Oral History Interview with Dorthy Hannemann, June 16, 2014 Page: 19

                                
ounce with the medicine dropper. And luckily, as much as I
know of, I don't think we had any deaths. I think they all
survived.
EM: Well now, your granddaughter told me of a story that she
recounts from things you've told her, so I'll ask you about
it. She said that there, especially when there was a scare
or a possible attack, or an air drill or something, that a
lot of the women went into premature labor, had their
babies, and they would come, a lot of preemies real
quickly, and you didn't have enough incubators, so you put
them in shoeboxes, and you opened the ovens to let the
extra heat into the room. Is that a fabrication or is that
true?
DH: Some of it is true, and some of it is not. Putting them in
shoeboxes, that was when they were born premature in their
home.
EM: So there was some of that going on.
DH: Some of that going on. Of course, most everybody had a
wood stove, didn't have electric stoves at that time. They

would fire up the wood stove, open up the door, and put
that shoebox on that lid of the open oven. We didn't have
any of that. We had premature babies, but at that point we
had the equipment, we had the incubators.
EM: Things have changed, haven't they?

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