Sister Alphonsus Talon, Nurse: When all else fails, Pray. Then get up and help others.
Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Houston

At 5:57 p.m. on March 10, 1933, Sister Alphonsus Talon heard a tremendous explosion and felt the building twist. A trained nurse at the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word Hospital in Long Beach, California, she was downstairs in the basement and realized she must be feeling a major earthquake. The stairs leading out of the basement crumbled, the lights went out, and the plaster on the ceiling started falling.

Thinking she was going to die, she dropped to her knees to pray, a handy position to be in as the ceiling with three stories above her was lowering. She realized then that she was still alive, and decided if she was not going to die right then that she had better get on with helping others.

She climbed out a window to see the hospital severely damaged and the patient floors sloping toward the front yard. The stairways had collapsed. The elevator was gone. There was no electricity.

She and the other Sisters dragged the 70 patients out of the hospital on mattresses using an incline from the third floor. They placed them on the front lawn before later moving them into two churches.

Over the years, she has worked in every nursing unit in the hospital, served as nursing supervisor of the surgery floors and began the hospital's patient representative program. Now retired, she says, "I am grateful to God for permitting me to serve the people of Long Beach at St. Mary's for 70 years."