Mary Jane McWilliams, often known as MJ, spent most of her nursing career caring for patients in Mount Vernon. On Friday, March 13, after about 50 years of being a nurse, McWilliams retired.
According to McWilliams, she “grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa near Emmetsburg, and from the time that [she] was in middle school, [she] wanted to be a nurse.” She spent nearly all her time with her best friend at the Coffey house, in which Mr. Coffey, McWilliams’ best friend’s father, was her family doctor at the time.
As soon as she turned 16 years old, McWilliams decided to take a nurse aid course over the summer at the local hospital, “and oh my, it was an eye opener,” McWilliams said. She learned valuable things from “some wonderful people in that little hospital — nurses that were just the best.”
McWilliams shared that, at the time, the University of Iowa was just about the only place to go for a nursing degree, so she had always thought that she had to go there. However, she learned that Mr. Coffey had taken some short courses at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago. There was a three-year nursing program that Mr. Coffey encouraged McWilliams to attend. “I thought Mr. Coffey knew everything, so that’s where I went,” McWilliams said.
While she went through the nursing program at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, her parents were unsettled by the idea. Being the youngest of four children, she was the last to pursue higher education, and her siblings had all gone to “nice, safe places like Iowa, Iowa State, and Creighton,” McWilliams said, whereas she was heading to a big city.
“I went anyway, and it was just fabulous. I learned a lot there,” McWilliams said. Not only did she learn from the program, but she found that the older students had a lot to share as well. When she attended the program about 50 years ago, it was uncommon to have older, married students be in college, but fortunately for McWilliams, they were there and they were willing to share their knowledge and expertise with her.
Being a small-town Iowa girl in a big city, McWilliams quickly found that people were just as fascinated with her way of life as she was theirs. While she was in the city, she got set up on a blind date when she only had a year left of her schooling, which was the moment that McWilliams met her husband, John McWilliams, for the first time.
“We stayed in Chicagoland for two years after that, but then, at that point in time, we decided to move out of the big city, because we thought, if there were ever kids, we didn’t want to raise them in a big city,” McWilliams said. Thus, the McWilliams family moved to Mount Vernon, a halfway point between her hometown near Emmetsburg, and his hometown of Joliet, Ill.
According to McWilliams, she and her husband “simply picked Mount Vernon because [they] liked how it looked.” Despite choosing Mount Vernon simply for its appearance, she and her husband settled in, and she began working at the Cedar Rapids Hospital.
After moving to Mount Vernon, the McWilliams family welcomed two baby girls 16 months apart from one another, Maggie and Betsy. When Betsy, the younger daughter of the two, was just six weeks old, McWilliams took a job working at a local doctor’s office for Dr. Kim Brandt. Dr. Brandt was young—only a year older than McWilliams—and new to family practice, and McWilliams was new to being an office nurse, so they both learned a lot from one another.
For 25 years, McWilliams worked for Dr. Brandt. That is, until Dr. Brandt and his wife decided to move to the West Coast, at which point McWilliams pursued other things for short periods of time, such as long-term care and home health nursing. It wasn’t until 2004, when she “stumbled into the free clinic in Cedar Rapids as a volunteer,” according to McWilliams, that she found her new home-base for her nursing.
It wasn’t long before the CEO of Community Health Free Clinic in Cedar Rapids, Darlene Schmidt, approached McWilliams and asked her to be a full-time staff member, rather than the volunteer that she had begun as. By that point, her children were out of the house, so she took on the job.
At the clinic, anyone can get the health care that they need. Oftentimes, patients from other countries will come in, scared to ask for help, but for McWilliams, it is important that the people who walk in the doors know that the people there won’t judge, and don’t care what their story is. Their goal is simply to provide patients with whatever care they need.
There is no government funding for the clinic, so it runs on donations and grants. Oftentimes, the patients do not have insurance, as they cannot afford healthcare alone; thus, they are attending the free clinic. Without having to get things approved through insurance—a result of not being government funded—the clinic can perform any tests that they want to get patients taken care of.
“It’s just a great place to work,” McWilliams said, before she went on to say, “it’s lots and lots of different ethnic groups that come there, and they all sit together in the waiting room, and they all get along, and I think that’s a great lesson for lots of people to see: ‘Hey, we can all sit together, and we all get along. We don’t have to fight.”
Initially, McWilliams had planned to retire in the summertime, but while cleaning out her wallet recently, she found out that it expired on March 15, 2026. Once she found this out, she reached out to Schmidt to let her know that her retirement would have to come much sooner: March 13, 2026.
Looking back, McWilliams is grateful for the life and career that nursing allowed her to have. Fortunately, she was able to work part-time or full-time as needed when her family life demanded more or less of her. Not only that, but she was able to build community within Mount Vernon through the patients that she treated daily while working for Dr. Brandt.
“I loved it when I worked here in town all those years, because we took care of generations of the same family. We were taking care of grandma, and sometimes great grandma, and throughout the years, I’ve gotten to know people at the office,” McWilliams shared. Over time, she has attended “hundreds of funerals and visitations,” because she grew to care about her patients deeply—to her, they were more than patients; they were people.
Today, McWilliams is living a happily retired life in Mount Vernon. Her children, now married with children of their own, live in Marion and Lisbon, and McWilliams values her time with them and their families. In fact, for the last couple of years, she has taken a couple of her grandchildren to school each morning, and in retirement, she has no plan for that to change, as she said, “I will continue to take those girls to school every day. That’ll be nice. It’s nice to have that ongoing connection.”
In the end, MJ McWilliams is “just very very grateful for the career [she’s] had. Just very grateful. It’s been a great run, and [she] just made some wonderful friends.”