New Endowment Honors U.S. Army Nurse

Diana and Dick Glanville recently endowed the Dorothy L. Davis Memorial Scholarship in Nursing with a gift of $150,000 in honor of their aunt Dorothy Lovenia Davis. The Dorothy L. Davis Memorial Scholarship Endowment Fund will annually award two $3,000 scholarships to undergraduate nursing students who have a demonstrated financial need.

Dorothy Lovenia Davis was born and raised in Candler, a small mountain town near Asheville, N.C. She was the second youngest of 11 siblings. Upon graduation from high school, she moved alone to Atlanta to attend nursing school at Grady Hospital, where she graduated in 1943.

Dorothy was immediately commissioned into the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as World War II was raging in Europe and the Pacific. After Army basic training, she was posted to Shanghai and spent the next two years in China, Burma and India applying her nursing skills under very difficult conditions. Dorothy had to fight the impact of these experiences throughout much of her later life, like many others of that era.

After the war, Dorothy disembarked in the U.S. at San Francisco and chose to establish a new life on the West Coast. She spent her working life as a practicing clinical nurse, mostly at the former Letterman Hospital in the Presidio. She remained in the U.S. Army Reserve for over 40 years and obtained the rank of Colonel. Always interested in bettering herself, Dorothy took classes at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) and received a B.A. in Education in 1961.