When disaster strikes, you might want to call Barbara Fruchtbaum Gardner ’62, because she’ll know what to do. She participates in crisis care training with emergency response teams and recently played the role of a teacher in an “active shooter” exercise with first responders and citizens of Watertown, Massachusetts – the city where police took down the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers. In the scenario, staged by the Cambridge region Medical Reserve Corps, the teacher’s adult son was on a shooting rampage.

“He held me hostage in the school library. He was holding a gun to my head – it was plastic but it looked very real – and I was saying, ‘You don’t have to do this!’ They wanted us to be spontaneous. I felt scared. You really just get right into it. They were trying to teach the police how to react to someone who is ready to explode,” she explained.

That’s volunteer work for Gardner, a career public health nurse in New Jersey for 25 years. From 1993-2008, as Director of Nursing for both the Madison Regional Health Department in Morris County and the Hanover Township Regional Health Department in Whippany, she trained and supervised community health nurses and provided immunizations, school health services and communicable disease prevention. She also developed and taught health education, including disaster preparedness and disease prevention, to municipal employees – police, fire, public works, town council members and mayors. Her experience in crisis containment compels her to share her expertise with others.

“I learned how to set up a shelter in place, where to put the pets, the mental health issues with all those people together in a gym,” she explained. “The world is changing and now this is becoming more common, this training is becoming more important.”

Her work is not all serious and grim, though – she likes to have fun.

“The cops and firemen couldn’t wait for a Barbara Gardner training,” said her daughter, Laurie Gardner. “She would make up games to teach about things like blood borne pathogens and give out beer and condoms for prizes! She has a way of making her personal relations and work fun with play.”

Barbara Gardner grew up in Nutley, New Jersey. In high school, she participated in the Future Nurses program. Her father was a physician, and he told her she could go to college if she became a nurse. She chose UVM “because it was one of the best programs, and not too far or too close to home.”

At UVM, she developed close friendships with her classmates. “We had a small nursing class, and most of us are still in touch with each other,” she said. She met her husband, Allan Gardner MD ’65, at his orientation as a first-year medical student. They married the year after her graduation. Her good friend, Joan Tomasi ’62, remembers the couple’s first date.

“He called for her at the dorm. Three of us girls were there waiting with her. As they were walking down the sidewalk we were all at the window watching, and he turned around and waved at us,” Tomasi recalled.

After graduating, Barbara Gardner worked as a pediatric nurse at UVM Medical Center while Allan attended medical school. She soon joined the Vermont Department of Health as a public health nurse, focusing on preventing infectious diseases. In 1965, the couple moved to California for Allan’s internship at UCLA Medical Center, and Barbara worked at Kaiser Permanente, setting up a home care program for a new hospital. It was here she witnessed her first, real public health crisis – the Watts riots.

“It was my first really scary thing. I pulled my car up to a home on Firestone Boulevard. It looked very nice, with all the little houses, but all the garbage cans were upside down. People were lined up like there was going to a parade. A guy said to me, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ I said ‘I have to give a lady a shot, I’m a nurse.’ He said ‘All the more reason to get out of here.’ So I turned around and left. That was 3:00 in the afternoon. At 5:00 that evening the riots started on Firestone Boulevard.”

During the Vietnam War, the couple lived on military bases in Georgia and Florida while Allan did medical research for the air force and Barbara worked for the Visiting Nurses Association. They eventually settled in Summit, New Jersey where they raised their three children.

While Allan established his neurosurgical practice, Barbara went to graduate school at Rutgers University, earning a M.S. in Community Health Nursing in 1976. For her master’s thesis, she developed a game called Heart-Ache, to educate people about heart disease risk and prevention.

“It was sort of like Twister. You picked cards and moved around. I wanted people to be physically active,” she explained. “The cards asked about risk factors, like, 'what are you having for dinner?’"

She carried her penchant for playfulness to her work in public health, making trainings and clinics entertaining with friendly competitions and prizes. She organized the first professional association for public health nurse administrators in New Jersey. In 2004 the New Jersey Public Health Nurse Administrators honored Gardner as the Public Health Nurse Administrator of the Year.

“Mom was superwoman,” said Laurie Gardner. “Raising three kids and running these clinics and making it fun with games. And she’s still fun!”

As a public health professional, though, she’s seen her share of crises. She recalled working in New Jersey during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “We were 40 miles west of the attack on the World Trade Center. They thought the less injured would take trains into New Jersey so we had to wait for them. We didn’t know if there would be more attacks. I kept walking by the window thinking I might see something in the distance, and imagining what I would do.”

Knowing how to protect groups of people continues to drive Gardner and keep her involved in nursing and the community. In 2008 she retired from the health department and moved to Massachusetts to be closer to her children and grandchildren. She quickly took a part-time job as an Occupational Health Nurse at Partners Health Care/McClean Hospital in Belmont, managing workplace health and wellbeing programs for hospital employees. In addition to volunteering for the Medical Reserve Corp in Cambridge, she has served on the CNHS Board of Advisors and the UVM alumni board for the Boston region.

On her visit to UVM in 2017 for her 55^th reunion, she was excited to see the Clinical Simulation Laboratory in Rowell Hall. The “Sim Lab” serves as a centralized hub in the training of students and health care professionals from College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Larner College of Medicine and The University of Vermont Medical Center.

“The sim lab is fabulous. I wish they had that when I was a student there,” Gardner said.

During the reunion, Gardner attended the White Coat Ceremony marking the commencement of first year undergraduate and direct-entry graduate students’ nursing careers. At the ceremony, Nursing Department Chair Rosemary Dale presented Gardner with an award -- the Janet T. Austin Nursing Alumnus Award -- for her longtime volunteer commitment to the UVM nursing program and the community. Gardner’s donations pay for UVM nursing students to attend annual National Student Nursing Association conferences.

The award surprised Gardner, as did seeing her daughter Laurie, son, Adam, daughter-in-law, Lauren Sullivan, and grandchildren at the event. In her acceptance speech, she remarked on the study and hard work that lay ahead for the class but also shared a few laughs from her 55-year career in public health.

Gardner wished the first year nursing students good luck and assured them, “It is so cool to be a nurse!”