Tag Archives: Carpinteria

Margaret grew up in Carpinteria, CA., during the Depression.  Her family lived two blocks from the beach. Carpinteria – just south of Santa Barbara – is known as the “World’s Safest Beach” and it’s where Margaret learned how to swim.

During World War II, she volunteered as a civilian aircraft spotter: she would sit on the beach with a friend and watch for aircraft off the coast. One day she was manning her post on a sand dune, when she met the man who would eventually become her husband of 64 years.

Fred, an Army officer stationed on the coast, came walking along the beach in cream-colored bathing trunks, introduced himself, and the rest was history.  She only knew him for a few months before he was shipped off to a new location, but they wrote back and forth and married after the war.  World War II ended while they were on their honeymoon.

” I wanted to get out of Carpinteria for one thing. I wanted to see the world. I suppose I had a lot of great ideas but you just didn’t really expect them to happen.”

Margaret Anderson Thorngate is one of the women featured in the upcoming documentary  Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II, produced by TaylorCatProductions. Producers would like to bring Margaret to the USS Missouri to shoot the final segment of the film. She toured the ship and painted it “for luck” during World War II.

Margaret, originally from Southern California, started her military career as a civilian aircraft observer when she was 19 years old.  As soon as she turned 20, the required age for service, she joined the WAVES.

                

“I always felt important strutting down the street in the WAVE uniform.”

                                              Who is She?

                                                                                                                                    Why is her story important?