If you’re ever scuba diving in the Ottawa River near the Champlain Bridge, you may come across a bunch of ugly black shoes and stockings at the bottom of the river.
They belonged to nursing students from the 1950s and ‘60s who attended the Ottawa Civic Hospital School of Nursing and would toss their “dreaded black shoes” in the water to celebrate their “graduation” into their third and final year, when they were finally allowed to wear white shoes and stockings. The ceremony accompanying the transition was called “Going into White.”
Ottawa resident Donna Anderton was among those nurses who performed the shoe toss before it was eventually stopped. “They closed the Champlain Bridge for us,” recalls Donna, who graduated from the Civic Hospital School of Nursing in 1963. “For the first two years, our uniform consisted of a big, baggy pink thing with OCH (Ottawa Civic Hospital) written on it, a bib, apron, collar, and those black shoes and stockings.”
The pink smock remained part of the uniform throughout those three years, but the white shoes and stockings signified a transition into the real world of nursing.
Along with the shoe toss, Donna remembers a few other fun facts about those early years in nurses’ residence, including a rule that gum could only be chewed in the privacy of your room, with the door shut.
