with a lady in town on South Seeger Street. They were so poor at the time that my mother had only a single dress and pair of shoes to go to school with. She was in the first graduating class to graduate from the new 3-story Cass City High School in 1929. Following graduation, I believe it was Joseph McCarty who owned the general store in Argyle, offered to pay for my mother's nurses training at Mercy Hospital in Bay City. He had given uncle Barney a new pair of shoes from his store because they were so poor. She didn't want to go but Grandma and Aunt Merwina talked her into it, or more likely forced her into it. She got her nurses diploma in 1932 and her RN license in January 1933. About this time my mother started to work at Pleasant Home Hospital in Cass City. She paid back Mr. McCarty for the money he gave her for school.

In July 1917 Dr. M. M. Wickware sold Pleasant Home Hospital to Dr. Ira D. McCoy who took possession and moved his office into the hospital building the first of the week. The Depression start in 1932 and apparently Dr. McCoy had trouble meeting the mortgage payments and offered to sell the hospital to my mother. On 20 Jan 1934 a sales contract was signed for $5,800. The contract stated that she would make payments of $100 per month, interest free, until half the cost of the hospital was paid off. Dr. McCoy would pay all the taxes, insurance, and interest on the $5,800 mortgage. She would then obtain a new mortgage for the remaining amount and pay Dr. McCoy the remaining half. Dr. H. T. Donahue, who was Dr. McCoy’s assistant at the time, would take over his practice at the hospital. I believe the only reason she agreed to it was because Grandma McGary (Grandma had married Guy McGary a couple years earlier) had just lost the farm and it offered a great opportunity for jobs during the Depression, and Aunt Merwina, Uncle Barney, Uncle Alger, and Aunt Gertrude were all willing to work for my mother if she bought it. Dr. Donahue would have been the logical person to sell the hospital to, but he grew up on a farm near Colwood and was more interested in farming than running a hospital. He had a large dairy farm just north of town, another near Colwood and later a third farm near Prescott some 50 miles north of Bay City.

Dr. Ira D. McCoy also owned the Dutch Colonial style house next to the hospital. He had the house built in 1925. The house was an Aladdin pre-cut home manufactured in Bay City, one of the first. The lumber is pre-cut timber and numbered at the factory site, then shipped to the building site and assembled. (Every issue of Popular Mechanics had a full-page ad of Aladdin homes on the back page of their magazine for many years probably into the 1960s or 70s.) Dr. McCoy sold the house to my mother in 1941 for $6,000 when I was 4 years old. Prior to that we lived on North Seeger Street. Living next to the hospital meant my brothers and I got to eat all our meals in the basement kitchen in the hospital. We walked home from school every day for lunch. On Christmas and occasionally for certain events we got to eat at home.