Nurse Glaudi changed rules for adoption

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

ngelina Glaudi was associated with a saint as a child and survived the infamous Galveston hurricane of 1900, but perhaps the most unique event in her life was the way she became a mother.

When she went to work as a young lady at the Lafayette Sanitarium (the predecessor to Lafayette General Medical Center) in 1923 she was the only graduate nurse on the hospital staff. She was still there when she was 80 years old, the oldest RN still working in Louisiana.

During the intervening years she saw it all. She handled emergency cases, worked in the operating room, helped with difficult births and critical heart cases, calmed disturbed people, and eased the plight of patients very young and very old.

For most of those years she did it without the whizzbang machinery that hospitals use today.

(When the hospital was remodeled and upgraded in the early 1950s, some people were afraid that the new operating rooms might blow up. They said the combination of electrical gadgets and gases used for anesthesia would surely cause disaster. Fortunately, the designers and builders knew how to properly ground the circuits and all went OK.)

Nurse Glaudi was reared in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans, where the Italian nun Mother Cabrini regularly made the rounds of the neighborhood in a hand-me-down horse-drawn hearse to beg for food and money for the children in her orphanage. The Glaudi residence was one of her regular stops, not only because they gladly shared what they could, but because the saint-to-be also enjoyed visiting families from her native Italy.

The Glaudi family made a fateful move to Galveston in 1900, when Angelina was 11 years old. They had been there only a few months when the most devastating hurricane in U.S. history came ashore. Their house was ripped apart and Angelina, her parents, and her siblings found themselves clinging to a makeshift raft that had once been their kitchen floor.

She watched with horror as the raft broke apart and her father, youngest sister, and a brother were swept away. By some miracle, the boy survived; her father and sister drowned. The six surviving members of the family returned to New Orleans and it was there that she eventually entered nursing school.

She graduated with honors, took a job as anesthetist at the Lafayette Sanitarium, and soon became head nurse — and a force to be reckoned with in the hospital and in the community. When Glaudi spoke, people listened.

She was working at the hospital in March 1929 when Father John Kemps showed up, carrying a box he’d found on the side of the road while returning from a sick call. Inside the box was a tiny bundle wrapped in newspaper.

It was a premature baby — blue, nearly lifeless.

The doctors gave the infant virtually no chance to live. All they could do was keep her warm and — in those days before oxygen tents— turn her face to the window so that she could get as much fresh air as possible.

Father Kemps baptized her Mary Josephine. The hospital staff shortened her name to Jo-Jo.

They fed her with a medicine dropper every two hours around the clock and she gradually gained strength. But her ordeal was not over. She had significant medical problems that would require a dozen operations as a child — and no parents to take up her cause.

Angelina Glaudi remedied both situations. She took Jo-Jo into her own home and saw her through the needed surgeries, adopting her as her own child.

But when she decided she wanted to make the adoption formal, there was a big problem. It was illegal in Louisiana for a single person to adopt a child.

That didn’t slow Nurse Glaudi. It took four years of arm-twisting and generous application of the forceful Glaudi personality, but in 1939 Angelina Glaudi, then 50 years old, officially became a parent by special act of the legislature.

Jo-Jo traveled with her mother to Baton Rouge on the day the legislation was passed. She sat at Lafayette Senator Esteve Martin’s desk and pushed the lever to cast his “yes” vote on the issue.

Nurse Glaudi and Jo-Jo spent another 50 years together.

Angelina Glaudi died at the age of 100, living in her own home until shortly before her death.

Jo-Jo continued to live there until her own death several years ago, indulging a companion cat and the love of opera, both of which she acquired from her remarkable mother.