Joanne Dodd said she knew exactly what she wanted to be by the time she turned four years old.
“I told my mother I was going to be a nurse when I grew up and that was the only thing I ever considered. That was my life commitment, I guess,” she said.
Watch Joanne discuss her nursing life in the video below:
And that’s exactly what it turned out to be. Joanne would spend the next six decades working in the medical field. She started working for Billings Deaconess Hospital—now Billings Clinic—after graduating from nursing school in the early 1950s.
“I remember giving penicillin shots for the first time in 1952—and it was quite new,” she recalled.
It was hard work, and nurses didn’t have much say or status.
“We had to obey the doctors. Whatever he said was law. We had to stand when they came into the room and if we were in an elevator we had to move to the back. All of that did not sit right with me from the very beginning. I just didn’t think that was the right way to be treated,” she said.
That’s something she would help change. She worked her way up from RN to nursing director to eventually becoming an executive. She also served with the National League of Nurses, promoting education and training for nurses.
“And that is really where I learned all about assertiveness and standing up for my rights and other peoples’ rights, and it was a new awakening for me. I trained a lot of nurses around Montana,” she said. “And today they are equals with physicians—and that’s wonderful—they should have been all along.”
Joanne would later turn her focus to the Billings Clinic Classic and spent two decades helping the foundation grow and raise millions of dollars over the years.
“She has that long connection to both the nursing profession and leadership, administration, and community. I think at the core she really cares about this community. And her dedication goes beyond her work in spades,” says Jim Duncan, longtime Billings Clinic Foundation director.
“They really did break the mold when they created Joanne,” he said.
At the age of 91, Joanne still plays golf and bowls regularly and still finds time to volunteer in the hospital’s endoscopy department while also serving on a couple boards—fulfilling that life commitment that started at such a young age.
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