A: Aarons to Anderly

Aarons, [Miss]
Nurse Aarons is one of Cherry's Spencer classmates and fellow soldiers; when roll is called as Cherry's unit is shipping out (Army Nurse), she is the first of three nurses whose names precede Cherry's alphabetically.

Ackland, [Miss]
Nurse Ackland is one of Cherry's Spencer classmates and fellow soldiers; when roll is called as Cherry's unit is shipping out (Army Nurse), she is the second of three nurses whose names precede Cherry's alphabetically.

Albee, Merrill
Only thirty years old, Merrill Albee seems older--he is balding, tall, thin, and pale, and he resents his younger brother, Richard, whom he blames for his poor health, stemming from an incident when they were children. Cherry thinks he is a cold fish and an emotionally twisted man (At Hilton Hospital).

Albee, Richard (AKA Bob Smith)
Brought into Hilton Hospital's emergency room with a fractured leg, the young man who calls himself Bob Smith is gaunt, wind-burned, and frightened--he doesn't know who he is. Working with psychiatrist Harry Hope, Cherry helps him remember that he is really Richard Albee, and untangles his complex relationship with his older brother, Merrill (At Hilton Hospital).

Allen, [Miss]
Nurse Allen is one of Cherry's Spencer classmates and fellow soldiers; when roll is called as Cherry's unit is shipping out (Army Nurse), she is the third of three nurses whose names precede Cherry's alphabetically.

Ames, Charles
Charlie was born a few minutes before Cherry (for example, Student Nurse), and both he and Cherry attended Hilton High, where Charlie played on the football team ("Bermuda Adventure"). Fascinated by planes, Charlie attended the state college to study engineering while Cherry was in nursing school, but he dropped out to join the Army Air Force (Student Nurse; Senior Nurse), serving first as an aerial gunner, then with the Air Transport Command (Army Nurse, Chief Nurse). He later returned to school to earn his degree (Visiting Nurse), worked at an automotive plant and then an aviation engineering job in Indianapolis. After that, he took an aviation engineering job in Southern California. Charlie is "a tall athletic boy with ruffled light hair and alert blue eyes" (Student Nurse, p. 5); he and Cherry "looked like a negative and a print of the same picture: identical, lively faces, but Charlie blond and Cherry vividly dark" (Visiting Nurse, p. 3). Their dissimilar coloring actually creates a problem for Cherry in Dude Ranch Nurse, when her claim to be a twin is disbelieved.

When Cherry leaves for Spencer Nursing School, Charlie gives her a nurse's watch, which she treasures: "Charlie teased the daylights out of her twelve months a year but a brother was a pretty nice thing to have, after all" (Student Nurse, p. 16). Charlie is a minor, background character in most of the books, though he is featured prominently in Chief Nurse, in which he and Cherry find evidence of a new weapon. Charlie gets along well with Cherry's Spencer Club friends, especially demure Mai Lee, whom he briefly squires in Private Duty Nurse. He provides important information that helps Cherry solve the mystery in Clinic Nurse.

Ames, Cora
Aunt Cora Ames, the widow of Jim Ames, is actually Cherry's older cousin by marriage. Cherry lives in her home while working as a public health nurse in Sauk, Iowa. Before Jim died, he and Cora had traveled extensively, to such places as Bombay, Paris, and Copenhagen. As a widow, Cora stays close to home, "enjoying her comfortable house and garden and her books and her many community activities" (Rural Nurse, p. 11).

Ames, Edith Anderly
Cherry's mother, Edith, whose maiden name was Anderly (Private Duty Nurse), is a dedicated gardener and an occasional hospital volunteer. She is "a youthful, sweet-faced woman, with the most understanding eyes in the world" (Student Nurse, p. 8); "pretty" and "dark-haired," with "tender, dark eyes" (Veterans' Nurse, pp. 7, 8). She has a sense of humor about everything except her gardening (Senior Nurse), and is especially fond of her dahlias, which win Hilton's Garden Club ribbon every year. She tells Cherry: "Nurse, my dahlias are to me what your patients are to you!" (Visiting Nurse, p. 3). Her birthday is probably in late September (Boarding School Nurse).

Ames, Jim
Uncle Jim Ames, Cherry's older cousin who was married to Cora, is deceased (Rural Nurse).

Ames, Will
Cherry's father, Will, sells real estate, but during the war, he spends a lot of his time selling war bonds instead (Senior Nurse). He is "a tall, good-humored looking man, with the blue eyes and fair hair which Charlie ... had inherited" (Army Nurse, p. 5). His taste in decorating is not the best; he wants to paper the living room in red (Chief Nurse), and he once bought a "stuffed owl that molted" because he wanted to help the Boys' Taxidermy Club get started (Island Nurse, p. 37).

Ames, unnamed family members
Cherry has a grandmother--apparently her father's mother--who becomes extremely talkative when fish is served, and invariably chokes on a fishbone, though it hasn't killed her yet (Book of First Aid and Home Nursing). Cherry's family considers having Thanksgiving dinner at "Grandma's" (Boarding School Nurse).

One set of Cherry's grandparents have a farm where Charlie, at age ten, got stuck in a tree (Book of First Aid and Home Nursing).

Cherry apparently had a great-aunt who left her a legacy that she considers investing (Staff Nurse).

Anderly, Charity
Charity Anderly, Edith's mother, is the grandmother for whom Cherry is named. She has been deceased ten years when a shady fortuneteller pretends to deliver a message from her at a seance that Cherry attends as a lark (Private Duty Nurse).

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