Mom was born at home in Pittsburgh on March 18, 1920. She was the oldest of seven. Two of her infant sisters died of pneumonia. A third sister died of diphtheria at age 5. Mom tells tragic stories of each of those deaths. Her 5-year-old sister was laid out in the living room in a glass-enclosed casket because the disease was so contagious. Mom said she looked like Sleeping Beauty. What an image that is.

Michael Joseph Sullivan, the father of Nora, was the youngest of 13 children. The family lived in Pittsburgh, where he married my grandmother, Anna Elser. He was a photo engraver and supervisor of the department that made the metal plates to reproduce photographs for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. When my mother, the oldest of seven children, of which only four survived, was in grade school, the family moved to Brooklyn, because my grandfather had been transferred to the New York Journal American. My mother said the Pittsburgh schools were ahead of the New York schools at that time, and she was put into the fifth grade instead of the fourth grade, where she would have been in Pa. She skipped a grade a second time going from junior high to high school, making her two years younger than her classmates and friends. It must have been difficult for her, because she was not permitted to join them when they began to go out to dances and to see big bands play in the city. She never really like living in Brooklyn and after high school she chose to go back to Pittsburgh to St. Francis School of Nursing.

My father at that time was a student first at St. Vincent College. He was a friend of a fellow from Brooklyn who knew my mother from summers in Long Beach, N.Y., where my grandfather bought a house. On a dare he wrote a letter to my mother. They had not met at that point. She carries the letter around to this day. His family was from Midland, Pa. They married soon after she graduated. I was born in St. Francis Nov. 17, 1942. Shortly thereafter my dad was in the Navy. My mother went back to Long Beach, where my grandfather had permanently moved the family, to wait for his return. That's when she answered an ad in the paper for a nurse for the newspaper's dispensary arranging for my aunt, her younger sister, to care for me while she went to work. The sisters would split the salary.

Dad came home. They moved to Fairless Hills, Pa., and reared five children. Dad worked in the blast furnace of the Fairless Works USS Steel until he retired. That's when she went to work at Sesame Place, which was just opening up. Dad died in 1999 from complications due to diabetes. He would have died years sooner had he not had my mother taking care of him.

Mom has always been proud of her nursing skills learned at St. Francis. She was a really fine diagnostician. Once, when she was working in a doctor's office, she tells the story of a young physician asking her to go into an examination room and glance at a rash on an adult patient and tell him what she thought it was. She did so and told the doctor it looked like measles to her. He went back in and said to the patient, "Well Mr. So and So, it looks like you might have picked up a case of the measles."

Mom currently lives in Churchville, Pa., a small burgh near Newtown, Pa., with my sister Ellen (Nellie) Renn and her husband, Ed. Nell followed in Mom's footsteps and became a nurse. She in charge of maternity education at St. Mary's Hospital in Langhorne, Pa. I live in Connecticut, where my husband and I reared four children, all grown, three married, six grandchildren.

The children of Nora Sullivan O'Neil are Margaret (Peggy) O'Neil Schenk of Connecticut, husband Richard, two sons and two daughters; Nora Ann (Nicki) O'Neil Tramontana of Florida, husband James, one son; Michael G. O'Neil of Virginnia, wife Gloria, two children a son and daughter; Ellen Marie (Nell) O'Neil Renn of Pennsylvania, husband Edward, two daughters, one son; and Robert A. O'Neil of Pennsylvania, married to Angie, two daughters. In addition to her 12 grandchildren, Nora has seven great grandchildren.

I can begin my stories about training by starting at the beginning. When I entered training in 1938, I was the only student in the class of 96 girls from the state of N.Y. There were girls from Pennsylvania, of course, some from West Virginia, which is just south of Midland, Pa. Some of my fellow classmates had difficulty getting used to my New York accent. I got sick and tired of having to often times spell the word I was saying, so I decided to do something about it. In the evening, after I completed my studying, I would get a book and read aloud, practicing the way the Pennsylvanians talked. I would make a list of the words that needed special attention and I would repeat them over and over until I finally mastered the Pennsylvania accent. Lucky for me we each had our own private room in the nurses' home, otherwise I might have been looked upon as needing psycho help because I was always talking to myself.

To make a long story short, I did master the enunciation.

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One night during our second year of training one of my classmates dressed up like a nun and went up and down the hall giving out detention slips for unbelievable reasons. The nuns were very strict with us. We had to have our showers completed by 7:30 p.m., and we had to study from 7:30 to 9:30. Lights were out at 9:45. One of the nuns checked every room between 9:45 and 10 p.m. We never knew when one of them would show up, so we had to be prepared. My classmate who was dressed as a nun, the night she scared the wits out of all of us, just made it back to her own room and jumped into bed fully dressed in the nuns habit just seconds before the door opened and the real nun opened the door to check on her. After all was clear and the floor secured for the night, my classmate went from room to room collecting the phony detention slips. Everyone was ready to crown her Queen of the May. No one had the nerve to complain to the real nun about the detention slips. Our classmate got away with her phony portrayal of a nun. None of us ever tried that prank again. By this time, the beginning of our second year, our class was growing smaller. As the year 1939 began, we were down to 69 students. The girls were leaving one by one. We were not allowed to be up until 10:30 in our second year. That was one rule that didn't sit well with many of the students that left training our first year. We only got one evening off each week. In order to get that time off (from 6:30 to 10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening) we had to have perfect attendance for every class and floor assignment and have an average grade of 80 in all our subjects. I will think of more stories, I got a million of them!!!!!!!!!

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I will fill you in on another episode while I was in training. We all had to spend 3 months in the psycho part of our hospital. It was a big part of our hospital and catered to very wealthy patients. Back then it was referred to as the Nut House. One could think of it that way but by no means was it ever to be referred to verbally. It was the beginning of my senior year when I got my assignment over there. The first day I got off the elevator on the floor I was to work on and was met by a nun who immediately gave me a list of projects she wanted me to take care of. This nun never introduced herself to me, she just told me what to do. She kept hunting me down and giving me more assignments and dummy me, I kept doing what she said. I didn't know any better as I had no idea of what went on since it was my first day over there.

At noon the head nurse caught up with me and asked me what my name was. When I told her, Nora Sullivan, she said "Where have you been since 7 a.m.?" I explained that I had been given instructions from Sister and was working for her all morning. She asked me what sister. I did not know her name, but just then, I saw her down the hall and pointed her out to the head nurse. The nurse laughed so hard and when she composed herself, she explained that sister was a patient. What's more, the head nurse was about to call over to the nurses' home and notify them that I did not report for duty that morning. I was really scared, because if she had reported me, I would have lost all my privileges for a month. The head nurse assured me she would not report me, and for me to go to lunch and then to my class in the nurses' home at 1 o'clock. I was to report back on the floor at 3 o'clock and work until 7 p.m.

While we were in training, we worked from 7 a.m. until noon. We had lunch and then classes from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m., then back on the floor from 3 to 7 p.m. This was now our senior year and St. Francis student nurses were given tough assignments in psycho. Student nurses from hospitals all over Pittsburgh and surrounding towns, as far away as Latrobe hospital, came to our hospital for their psycho training, and we St Francis student nurses were assigned to look after the girls from other hospitals. I have oodles of stories about my 3 months of psycho training, which I will go into at a later date.

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WRITTEN BY MARGARET SCHENK, daughter: My mother has a really good story about being in Times Square when the end of WWII was announced. The moment was made famous by the photograph of the sailor kissing the nurse. She said she wasn't that nurse, but she was there in the background of the picture. She was in her nurse's uniform on her lunch hour from her job in the dispensary of the New York Journal American newspaper, where my grandfather worked. She said she applied for the job without telling him and he was angry when he found out because he didn't want anyone to think that he was giving favors to his family. But she quieted him down by saying him that she didn't tell him because she knew he would not approve. She said that no one knew they were related since by that time she was married and her name was O'Neil. It's a good thing she was the nurse at the paper because my grandfather fell and hurt his arm. She she told him that he had broken it, but he didn't believe her. She made him go to the hospital and sure enough, he came back in a cast on his broken arm. She's always been good at diagnosing. She has tons of stories like that. There's the one about the man who caught his arm in the elevator, and it was torn off, and the big honcho who had a heart attack and would have died, except mom got him breathing with CPR and stablized him until the ambulance came and brought him to the hospital. He gave her a $300 bottle of perfume, she said, which she did not want to accept. She didn't wear perfume, she said.

Nora M. O'Neil

Nora M. O'Neil, known as Nora the Nurse at Sesame Place and a special lady who could fix boo boos and restore smiles, died peacefully on Nov. 24, after a valiant battle against old age. She was 92.

Nora was a longtime resident of Fairless Hills and in later years made her home in Churchville with her daughter and son-in-law Ellen and Edward Renn.

Born in Pittsburgh on March 18, 1920, Nora was the oldest of five children of the late Michael J. and Anna Sullivan. The family later moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where Nora attended public schools. After high school, she enrolled in Saint Francis Hospital School of Nursing in Pittsburgh receiving her R.N. in 1941.

In 1942, she married Robert O'Neil, who in 1999 predeceased her after 57 years together. During World War II, while Robert was in the Navy, Nora worked in the dispensary of the former New York Journal American newspaper. With the opening of the U.S. Steel Corporation's Fairless Works, the couple moved to Fairless Hills in 1952 and reared five children. During that time, Nora was a homemaker but gave freely of her skills as head nurse� on the block dispensing advice and nursing treatment at no cost to friends and neighbors, who depended on her expertise.

At age 60, with her children grown, Nora returned to work at the Fairless Hills Medical Center. She set up the Sesame Place dispensary, when the park opened in 1980. She remained at Sesame Place for 21 years retiring in 2001 at age 81. At that time she was honored with a proclamation from the Buck County Commission, which declared Oct. 30, 2001, Nora O'Neil Day.

In 2011, Nora received the Outstanding Alumni Award in Lifetime Achievement from the St. Francis (cq) Medical Center School of Nursing Alumni Association at its annual reunion in Pittsburgh.

She was a longtime communicant at St. Frances Cabrini Roman Catholic Church (cq), a member of the St. Frances Cabrini Ladies' Guild and a volunteer at Bishop Conwell and Bishop Egan High schools. When she wasn't caring for her husband, children or the ill and injured, she enjoyed playing bridge.

She is survived by her children and their spouses, Margaret M. Schenk of Connecticut (Richard), Nora A. Tramontana of Florida (James), Michael G. O'Neil of Virginia (Gloria), Ellen M. Renn of Churchville (Edward) and Robert A. O'Neil of Easton, Pa. (Angela); also 12 grandchildren and several great grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, Nora requested prior to her death that donations to be made in her name to St. Francis Cabrini Church, 325 South Olds Blvd., Fairless Hills, PA 19030.