After 50 years at SU, a new name:  Eleanor Wade Custer School of Nursing

WINCHESTER — Shenandoah University officials announced Friday that the college’s Division of Nursing has been renamed the Eleanor Wade Custer School of Nursing.

The announcement was made during an evening event in SU’s Brandt Student Center to celebrate the division’s 50th anniversary.

“We perceive there is going to be a health personnel crisis, and we have a duty to respond to that,” said Bryon Grigsby, SU’s senior vice president and vice president for academic affairs, in an interview Friday afternoon.

“They can stand on their own,” he said of the nursing division. “Their size is large enough. They’re the third-largest program in the university. Now they can chart their own course and lead in their own direction.”

The School of Nursing will have about 450 graduate and undergraduate students.

SU has five other schools: Shenandoah Conservatory; the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy; the Harry F. Byrd Jr. School of Business; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the School of Health Professions.

The School of Nursing, previously a division in the School of Health Professions, will be on SU’s main campus.

Kathy Ganske, director of the Division of Nursing, has been named dean of the new school.

The school’s namesake, Eleanor Wade Custer, was a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in 1930 and the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing in Cleveland in 1934.

During World War II, she led Army and Navy nurse recruitment for the armed services. From 1945 to 1948, she was the administrator of the Rainbow Children’s Hospital in Cleveland.

Custer and her brother, Winchester surgeon and SU trustee Monford Custer, brought visibility and recognition to SU’s nursing program at the time the John Kerr Building was renovated in 1983.

Throughout the next two decades, Custer provided advice and financial support, including the establishment of the Eleanor Wade Custer Nursing Endowment and the Eleanor Wade Custer Lecture Series in Nursing.

She died in 1997.

— Contact Rebecca Layne at rlayne@winchesterstar.com