MORGANTOWN – A momentous thing happened Wednesday afternoon at the Village at Heritage Point, even if one the better-known residents of the retirement community down from Pineview Drive didn’t necessarily think so.
“Please,” Lillian Klein said with a grin and a wave. “All this fuss.”
Her friends and neighbors politely disagreed. After all, they said, Klein did turn 100 the day before.
The real joyful noise, however, came from her West Virginia University nursing colleagues who wanted to give belated birthday wishes to their mentor.
Bob Klein, son of Lillian Klein, speaks to nurses and others at his mother’s 100th birthday celebration Wednesday. Lillian is at far right.
Klein, who went to work right after her graduation from nursing school in Pennsylvania at the end of World War II, would find herself in a frontier role, of sorts, in her field in Morgantown, just scant years later.
She hired on at the then new and gleaming WVU Medical Center (now the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center) in the early 1960s when the University City was fashioning itself into a place for transformative hospital care.
Pioneering, transformative hospital care.
As an intensive care nurse, Klein assisted with the first open-heart surgery to be performed in the state of West Virginia.
The first kidney transplant, too.
She was the head nurse of ICU when she retired after a 25-year career in the Morgantown medical community.
“I can’t tell you what it’s like being here with Lillian today,” said Mary Fanning, the WVU nurse and hospital administrator hired by Klein four decades ago. “She’s still here and I’m still here, and it really makes me feel special.”
Lillian Flicks Klein, right, who turned 100 years old Tuesday, poses Wednesday with three nurses she hired, from left are Lisa Neratka, Jerry Yoho and Mary Fanning.
Fanning is an inaugural member of the Nurse Honor Guard, the organization celebrating the life and times of Florence Nightingale, the profession’s first pioneer.
Klein’s birthday was also the guard’s first public appearance.
With their blue cloaks and old-school white nursing outfits (from caps to crepe-soled shoes) they ushered in the birthday cake to go with all the hugs, heartfelt thanks and cell phone snaps.
Klein loved when she got to see patients recover and go home.
Nursing, she said, was her home.
She stopped her sentence to look over at said cake with its depiction of a stethoscope in frosting.
“It was fun. You work hard and before you know it … this.”
