About Alva North

Alva G. North was born in Chicago on February 27, 1920.  After graduating from a large public high school on the City’s west side, she enrolled in three-year program for registered nurses at West Suburban Hospital in nearby suburban Oak Park IL.  Midway through this program she tested positive for tuberculosis, obliging her to take a year off from her studies.  When she did not come down with actual symptoms, she returned to the nursing school, graduating in the spring of 1941.  She then took a position as surgical nurse at the same West Suburban Hospital.  Two years later, to escape a relationship that she no longer felt comfortable with, she enlisted in the Army Nursing Corps.  After ten months as nurse on a shock ward in a mobile tent hospital in the European Theatre, she married AAF Capt. Charles W. Dunn, Jr. back in England.  In August of that year, now with the Army of Occupation in Germany, she learned that she was pregnant.  She miscarried over the Atlantic after being ordered home on a military transport plane.

After the war she put her new husband through medical school by working first as an industrial nurse at a Chicago television factory and then as a public health nurse.  In the meantime, she also delivered three healthy children.  In 1953, while again pregnant, she began taking blood transfusions as treatment for anemia.  At a time when blood supplies were not yet screened for hepatitis, she was hospitalized for several weeks with a severe case of that disease.  This newest baby did not survive.  After 40 years of marriage, she survived her husband by an additional 18 years.