Lora Wood Hughes (1873–1960)

Lora Wood Hughes was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and raised on the Kansas prairies and in California. In 1892, she married Emory Hughes of Ventura, California, with whom she had a daughter, and trained as a nurse.
The outbreak of the Spanish-American war in 1898, combined with the death of her child, took Mrs. Hughes to Honolulu, Hawaii, where she enlisted in the U.S. Army Nursing Corps. She spent two years nursing typhoid fever victims, and after her discharge from the Army worked in the remote prairies of Montana and western Canada. Later, she lived and worked in several cities in Washington state, including Seattle, Manchester, and Harper. After 50 years of nursing, she thought she would retire to a home in the Puget Sound area she loved, but she was summoned during World War II to be the supervisor of a Red Cross Unit Hospital. Mrs. Hughes wrote an autobiography, No Time for Tears, published to acclaim in 1946.