1938 Alumna Steps Up for Nursing Scholarships

Twirling around the dance floor with a man half her age, Annie Beery Bieber, N'38, is a step ahead of most 91-year-olds. Her feet keep time to the Latin rhythms of the tango, mambo, cha-cha, and merengue.

Bieber's smile is wistful as the music recalls another time, when she and her late husband Gustave Francis Bieber, MD'43, used to dress to the nines and go dancing to the big band sounds of Tito Puente and other Latin greats.

Now the arms around Bieber's slender waist are those of her dance instructor and dear friend Tim Saunders. Once a week he brings a boom box to the Greensboro retirement community where Bieber lives, and they spend an hour ballroom dancing. Bieber says it's the highlight of her week, and the exercise helps keep her mind, body, and spirit in shape.

Much has changed-in dancing and nursing-since Bieber took her first steps at Duke toward a life that would take her all over the world. Both her career in nursing and her marriage had their start at Duke, and that's where Bieber has decided to leave a bit of her legacy. She recently gave $100,000 to establish the Annie Beery and Gustave Francis Bieber Scholarship Fund in the School of Nursing. Her gift will be matched by the Duke Financial Aid Initiative for a total of $200,000.

“I think all of us, as alumni, feel a connection to today's students, and it's wonderful when alumni are able to give back to support scholarships,” said Dean Catherine Gilliss, BSN'71, DNSc, RN, FAAN. “While Duke is preparing nurses today for a world of health care that is very different from the environment in which Annie—and even my generation practiced—the quality of a Duke nursing education remains among the very best.”

Bieber had 35 classmates when she began classes at the School of Nursing, and only 18 of them graduated. She says that her class was instrumental in starting the Duke Student Government Association, partly a reaction to the strict curfews on nursing students, who were the only women on West Campus at the time.

After graduation she had the honor of being chosen as assistant to Miss Dill, the nursing arts instructor. In later years she worked in Duke Hospital Emergency Room in the mornings and spent afternoons working in the Nose and Throat Clinic. During her last year and a half at Duke she was a supervisor in the nursing office.

She remembers many legendary figures of Duke Medicine's early days, including deans of nursing Bessie Baker and Margaret Pinkerton, the first nursing faculty member Ann Henshaw Gardiner, and original Duke medical faculty members Robert “Daddy” Ross, F. Bayard “Nick” Carter, Darryl “Sterile Darryl” Hart, and Fred Hanes.

Gustave Bieber was a third-year medical student when Bieber married him in 1941. After he graduated, they moved to the University of Chicago Clinics for his internship and residency. After Gustave completed two years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, the couple moved to Honolulu , Hawaii , for his internship and residency in obstetrics and gynecology. They spent a number of years caring for workers on Hawaii's sugar plantations. Later, they settled in New Orleans , La. , where he worked at Charity Hospital and they began raising two sons, Kenneth, E'70, and Pete “Steve.” They finally settled in Fort Myers , Fla. , but traveled all over the world for medical conferences. Bieber collected necklaces from many of the places she visited, and these have become part of her trademark style.

After Gustave died in 1988, Bieber moved to Greensboro, N.C., in 1999, where her son Pete and his family live. When some bonds she had purchased years earlier matured, she decided to use the money to endow a scholarship at the School of Nursing. “It just seemed like a nice thing to do,” she says.