Aggieland’s Most Beloved Campus Nurse, Rediscovered

Carefully flipping through Irene Claghorn’s scrapbooks in Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, it’s easy to see how loved she was. The yellowed pages are filled with photos of her favorite Aggies, campus gala invitations and dozens of Mother’s Day cards. However, none were from her own children. In fact, though relatively unknown today, this popular campus nurse was once called “Mom” by thousands of Aggies.

A captain in the World War I Army Nurse Corps, Claghorn began her nearly four-decade tenure as the Texas A&M Campus Hospital assistant superintendent and later superintendent in 1918 at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic. The night she arrived, all four of her patients were dying of pneumonia. Soon after, a disheartened but determined Claghorn met college president Dr. William Bizzell, who asked her to stay to run the hospital for at least a year. “After a year,” Claghorn said later, “they couldn’t run me off.”

Claghorn led the hospital through the pandemic alongside nurses and students, some of whom dropped out of school to help with the surge in patients. At one point, she was treating 300 patients in a building with only eight beds.
 

The best display of Claghorn’s motherly nature might be her relationship with athletes while D.X. Bible was head coach. “D.X. called me one day to say one of his football players had quit the team and was probably on his way over to see me,” she wrote. “Sure enough, the boy walked in a minute later. I gave him a good talking to, and he rejoined the team. And he did become a good player.”

But nothing demonstrates the Aggies’ love for Mom as much as the events of March 1956, when Claghorn was in a car accident near Dallas, leaving her with severe chest, lung, head and heart injuries. Word of the incident spread quickly, and within days, the halls of Baylor Hospital were overflowing with Aggies while letters and telegrams poured in from former students across the world. Though initially given little hope for recovery, Mom’s Aggie family assured her doctor that she “had been around the Aggie Spirit for so many years. She has enough fight in her.”

Throughout her career, Mom lived in the campus hospital’s apartment, but following her injury, three Aggies—Dr. Jack Blankfield ’42, Harry Blankfield ’44 and Jack Forman ’42—fundraised and purchased a house for her to repay her love and kindness toward students. The home was intentionally close to campus so her Aggies could visit.

After her recovery, Claghorn retired from the university and lived in the house until her passing in 1974. Though she never had any of her own, the thousands of Aggies who set foot on campus became her children and forever knew her as “Mom.”