Tag Archives: 1940s

Deciding to Enlist

Jean Byrd was working as the war broke out. But she wanted to join the military service. Initially, only the Army was accepting African American women, and only into segregated units in the Women’s Army Corps. That didn’t interest Jean.

A lot of the women were going into the Army. I said, I want to be different, I want to be something nice.

One day in late 1944, her family was visited by a family friend, Dean William Pickens of Morgan College in Baltimore, Jean’s father’s alma mater. Dean Pickens had a daughter who was a little bit older than Jean.

His daughter Harriet, when she came out of school, they were asking for women to go into the Navy. And I saw it in the paper, where she went up to Smith to train for officer’s training school. And I said, “So the Navy is for me.”

Truman said, “We would like for the ladies to volunteer their services to relieve a man and I think it would help us win the war sooner.”  I said, “I’ll go!”  I’m sitting there working for a defense company making apparatus to go into airplanes.

Jean enlisted in the WAVES and was sent to boot camp in May of 1945.

This photograph comes from the collection of Jean Byrd Stewart.

Dreams

Even though Jean Byrd grew up during the Depression, she still dreamed big.

 You know how you wish for things?  My mother had a gentleman who would take her, my aunt and another lady, he would take them shopping because he had a car. They would go and shop, and they would pay him and I thought that was so nice. So one Saturday, I said, “You know, I would like to buy some property.” Well, I was working then and I had a few dollars.  I said, “I don’t have much, but I’d like find out how much land costs, how much you need” and this and that and the other thing.  I had a nice black dress and black pocketbook and this that and the other.  I said, “I’m going to get dressed and ask Mr.” I forget his name now “to take me out to this place so I can find out something about land.”  Didn’t have a dime.  A few dollars.  I think my first account I put two dollars in. Well, that’s what I got paid.  Two dollars a week. That was way back.  ’40 — I forget the year. ’30, ’38 I came out of high school. Anyway, this is what I was going to do.  I was going to act like I had some money and I was a lady who had some prestige.

This photo comes from the Jean Byrd Stewart collection.

“Send for Your Ice Skates”

Pat Pierpont met her husband-to-be, Dick Graves, while serving in the Navy. She was a WAVE and he was a sailor. They were both stationed in Jacksonville, Florida.

My sister was very much into boyfriends and things but I didn’t have any.  So I went down there (to Jacksonville) and just knew a lot of guys but didn’t go out hardly at all.  And then I met someone one day. He was in the hangar. And I just happened to meet him and he asked me once to go out.  The first time we ever went out was New Year’s Eve. We went to a movie. That was it.  Had dinner and went back to the base and then saw each other off and on, but we didn’t get married until we were both out of the Navy because that was the way it was.  We hadn’t known each other that long, you see,  He was from California and I was from Connecticut.

Their marriage was in February 1946. In Connecticut. Pat told them to prepare for the worst.

I said, “Send for your skates, your ice skates” because we always had ice everywhere. And virgin ice, clear beautiful.  On the lakes, everywhere. Well, of course, this was the year when they wasn’t any ice when they were there. Except the night we left from church.  Then it was raining and freezing. Dick learned to put on chains right away.

This photograph comes from the collection of Pat Pierpont Graves.

“We Had a System”

As World War II was winding down in late 1945, people in the military started thinking about life after the war. Jane Fisher was in the Coast Guard boot camp to serve in the SPARs (from the Coast Guard Motto Semper Paratas, Always Ready) when the word came down that the war had ended. She ended up relieving other women who had been enlisted longer.

Jane was sent to Seattle and assigned to work in the Post Office. For her, military service was about patriotism – and flirting.

I worked in the post office.  Oh that was good deal.  I had a friend who worked in personnel.  If we saw a cute guy, (laughs) just to show you how women worked in that day and age, if we saw a cute guy, she looked up his personnel records.  If it didn’t show that he was married, then I’d check the letters to see if he got a letter from the same person all the time.  (laughs).  Oh, we had a system.

Jane met her husband-to-be while she was heading back to work after leave to visit her family in Nebraska. She noticed him when he got on the train in Idado.

 I remember peeking out.  His voice. It just sounded good.  But I was playing it pretty cool as we were going up the river.  And we had had a wreck in the middle of the night which made our train late.  And we got to the Dalles (in Oregon) and everybody was getting off the train, you know, to go to the ladies who were serving cookies and stuff.  I thought, “Well, I’m not going to get off and have him give me a bad time.”  Because he kept walking back and forth and I knew he was getting up nerve enough. So I waited and I got off.  He had got off to check uniforms.  He waited and he jumped off the train behind me.  And he informed me that SP stood for “SPAR Patrol.”  Or “SPAR Protector.”  And then he sat on down beside me and he asked me if I knew anything about fish ladders.  Now that was the craziest line I had ever heard in my life.  And I didn’t know what a fish ladder one. I had never heard of one.  He said, “Well we’re coming to this Bonneville Dam and they have a fish ladder and I’m going to point it out to you.  Because someday, I’m going to design and build fish ladders.”  He was the only guy I ever met who really knew what he wanted to do with his life.  It really impressed me.

By the time the train reached Portland, Oregon, Jane was smitten. But she was supposed to transfer to a nearby train head back up to base in Seattle.

 He said to me, “If you purposely miss that train I’ll sign your papers that we had a wreck.”  So I did.  And we spent the whole day in Portland. I went on the train that night that he was on Shore Patrol to Seattle. And he took a cab and took me to where we were staying and got it all squared away that I really wasn’t late.  Signed the all papers and stuff. And we were married three months later.

It was a whirlwind courtship – spurred along by an over-anxious mother:

We were going to get married, but we were going to get discharged and go home.  But my mother kept planning my wedding.  And one night we were in a movie and I was so upset with her and I said, “Gee you know for two cents I’d just get married right here in Seattle.”  And he reached over and gave me two pennies.  So we got married in Seattle.  We were married 28 years.

The photograph comes from the Betty Jane Fisher Collection.

Keeping Romance Alive

Ruth Kinman used the power of letters to keep romance alive while serving as a WAVE during the war.

My sister, who is 13 months older than I, she decided she was going to go into the WAVES. And I hadn’t thought anything about it. But she decided and she joined. And then this young man I was going with, he was drafted into the Marine Corps. So I thought, “I’m not going to stay here by myself.  I’m going to go into the WAVES too.” So that’s why I enlisted.

Ruth stayed in touch with her young Marine, Carl Gaerig, throughout the war. But it wasn’t until the war was nearly over that they began talking seriously about marriage.

He had been discharged because he had been wounded, had been in the hospital and recovered.  Then he came to Washington, where I was stationed and so we decided to get married. When we decided to get married I had to get permission from my superior to wear a wedding gown and veil and all that. And my mother came to the wedding and Carl’s mother came tot he wedding from Duquoin, Illinois. It was quite a spectacular occasion for us.

This was in September of 1945, after V-J Day. Shortly after the wedding, Ruth was discharged. She can Carl moved back to Illinois, where they both went to college. We met them aboard the WAVES National Convention Cruise in 2006.

We’ve been married 61 years now,  I don’t know where the years have gone.

This photograph was taken of Ruth in 2006 aboard the WAVES National Convention Cruise. It comes courtesy of Mel Kangleon.

“I Can Make You Love Me”

Doris Cain had been married before she joined the WAVES in 1944. The marriage ended badly and she decided to enlist so she wouldn’t see her husband in the small farming community where they lived (he was deferred from military service because of the farm).

One day, she was at the USO for a dance and met a man who had been a pharmacist’s mate on Guadacanal. Doris was gunshy – she didn’t want to get into another bad romantic situation. And something the pharmacist’s mate did raised her suspicions:

He was wearing a Marine uniform when I met him. He made a date with me to pick me up for dinner or something, and he picked me up in a sailor uniform. I was really amazed because I didn’t know you could interchange uniforms like that. I almost quit going with him. We were working in a tight secure environment. I didn’t want to have anything to do with somebody who was messing around, do you know what I mean?  Well, you don’t know if they’re spies or if they’re crazy or what. So I went out with him for dinner but I wouldn’t make another date or anything. He kept bugging me. “Why? Why?”  And I told him.  I said, “Because you wear a Marine uniform one time and a sailor uniform.”  That’s when he told me that the Marines don’t have a medical department and the Navy supplies medical for them. He was stationed at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina.  That’s the reason he could go in either uniform. He wears a Navy patch in the Marine uniform that shows he’s a pharmacist. But outside of that you can’t tell.

Doris’ pharmacist’s mate was persistent. They began going out, and he began asking her to marry him.

He proposed to me, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get married again. I told him, I says, “I don’t love you.” And he said, “But I can make you love me.”  So I married him.

By this point it was late 1945 and the war was over. Doris left the service and she and her pharmacist’s mate got married shortly after. Once he was out of the military, they moved to California and had two children.

This photograph, “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not,” shows WAVES and sailors on liberty in New Orleans, LA, c. 1944. It comes from the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Romance Week!

With the approach of Valentine’s Day, we’re turning our focus to romance during World War II.

Margaret Anderson Thorngate, who we’ve featured before in these posts, met her husband Fred during the war:

 I was a member of the Fourth Interceptor Command. That’s when they had that — no radar in those days, so you looked for airplanes in the air, at sea, whatever. I belonged to that.  Another girl and I had the duties on Sunday afternoons, which we picked because they we could sun ourselves on the sand dune where the observation post was.  And so Fred was stationed in the beach club down the street, down the little ways. He came trotting up one day, when I was — one Sunday afternoon when I was sitting there in my black bathing suit watching for airplanes (laughs). With my glasses picked him up right away.

Margaret and Fred wrote back and forth to each other during the war,  while he was stationed overseas and she was in the WAVES in California. Eventually she agreed to marry him.  So in late summer 1945, he got a leave between assignments, so he returned to California.

He came back from overseas and we were going to get married. I met him at my aunt’s in Glendale. He rang the front doorbell and I ran out the back. I was scared to death (laughs). And she (Margaret’s aunt) made me — she made me answer the door and I couldn’t talk.  I couldn’t talk!   Absolutely, for 20 minutes I couldn’t say anything.  And he was just laughing. I thought, “This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done in your life!  You’re going to marry somebody you haven’t even seen in two years and barely know!”

They were on their honeymoon when the war ended.

Something worked about their unconventional romance – Margaret and Fred are still married.

The photo comes from the collection of Margaret Anderson Thorngate.

The Boot Camp Experience

Part of the Hunter College boot camp experience for the young WAVES was learning what it mean to be in the Navy. And that meant restrictions, as WAVE Virginia Gillmore remembered:

The hard adjustment was the way they treated a few people.  One of the really hard things was the fact that if we kept our hair off our collar that was the requirement.  And that if you did your hair up, your long hair up and kept it off your collar you’d be ok.  But one cold morning they mustered us outside our apartment house outside in the street — that means they lined us all up — or we lined up.  And they went behind all the girls with long hair and they pulled their bobbie pins or whatever was holding their hair up out and let their hair fall down, and then took scissors and clipped their hair off.  And these girls had been told they wouldn’t have to have their hair cut.  There was almost mutiny that morning.  None of us thought it was fair. Because the regulation was just keep your hair up off your collar.  But we all kept quiet.  So it was a little fear that I didn’t think was entire necessary in our training.  But I suppose we all have to go through something.

All in all, boot camp was a good, positive experience.  We felt lots of support from the instructors, as a whole group.  But we did have to toe the line.

This photograph comes from the National Archives.

Learning the Ropes

The last photo in the essay following one woman, Maria Ramona Espinosa, through boot camp at Hunter College shows the WAVES’ classroom activities.

The caption reads:

Maria Ramona Espinosa recites in one of the classes which occupy a large part of her time at the training school.

The photograph comes from the National Archives. It dates from September 1943.

Getting the Uniform

The second image in the photo essay of Maria Ramona Espinosa at boot camp at Hunter College followed as she was fitted for her Navy uniform.

The caption reads:

Apprentice Seaman Esponosa, her hair done up in regulation style, has her first uniform fitted.

The photograph comes from the National Archives. It dates from September 1943.