Cynthia Broze received a Master of Science Degree at California State University, Long Beach, and her Nurse Practitioner training from the Women’s Healthcare Nurse Practitioner Program at Harbor-UCLA. She began writing professionally after completing the Master Class in Novel Writing program at UCLA with the late great Les Plesko.
Broze joined the Peace Corps in 1980 living in Sablayan, Occidental Mindoro (the Philippines) for two years and worked in community health and leprosy education. The town had no library so she organized one with 10,000 donated books she obtained from libraries and schools around the world.
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Nurses of Los Angeles book presentation to Azusa Pacific University DNP students, February 23, 2025
Book Presentation in Bucyrus, Ohio. September 18, 2024
Article in the Bucyrus Telegram-Forum by Oksana Kotkina
May 28, 2024
“Lauretta Schimmoler wouldn’t be stopped,” Broze opens her 372-page narrative. “Airplanes fired her blood, and it didn’t cool.” Despite her passion for it, Schimmoler did not begin to fly until she was 28 when she took her first plane ride on a Waco 10 biplane owned by a Crestline Barnstormer. Afterward, flying became her life.
Broze’s book includes chapters on Schimmoler’s early years and the founding of Fort Bucyrus Airport, Aerial Nurse Corps of America (ANCOA), the changes brought to ANCOA by World War II, Leora Stroup’s biography, a chapter on nurse-pilots and flight nurses and more.
Stroup believed in the aerial nursing cause along with Schimmoler and began a group in Detroit. The two women, both from Ohio, met as members of the Ninety-Nines, a woman’s pilot group formed in 1928 with Amelia Earhart as their president.
For her research, Broze visited Bucyrus where, Schimmoler’s archive is kept, as well as Texas where Stroup’s – the second character of the book, archive is kept, and Kansas, where Stroup built a nursing program in Fort Hays State University. Broze said she included Stroup in her research because she was both a nurse and a pilot, and took Schimmoler’s place as ANCOA president to appease the resistance from various nursing organizations on getting orders from a pilot, and not a nurse…
The University Archives and Special Collections thanks nurse-author Cynthia Broze for her personal quest to document the first BSN. It can be found in Chapter 8 of her book “Nurses of Los Angeles: Uncapping the Mystery” (Los Angeles: Semper Publishing, 2010).
The story behind the race to start California’s first nursing baccalaureate degree, By Victoria McCargar, University archivist, 09/11/2019 The Claim to BSN Fame
Working Nurse honored Cynthia Broze as a nurse who broke ground in her field.
Although she has been writing for years, the idea of a book was not foremost in Cynthia Broze’s mind. Rather, she had a question that no one seemed able to answer: “What was the first nursing school in Los Angeles?” Several schools or affiliated hospitals claimed the honor, but could anyone prove it? Visit Working Nurse magazine to read the full interview.
Cynthia Broze 