Marjorie A. Franklin

According to the July 15,1946 station hospital roster, Marjorie A. Franklin was a first lieutenant and had separated from the service. Janet Tarolli, a Michigan woman offered additional information about this nurse below:

Marjorie Alice Franklin was born in Iowa on August 29,1906, the third child of William and Beulah Franklin. Growing up she lived in the Chicago area and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Franklin was an honor student at Ann Arbor High School in a college prep curriculum. She graduated in 1923 two months before her seventeenth birthday. Too young to enter nursing school, she spent a year in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, then entered the University Hospital School of Nursing of the University of Michigan in 1924. After receiving her diploma with the class of 1927, she returned to Chicago, remaining there until at least 1935. In 1940 on leave for a year from the Tuskegee Institute, she pursued her interest in caring for young polio victims at the Hospital for Special Surgery (formerly, the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled) in New York City. According to an article by B. B. Walcott in the February 1940 issue of The Crisis, she was being groomed to become the head of physical therapy in the planned thirty-bed polio unit to be built at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital, Tuskegee Institute. The unit was completed on time and dedicated in January 1941. Franklin enlisted into the U.S. Army on May 1,1944 and served in the Army Nurse Corps at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, in Tuskegee, Alabama, achieving the rank of 1st Lieutenant. She was released from service on January 24,1946. Franklin died in San Francisco, California on October 23,1977 and is buried in Skylawn Memorial Park, San Mateo.

Thank you to Pia Winters Jordan, Project Director of the Tuskegee Airmen Nurses Project, for sharing with us the incredible legacy of nurses who served alongside the Airmen. We are honored to feature their history and stories. 

Be sure to visit Tuskegee Airmen Nurses Project for more information!