8 | theLAKER The family business Alicia McBride didn’t want to be a nurse. Her mom, Lisa McAnn, was a nurse. Her grandmother, Betty Jean McAnn, was a nurse – and a hard act to follow. Betty Jean co-founded the Canandaigua Airport with her husband, Wally, in the 1940s. The couple rented out and maintained aircraft for three decades. Both were pilots and taught their daughter-in-law, Lisa, to fly as well. Betty Jean also worked as a licensed practical nurse for most of her life, but as Lisa said, “She wanted to do more with her life. LPNs at that point in time didn’t have a lot of responsibilities, and she thought she could contribute more as an RN.” In 1969, at age 45, Betty Jean enrolled at FLCC. She graduated in 1973 and went to work as a registered nurse at the VA Hospital in Canandaigua. Along the way, she convinced Lisa to go back to school for nursing, too. Lisa graduated in 1993 and began working nights at Geneva General Hospital and providing care at migrant camps for apple pickers in Wayne County. Lisa joined the FLCC nursing faculty full-time in 2008. All this left an impression on Alicia. “I always thought that my mom and my grandma were very, very strong women who had the will to get to where they wanted to be,” she said. Still, Alicia thought nursing wasn’t for her. She earned an associate degree in liberal arts at FLCC in 2005 at age 20. A few years later, she was in the hospital to have a tumor removed from her spine. “The nurses always seemed to listen. The care they gave me was amazing. They really made a difference, so I wanted to make a difference,” Alicia said of her decision to return to FLCC in 2010 to study nursing. Lisa was among her instructors. Betty Jean knew of Alicia’s decision but passed away in 2011 before Alicia’s graduation. Lisa pinned the traditional nursing emblem on Alicia during the College’s Nursing Advancement Ceremony in 2014. Alicia is now the interim nurse manager for women’s outpatient health services at Rochester Regional Health. Her decision to stick with the family business – nursing, not airplanes – is not uncommon. “You talk to the students and you ask why they got into it,” Lisa began, “and they say, ‘My grandmother was a nurse,’ or ‘My mother’s a nurse.’” Now mother and daughter often talk shop, about the hard work and the challenges, just as Lisa did with Betty Jean decades earlier. “It’s nice to be able to come home and talk to somebody about it,” Lisa said. “It’s good to have that support.” from the cover “I always thought that my mom and my grandma were very, very strong women who had the will to get to where they wanted to be.” — Alicia McBride Lisa McAnn ’93 affixes the nursing pin on her daughter, Alicia McBride, in 2014. Alicia was the first FLCC graduate to receive the Future Leaders in Nursing Award from the American Nurses Association-NY. Betty Jean McAnn’s photo from her Civil Aeronautics Administration ID.
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