Tag Archives: Cedar Falls

In the Classroom

Here, WAVES are in the classroom during one of the first boot camps at the Iowa State Teacher’s College (now Northern Iowa University) in Cedar Falls. The facility would become a yeoman training center after the opening of the Hunter College boot camp in February 1943.

The photograph comes from the National Archives.

Cedar Falls

Shortly after the “combined” training facilities opened in Stillwater, Madison and Bloomington, the Navy decided a separate boot camp to train WAVES recruits would make more sense. The women could learn the Navy basics at boot camp and then move on to the other facilities for their specialized training.

Iowa State Teacher’s College (now Northern Iowa University) in Cedar Falls was selected as the first boot camp and women entered for training in the fall of 1942. The campus, however, did not have the room that the Navy would eventually need, so by February 1943 it was shifted to a yeoman training school alongside Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater. Hunter College in the Bronx, New York, surrendered its campus to the Navy for a WAVES boot camp facility through the end of the war.

This photograph of WAVES marching indoors at Cedar Falls comes from the National Archives

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To Training School

The initial Navy WAVES boot camp was at Iowa State Teacher’s College in Cedar Falls. It would be a boot camp in fall of 1942 through January 1943. In February 1943, the WAVES boot camp moved to Hunter College in the Bronx, New York.

This image comes from Marjorie Sue Green’s booklet From Recruit to Salty WAVE! The Ordeal of Seaman Green held by The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Past Lives

The WAVES base newspapers also reminded women of what they had left behind. In this comic, a WAVE (dressed in her summer grey seersucker uniform) wistfully remembers the fashions she was able to follow before joining the WAVES.

Before thinking that the comic was criticizing the uniform, remember that the WAVES’ uniform was couture-designed by the famous designer Mainbocher – and that while WAVES did wear a uniform on the outside, they could choose their own nightclothes and undergarments.

So even though they “gave it all up” they did so to become a part of what newspapers and magazines said at the time were “the best dressed women in America.”

This comes from the archives at the University of Northern Iowa.

That Tie

The base newspapers not only gave WAVES information about the uniform of the day: they also gave women guidance about how to assemble the uniform.

This comic shows newbie WAVES how to tie the “proper” knot for their uniform tie. It was published in the base newsletter for the Cedar Falls training center.

The image comes from the collection of the University of Northern Iowa archives.