Bill Anderson is lucky he married a nurse. If he hadn’t, he might not be here.

“I tell him he’s tried out all my nursing skills,” Bobbie Anderson said, for in a week’s time several years ago he underwent three heart surgeries. She was with him the entire time, noting and understanding every change, and telling the nurse, “Look at this,” but she would tell Bobbie, “He’s just tired.”

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.

But Bobbie was persistent. “I tried real hard to refrain from that, but I knew something had to be done,” she said.

If anybody knew what needed to be done, it was Bobbie. Her name is synonymous with the best in nursing care and skills, for she’s been on the job for 58 years. During that time she’s racked up several degrees, including two master’s. She’s received numerous awards and stays involved in both professional and church-related activities.

She does all that, she said, to keep abreast of health care changes, for otherwise she couldn’t be of help to others — the primary purpose and concern of a good nurse.

She got into nursing the year she graduated from Culkin Academy, in 1948, when a friend, Mildred Corbin Hearn, who had just graduated from the school of nursing at the Lutheran, or Vicksburg, Hospital was on a recruiting trip.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try this out,’” she said, so she worked during the summer as an aide, living in the nurses’ dorm and making a minimal salary.

She had interest in other fields, she said, but couldn’t afford college. Besides, she said, she had always liked to take care of people, so she entered nursing school in the fall, graduating in 1951 from the Diploma School of Nursing at Lutheran Hospital on Monroe Street. The diploma school, she explained is a hospital-operated program, and though you get the same instruction, there are no college credits.

Furthering her education wasn’t on her mind. Marriage was, and in December 1951 Bobbie Barber became Mrs. Bill Anderson. He was a student at the University of Alabama, and after she worked there in a hospital for a while he suggested she might enroll at the university, too. A scholarship provided by the state of Mississippi helped her earn a bachelor of science degree in 1954. After a stint at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, which was Bill’s hometown, they came to Vicksburg where she began teaching nursing at Mercy Hospital, a job she held for 14 years until the school closed in 1969. During the same period, her husband was an X-ray technician.

She worked for a while in an educational program for a hospital, “but that was not my cup of tea. I wanted to be with the students and teach.”

That’s when her friend Mildred Hearn came calling again, urging her to go to work at Hinds Community College. When she retired — temporarily — 25 years later, over 2,000 students had been in her classes. Part of her work was done in the classroom and then she would take the students for topical assignments on the floor where they observed her doing a lot of “hands on” demonstrations.

She didn’t know the doctors well, she said, “because my responsibility was with my students.” One day when a frustrated physician didn’t have his charts, she found them for him. He later asked another nurse what position Bobbie had, for all he had ever seen her do was opening and closing doors.

When Bobbie began teaching in the two-year program at Hinds she had only 11 students in a class, but it is now up to 30. She had almost no equipment and taught in one room in the home economics building. Now the School of Nursing building is named for her.

Someone asked her one day if she had ever worked in intensive care or coronary care, and she replied, “I have done it all. From the bedside we had to administer oxygen, but now you have different departments. In the beginning we had nothing piped into the room — no oxygen, no suction machines. What we see today are the many technological changes that give feedback as to what’s going on inside the body. That we didn’t have access to before.”

There have been other changes, some minor, such as the nurses’ caps, once part of the uniform but seldom worn today. The all-white outfits have given way to a variety of colors. Another change is that more men are entering the profession.

Some things, though, are still basic, and the main one is caring. It’s not about a job, she said, though that is part of it, “but caring is so important.”

Bobbie realizes that nursing isn’t for everybody. Top grades don’t guarantee that one will be a good nurse, and most who are upset by the sight of blood can get over it because, “You can observe and it looks much more difficult than when you’re doing it, when you’re involved, because you’re concentrating on what you’re doing to help someone.”

Though there are several routes in getting a degree in nursing, the one Bobbie is most enthusiastic about is the associate degree earned in community colleges. It has had its struggles, though.

“Every now and then somebody gets a bee in their bonnet that something needs to be different,” she said, “and in 1985 there was a strong thrust toward doing away with the two-year program and putting it all into four years.”

A meeting was held in Texas to explore the subject, and Bobbie attended along with Dr. Clyde Muse, president of Hinds. During the discussions, he nudged Bobbie and told her it was her time to stand up and speak out. She did and ended up chairing a national committee to get an organization started to back the associate degree program. She was national president for two years and on the board for two more.

She’s still an adjunct professor at Hinds and works with a number of nurse-related projects and programs. Three scholarships have been established in her honor, and this past summer she was inducted into the Mississippi Nurses Hall of Fame.

During all this time and these activities, she’s had time to raise five children. One daughter is a nurse, and one granddaughter is studying nursing. She has 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Bobbie will be 79 Thursday, but she plans to keep on doing what she loves — working with the Hinds program. It’s been a wonderful, rewarding career, she said, and she could never have worked anywhere better than Hinds, “for they are like family. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Nor would Bill. He told her he would never have made it without her.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said, “but he did come through.”

His name is in the miracle book at St. Dominic Medical Center.

Hers should be beside it.