Sarah (Olson) Rickman (1888-1931)

OLSON, RICKMAN, LANDE

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 7/5/2024 at 23:19:41

From Story City Herald November 26, 1931 (page 2)

FORMER WAR NURSE OF ELLSWORTH DIED IN CALIF. THURSDAY

Mrs. John Rickman Succumbs to Illness in California Hospital

Mrs. John Rickman, nee Sarah Olson, now of Clinton, Mo., and formerly of Ellsworth, died last Thursday evening [November 19, 1931] at the United States Veterans hospital at Livermore, Calif., according to word received by her sister, Mrs. Otto Lande, of Ellsworth.

Mrs. Rickman is very widely known as Sarah Olson, a former World war nurse. It was due to this exhaustive work that she contracted tuberculosis from which she died.

Enlisted in 1917

She took her nurse's training at the Iowa Methodist hospital in Des Moines in 1917 and immediately enlisted in the army where she with eight other nurses opened the hospital at Camp Dodge to care for the hundreds with flu.

Here she remained for nine months when she was transferred overseas with a Boston unit and served in Blue hospital No. 55. From there she was assigned to a evacuation hospital and an operating team on the front lines. She cared for a wounded American officer in Strassburg, Alsace Lorraine, for a month and was one of the only two American girls in the town.

Mrs. Rickman was also the only Red Cross nurse at that time in Hamilton county. While still in Europe she was allowed to visit her brother, George Olson, who was in the front lines that had advanced into Germany.

Married in 1922

She was married in Oklahoma in 1922 to John Rickman. She is survived by her husband, her daughter, Margaret, also by her father and stepmother, Mr. and Mrs. Jorgen Olson, her sister, Mrs. Otto Lande, and three brothers, George Olson, S. B. Olson and Ole Olson, the latter two of Randall, Minn.

The funeral was held in Clinton, Mo. Mrs. Lande and George Olson attended.