Resident Story: Marlene Mackey’s Lifetime of Nursing and Adventure

By Cypress Cove Resident Donna Miceli

Marlene Mackey always knew she wanted to go to college. At one time, she thought she might want to be a reporter—like the woman she admired who wrote for the local paper. “It was unusual to have a woman reporting the news back then,” she recalled. However, when the time came to make that decision, her family didn’t have the money for college, so she went to nursing school. “My tuition would be covered if I promised to work at the hospital for two years after I received my diploma,” Marlene explained. “So that’s what I did.” That decision was the first step in what became a remarkable career in nursing that included life-changing experiences she could never have imagined.

Marlene was born and raised in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, a small village on Lake Erie, 30 miles east of Cleveland. “I could walk to the beach in the summer, and our home was within walking distance between the grammar school and the high school,” she commented. “Everyone knew everyone, so the kids had to behave because everyone always knew what they were up to.”

After graduating from high school, in 1957, Marlene headed to the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital School of Nursing, where she earned her nursing diploma in 1960. While still living in the nurses’ dorm and working at the hospital, she started taking some science courses at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve). She earned her BS in Nursing in 1964 and started working full time at the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, specializing in labor and delivery.

While working at the hospital, Marlene began dating a young man from Iran, who was related to one of the doctors she worked with. They eventually married and she moved to Teheran with him. “His parents were very nice,” she recalled, “and his sister was a nurse.” According to Marlene, the U.S. Air Force had a small base there and there was a 20-bed American hospital. She would work at the hospital when a baby was admitted, and they needed extra help. She also spent some time teaching English at the Iran/American Society. “I dabbled a little bit in nursing in Iran, but because of the language difference it was too difficult.”

After two years in Teheran, Marlene’s husband, who worked for Iranian Airlines, was transferred to Frankfort, Germany. As luck would have it, the U.S. had a base there and she was able to get a job at the 97th U.S. Army Hospital as a civilian labor and delivery postpartum nurse. “When I was there, they were designing a neonatal intensive care unit for babies born anywhere in Europe and Northern Africa,” Marlene remembered. She and her husband eventually divorced, and after living in Germany for four years, she returned to the U.S. and enrolled in the master’s degree program at the University of Pittsburgh.

With her master’s in maternity nursing in hand, Marlene got a job teaching at the University of Michigan. “As soon as I got there, I started looking for a doctoral program,” she said. “After two years, I moved to the Chicago suburbs and began working towards a PhD in Nursing Sciences at the University of Illinois.” The focus of her studies was on premature labor, and she chose that as the subject for her dissertation. “I was interested in studying women who were hospitalized for premature labor,” she explained. “After they were discharged, some of them stayed home until they reached full term, and others returned to the hospital and delivered early. I suspected one factor was the kind of support they had when they went home.”

While working on her PhD, Marlene served as editor of the College of Nursing newsletter, an instructor in research and statistics, and a research assistant in family and women’s health research. After receiving her degree, in 1984, she accepted a teaching position at the University of South Carolina College of Nursing, where she taught until she retired in 2006.

One of the highlights of her teaching career was the opportunity to participate in an exchange program with Shanxi University in Taiyuan, China, to study childbirth in Chinese hospitals. “I heard that the university was offering that opportunity, so I applied for it and was selected,” Marlene remembered. “I was there for three or four months observing their nursing processes, interviewing patients, and arranging for lecturers to talk about labor. They provided me with an interpreter and gave me a bicycle, which I used for sightseeing on weekends. I got to see sights that most tourists never get to see.”

Another memorable experience from her teaching career was her involvement in an organization called “The Partners of the Americas,” inspired by President Kennedy. As Marlene explained, “The state of South Carolina was a partner with one section of Colombia, South America. I went to there as part of an exchange program. During that time, I did some studying about pregnancy. We were trying to promote the family working together, which wasn’t typical of some of these other countries.”

The variety of subjects Marlene taught over the course of her career is too extensive to list here, but some of the topics included “Healthful Reproduction,” “Research Methods in Nursing,” “Family Nursing Practice in the Maternity Cycle,” “The Human Life Cycle in Different Cultures, “Issues in the Health Care of Women,” and “Socio-Cultural Variations in Health and Illness.” It is not an overstatement to say that Marlene taught hundreds of future nurses over the span of her career.

Her list of honors and awards is also extensive. It includes:

• Official commendation from the U.S. Department of the Army for Outstanding Performance as a Clinical Nurse
• Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award from the USC College of Nursing
• Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing
• Outstanding Graduate of Fairport Harbor High School
• numerous awards for her research

Although Marlene never became the reporter she thought she might like to be when she was in high school, she did a voluminous amount of writing during her career, including book chapters, abstracts, journal articles and conference presentations. She also served on numerous review panels and was actively involved in many public service projects.

In addition to having lived in Iran and Germany during her marriage and participating in exchange programs in China and South America, Marlene did a lot of traveling over the years. Overall, she has visited 40 countries, including Russia, Finland, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand, Morocco and many more.
After she retired, Marlene turned her attention to learning about her ancestry. “Both sides of my family—Mackey and Wanska (her mother’s maiden name)—are from Finland,” she commented. “One of my aunts kept in touch with relatives in Finland. I have a cousin I still keep in touch with, but I am dealing with compression fractures of my spine, which makes it difficult to travel.”

In honor of the scholarships and other opportunities she was given to help achieve her remarkable career, Marlene, along with her sister Alberta and brother Gregory, established “The Mackey-Wanska Finnish Family Women’s Health Fellowship” at the University of South Carolina. “Although I graduated from the University of Illinois, I thought all of South Carolina was a bit behind in supporting education,” Marlene commented. “I’ve also been donating to the other colleges I graduated from.”

Marlene first visited Cypress Cove in 2018 while she was in Bradenton visiting her sister and brother-in-law, Alberta and Peter Valentini, who were considering moving to Cypress Cove. By the time Marlene returned to Bradenton for the holidays in 2019, the Valentinis were in the process of making plans to move into the Villas. They learned there was a one-bedroom apartment available in independent living (now The Harbour) and convinced Marlene that it was time for her to leave South Carolina and move closer to her family.

“I stayed with my niece for the holidays and never went back home to South Carolina,” she recalled. “My nieces took care of selling my home there, packed up the things they thought I’d want to keep and had them shipped here.”

Marlene became an official resident of Cypress Cove luxury life plan community in May 2020, just three months after her sister and brother-in-law moved to the Villas.

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