Florence Emily Wagner Biographical Sketch

NURSING A FULL LIFE FLORENCE HAS CARED FOR AREA RESIDENTS, INJURED WAR SOLDIERS

Florence E. Wagner was one of 12 in the 1919 graduation class at Goshen High School. That was the old high school building on Fifth Street, now the Municipal Building Annex. Her name is Florence Hardin now and has been since 1942. She hasn't lived much in Goshen since the 1940's, during the war, but she still speaks of it as home.

Her home, since 1962, has been in the house her stepfather built on U.S. 20 at the west edge of LaGrange, right next to his filling station. That's how some members of an endangered species, for LaGrange County, got there. Democrats. "Be careful, they're awful touchy about that here," said Hardin, who at 98 might be the oldest Democrat in the county.

Her stepfather, Walter Atwater, used to run the state highway garage in Goshen and eventually ended up in LaGrange County, where he became Clay Township's trustee. In later years Florence's husband, Virgil, served as LaGrange County Democrat chairman.

Florence Hardin's is the story of a lifelong nurse who cared for people almost all her life, even long after she quit "working" as a nurse. After graduating from high school Florence went to Goshen College. In fact, she said, all the members of her high school graduating class took some courses at the college. "Tuition was $10 a semester," she said, "but I'll tell you, it was just as hard to get $10 then as it is to get a thousand dollars today."

She went on to Evanston, Ill., by train, and studied nursing at St. Francis Hospital, getting her R.N. degree in 1926. Her first job as a registered nurse was at Beth Israel Hospital in Denver, Colo.

Florence joined the Army and was an Army nurse at Fort Knox, Ky., when she met Virgil, who was from southern Indiana, in 1942. They were married that year. She was 41. Army rules prohibited married women in the service, so Florence returned to Goshen while her husband spent the next three years in the European Theater of World War II. "He wrote me a letter every day and I wrote him a letter every day," said Florence, who was then working as a private duty nurse. The woman she cared for needed much attention. "I had a 20-hour day, with four hours off in the afternoon," she said.

Because she and Virgil both married late in life, they decided they were going to adopt. After the war she joined her husband in Germany, where he was part of the occupation force for three years, and there they arranged to adopt a 3-year-old boy. Their son, whom they named John Thomas Hardin, went to Purdue University, became an officer in the U.S. Navy, served aboard the first nuclear submarine to sail under the polar ice cap, and now is a lawyer outside Little Rock, Ark. He's also the father of her two grandsons, Matt, 14, and Jake 11.

Virgil, who had joined the Army as a private during the depression, stayed in the Army for 25 years and eventually earned a commission. Florence went to her one-and-only function for officers and their wives when the wife of an "academy" man referred to her up-from-the ranks husband as "one of those."

Virgil had a number of assignments after the war and Florence's favorite was Culver; where Virgil worked with the military school's famed Black Horse Troop and taught mechanics.

They were in Okinawa when Virgil was discharged in 1962; in March of that year Florence's mother, Wilmetta Atwater, a well-know seamstress in Goshen, died at her home there. Walter Atwater had died in 1956. Wilmetta continued living in the house in Goshen and also kept the house in LaGrange, where the Hardin's settled after Virgil's discharge.

Virgil went into real estate (Grogg-Hardin Realty) and Florence took it upon herself to look after people who were ailing or in nursing homes.

One woman she cared for in Goshen was the niece of a woman she had cared for earlier. Florence arranged for the niece to be transferred to a nursing home in LaGrange so she could stop by daily.

Virgil died in 1996, four years after the Hardins celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

Florence's eyes aren't so good and she uses a walker to get around. Her niece, Betty Geyer of Bristol, checks in regularly and then there's Jim Hart. He delivers her newspaper every day, keeps her supplied in soft drinks and usually stays for a visit before continuing his rounds. "My newspaperman's a saint," says Hardin. There are those who she cared for over the years who would have said the same of her even though she is a Democrat.

[Biographical sketch courtesy of Wellspages]