Gladys Myrtle Kipp

1890s

Born 1 April 1893 in Chilliwack, British Columbia, the eldest child of Edgar Allen Kipp and Sarah Jane McConnell, and granddaughter of the valley's pioneer settler Isaac Kipp.

1900s

Grew up in Chilliwack, part of the time on her grandfather's old homestead, winning footraces at the fall fair, studying piano and elocution, and singing in The Mikado. From August 1909 she clerked at W. T. Rolfe's dry goods store.

1910s

Began nurse's training in 1911 but had to stop for her health. Tried again at Vancouver General Hospital and graduated in 1918 with a surgical scholarship, then spent the Spanish flu winter nursing at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Married Harry Lobb on 23 August 1919 and followed him across the line into Blaine, Washington, that November.

1920s–1930s

Settled in Ferndale, Washington, in 1921 and raised five children there, crossing the border often to visit family in Chilliwack. Became a leader in Ferndale's church, music, PEO, PTA, and temperance circles. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen on 5 July 1939.

1940s–1960s

Returned to nursing as a visiting nurse and trained in polio care. Traveled widely with Harry, wintering in Arizona and touring Europe in 1964.

1970s–1980s

Widowed in 1969, she moved to Seattle, volunteered for years at Swedish Hospital, and at eighty-seven flew to Sweden with her son Ray. Died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle on 8 July 1984, aged 91.

A Chilliwack Girlhood

Gladys Myrtle Kipp was born on April 1, 1893, in Chilliwack, British Columbia, the eldest child of Edgar Allen Kipp and Sarah Jane McConnell and a granddaughter of Isaac Kipp, the valley's pioneer settler. She grew up in town, briefly at Cheam, and then on her grandfather's old homestead, a house with no telephone, radio, or electric light. Her childhood had some close calls. She nearly drowned in the mud during the great flood of 1894, was badly cut by glass the next year, and watched a neighbor's house burn down from her upstairs window. Another time, she and her sister Frankie were reading the Eaton's catalogue by lamplight in their bedroom, looking at dresses, when Frankie dozed off and the catalogue caught fire; Gladys grabbed the lamp and put it out. She sleepwalked as a child, and in January 1901 she came home from school in tears because Queen Victoria had died; she grew up to be a devoted royalist.

She was a musical girl. At ten she was performing with the Chilliwack School of Music. In 1905 she passed a music-theory examination set by a visiting examiner from London, and she played piano recitals, including a piano trio in the courthouse in 1906. She studied elocution with Theo Hutton, recited "Little Orphan Annie" at Knight's Opera House, and came second in the temperance society's recitation contest. In 1909 she sang in the women's chorus of The Mikado in geisha costume, and in 1912 she played Lady Ella in Patience. She was athletic, too: she won footraces at the Chilliwack fall fair, took first place in the thirteen-year-old girls' race at the 1905 Dominion Day sports, and played third base for the high school "Roses" in a 16–15 win over the public school "Thornes." In 1905 she passed the provincial high school entrance exams, one of sixteen out of thirty candidates, and in her first year she scored a perfect 100 in algebra.

Becoming a Nurse

After high school Gladys clerked in Chilliwack stores, working sixty-hour weeks, and was active in the Rebekah lodge, the young people's society, and the choir at Cooke's Church, whose choir gave her a leather traveling case when she left. In June 1911 she went to Vancouver to train as a nurse at the Burrard Sanitarium, but ill health forced her to give it up the following February. She came home and worked as a clerk, then spent a year as a stenographer for a silverware wholesaler in Vancouver. Around 1915 she started over at the Vancouver General Hospital training school, where her sister Frankie soon joined her. On June 28, 1918, she graduated and won the Riggs-Munro scholarship in surgery, worth $250, for postgraduate study at a surgical hospital.

She used it to go to Chicago. From October 1918 to May 1919, at the height of the Spanish influenza pandemic, she took a postgraduate surgical course at the Illinois Training School for Nurses and worked at Cook County Hospital. In June 1919 she came back to Vancouver General to work in the operating department. By then she had come to know Harry Lobb, a Chilliwack electrician who had once boarded with her family and who had just come home from the war.

Marriage and Ferndale

Gladys married Harry Lobb in Mount Vernon, Washington, on August 23, 1919. She finished out her work at the hospital, then crossed into Blaine that November to join him in Bellingham. In 1921 they moved to Ferndale, where they raised five children: Allan, Ray, Eleanor, Madalyn, and Kathleen. When Harry opened Lobb Electric in 1924, Gladys helped with sales and collections and minded the store. The family lived for years on Sterling Avenue, then on Malloy Avenue, and in 1953 moved into a new house on Vista Drive. From their beach place at Neptune Beach she could see the water, Bellingham, and Mount Baker. She canned the family's fruit and vegetables and sewed her daughters' dresses on an electric Singer.

The border was never much of a barrier. The Lobbs drove up to Chilliwack and Rosedale for Christmases, weddings, and weekends, and Gladys's parents and sisters came down just as often. In the summer of 1933 she left her children with relatives and went home to nurse her mother through her final illness. In 1936 she took Ray and Eleanor, along with her father, up the Cariboo Trail as far as Barkerville and Prince George, and in 1939 she joined a road trip, by way of Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore, to take her son Allan back to college in Aurora, Illinois.

A Pillar of Ferndale

Gladys threw herself into Ferndale's community life. In 1932 she organized the Ferndale Women's Music Club in her living room and served as its first president. In 1933 she was president of Chapter BQ of the PEO Sisterhood, which helped women pay for college, and gave the welcoming address when the state PEO convention met in Bellingham. She was chosen moderator of the Congregational Church for 1934 and was a longtime leader of its Ladies' Aid, and later of the United Church's Women's Society. She was music director and treasurer of the Ferndale Women's Christian Temperance Union, and treasurer and vice-president of the Ferndale PTA and a vice-president of the county PTA council; Harry had been the Ferndale PTA's first president. She was also active in the Civic Club, the Legion Auxiliary, the Orthopedic Guild, and later the garden club.

Above all she was the town's accompanist and soloist. Ferndale's newspapers are full of her at the piano for other singers, or singing duets with her sister Frankie, at weddings, funerals, club teas, and church programs. At one PEO meeting she sang a song written for the occasion about the Nooksack River. She also gave talks to her clubs on topics from "The Three Gardens of the Bible" to new medical discoveries and the Indians of Arizona.

Nursing Again

Her training never went to waste. During the Second World War she directed the Red Cross volunteers making surgical dressings, joined the town's emergency medical unit, and spoke to local groups about first aid and home nursing. By December 1944 she was working three days a week as a visiting nurse, and she served as camp nurse at the Advent Christian camp meetings in Nooksack. In 1948, as polio spread, the county's infantile paralysis chapter chose her as one of three Whatcom County nurses to take a special course in polio nursing at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, and that November she helped teach other local nurses to care for polio patients.

Travels and Widowhood

Once the children were grown, Gladys and Harry traveled. They towed a trailer across the continent to Washington, D.C., and Florida in 1952, spent most winters in Phoenix, and in 1964 made a six-week tour of Europe that took them from Paris and Rome to Ypres, where Harry had served in the First World War, and on to Ireland, where they climbed Blarney Castle and kissed the Blarney Stone. In 1967 they visited Jerusalem. They left Ferndale for Bellingham in 1965, and Harry died there in January 1969.

Gladys lived fifteen more years. She kept wintering in Phoenix for a time and then moved to an apartment on Terrace Street in Seattle, near Swedish Hospital, where she volunteered for many years and belonged to Plymouth Congregational Church. In 1980, at eighty-seven, she flew with her son Ray to Copenhagen and on to Sweden to visit a granddaughter's family, taking a ferry and spending a night in Malmö when a strike stopped their connecting flight. She died at Swedish Hospital on July 8, 1984, at ninety-one, of congestive heart failure brought on by aortic valve stenosis, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Ferndale, where Harry also lies.