By by Lydia Grimes – features reporter
Lynn Dantzler and Jill Dantzler Brown have more than one reason to celebrate this Mother's Day. Not only is it a day set aside to honor mothers, it also falls within Nurse's Week. It just so happens that Lynn and Jill are both mothers and nurses, and they are also mother and daughter.
They entered the nursing profession for different reasons, but it is clear they are both happy with the decisions they made.
Lynn Dantzler was born and raised in East Brewton. She attended the county school system and graduated from W.S. Neal in 1971. She said she always had good grades but her mind was set on being a wife and mother. She married Warren Dantzler in 1970, before she finished high school, and set about to live the life she had dreamed.
There were four of those children, Mark, Rebecca, Jill and Jeremy, and her life was very busy. A few years later, she would be called upon to care for her parents and later when her mother was in and out of the hospital several times.
Without her children even knowing what she was doing, she traveled to Reid State Technical College in Evergreen and took an entrance exam. She said she was so afraid she wouldn't pass, she just didn't tell anyone but her husband. She did pass and entered Reid State, where she received her LPN license in 1995.
Dantzler's daughter, Jill, watched her mother as she went back to school and was very impressed. In fact, so impressed, that she decided she also wanted to become a nurse. She graduated as the salutatorian from W.S. Neal in the spring of 1999 and began her schooling at Jefferson Davis Community College in the fall.
In the meantime, her mother had begun to take some prerequisites at JDCC while she was working as a LPN at D.W. McMillan Memorial Hospital.
During this time, both mother and daughter were attending nursing school but as Dantzler had to schedule around her work, Jill soon caught up. They said they never had a class together, but they were able to help each other with homework.
Jill was able to finish school a year ahead of her mother as she went straight through and her mother continued to work at the hospital.
Lynn Dantzler and her husband of 37 years, Warren, live in the North Pine section of Brewton and have for some years. But all of their children attended W.S. Neal because that is where they started and they wanted to follow in their parents' footsteps. Jill was smart in school and was the salutatorian for her class in 1999. She played the flute and piccolo in the high school band.
She is the mother of a son, Ryan, who is four years old. She has chosen to work at WestGate Village after working at the hospital for a year.
Her mother agrees and said she would like to pursue her master's degree at some point.