by Bea Peterson
Ella Amidon has always wanted to be a nurse. “There was no money for it,” she said flatly last week. She quit Berlin High School in tenth grade to work in Reese’s Shirt Shop in Berlin assembling shirts. She was almost 18 when she married in 1948. She and her husband lived in Cherry Plain and raised two sons. Howard lives in Petersburgh and Charles lives in West Virginia. She has seven grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
Ella worked in the Shirt Shop for 17 years and then worked in a nursing home for nine and a half years. She currently lives in Bennington, VT, where she has taken care of three children for a family of doctors for 13 years. She still attends the Cherry Plain Community Church.
Her quest for an education has never lagged. Forty-five years after leaving
school she enrolled in a BOCES program. She and her classmates wore Troy High blue caps and gowns and, in a graduation ceremony, received their high school diplomas, not GED certificates. Now, 13 years later, Ella has received a Nursing Assistant Diploma with highest honors from Stratford Career Institute. She is qualified to work with nurses in any hospital. The Institute offered a correspondence course, and Ella completed it from January through July. “It was so interesting that when I got started I just couldn’t put it down,” she said.
Ella, who will be 80 in February, has no intention of going to work in a hospital. “I did it for my personal satisfaction,” she said with pride.