Helen Rose Patten Rainer, 92, of Tifton died peacefully of old age on Friday, June 7, 2013, at Magnolia Manor Nursing Home in Moultrie. Funeral services will be held at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 9, 2013, in the Chapel of Bowen-Donaldson Home for Funerals. Rev. Stephen Webb will officiate with a private burial to be held in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The family will receive friends on Sunday, June 9, 2013, from 2:00 p.m. until the hour of the service and immediately following the service at Bowen-Donaldson Home for Funerals.
Mrs. Rainer was born on December 9, 1920 in Tifton and was the daughter of the late Marcus S. Patten, Sr. and Mittie Walker Patten. A lifelong Tifton resident, she was also predeceased by her husband, Joel Price “Buddy” Rainer and seven siblings. Mrs. Rainer was primarily identified as a nurse. When she graduated high school in 1936, she became the assistant to local physician, Dr. R. E. Jones. As she remembered at the end of her life, “I helped him deliver all the babies in the county.”
Following a year of college at Valdosta State University in 1938, she returned to Tifton to assist Dr. Ella Andrews, after Dr. Jones left for World War II. Dr. Andrews was instrumental in recruiting Helen into the Cadet Nurse Corps, a federal grant program established by the Bolton Bill of 1943 to train nurses for military and civilian service.
Mrs. Rainer attended and graduated from Emory University from 1943 to 1946. Following a brief period of service until the end of the war at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, she returned to Tifton to work with Dr. Jones until the birth of her first child in 1950. She later returned to full-time work in 1970 as an instructor for the Licensed Professional Nurse Program at Moultrie Area Technical School in Tifton, where she taught and trained nurses until her retirement in 1990. She would claim her license as a Registered Nurse through the end of her life. She last renewed this license at the age of 91, telling her caregivers “Saint Peter may need a nurse. At the very least, I can start a Bloodmobile.”
Mrs. Rainer is survived by three adult children and their spouses, Dr. Joel and Betsy Rainer of Florence, Alabama, Dr. Jackson P. and Karen Rainer of Tifton and Louise “Kiki” and Tim Thompson of Leesburg, Virginia; six grandchildren; and her long-time caregiver, Sue Minter.
Memorial gifts may be made in Mrs. Rainer’s memory to the Arthritis Foundation, P. O. Box 96280, Washington, D.C. 20077.