-An excerpt from Clara D. Noyes, R.N.: Life of a Global Nursing Leader (pp. 219-225)
On June 3, 1936, [Clara] Noyes was making her usual commute to Red Cross headquarters, this time with a companion, another niece, the young Lucy Noyes, daughter of her youngest brother, Charles Reginald Noyes. According to Clara Noyes’s nephew James Noyes, in a 2015 interview, James’s sister Lucy lived with their aunt Clara. His family was poor, and his aunt was very generous to her nieces and nephews, ensuring that the young Lucy had a good education in the Washington, DC schools, living with aunt Clara during this period at 1411 Twenty‐Ninth Street NW.
James, in his nineties at the time of the interview, had also been visiting aunt Clara in June of 1936, though only for a brief period to learn a little bit more about Washington, DC and tour the city where his aunt lived and worked. He recalls that aunt Clara had just purchased a brand‐new 1936 Chevy and, on June 3, was driving his sister Lucy to work so that Lucy could later take the vehicle and pick up her siblings to tour around Washington in aunt Clara’s car.
On the drive that June morning, just a block away from reaching Red Cross headquarters, Clara Noyes suddenly collapsed at the wheel. Her Red Cross labors, having turned her “gray hair a snowy white,” gave way to a sudden heart attack amid morning traffic; her niece, “Miss Lucy Lay Noyes, riding with her,” acted quickly during the tragic moment and “prevented a collision by pulling up the emergency break,” as her aunt lay slumped at the steering column. Lucy had jumped from the back seat to take hold of the brake. “A taxi happened to be passing, and the driver took the stricken woman to the Emergency Hospital, nearby. She had scarcely been laid on the bed in the hospital when she breathed her last.” She never recovered consciousness after “clasping her hand to her breast” at the wheel of her car.
At Emergency Hospital, on Tenth Street, near D Street NW, Clara Noyes was pronounced dead, not far from Fords Theater and a block from Peterson House where President Lincoln took his final breaths. Her brother, Charles Reginald Noyes (Lucy and James’s father), left Old Lyme at once upon the news, heading to Washington. Like her predecessor, Jane Delano, Clara Noyes died in the line of duty on the brink of her twentieth anniversary at the American Red Cross. Her death from cardiac arrest came as a surprise to Red Cross colleagues who recalled how “her mind” had been “clear and keen as ever, her spirit happy and buoyant, and seemingly she was in the prime of health and filled with energy and ambition.”
To the very end, Clara Noyes was engaged in her life’s work “driving her car to her duties in Washington.” And even her death, like much of her work in life, involved a crisis that would have been even bigger had it not been for the quick thinking of someone by her side, acting in the most urgent of moments, in this case her young niece Lucy. Clara Noyes had pressed 20,000 nurses into wartime disaster work; and, in her time of death, her quick‐thinking niece had similarly warded off disaster, preventing the hand of death from taking more than one life.
Echoing remarks about Jane Delano’s death, Clara Noyes’s friend, colleague and former superintendent at Johns Hopkins noted the parallels between Noyes’s duty and her demise quite elegantly in the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine: “It was in keeping with her whole life that she would have gone from us quietly, quickly, with her hand still at the wheel.”
The “marble palace,” national headquarters, went dark on the afternoon of June 5 in Noyes’s remembrance.
American Red Cross officials drafted a resolution stating that “The sudden death of Clara Dutton Noyes … took from the American Red Cross Nursing Service, and from the nursing profession throughout the world, one of the most commanding and influential personalities of her generation. It was, in large part, Miss Noyes’s genius for organization that gave the American Red Cross Nursing Service worldwide renown from the moment this country entered the Great War … Miss Noyes’s death brought personal loss to thousands of nurses who had been strengthened by her courageous loyalty to well‐established ideals of service.”