Oral history interview with Reva Ingram Fortune, 1999

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Reva Ingram Fortune
INTERVIEWER: Hermann J. Trojanowski
DATE: February 8, 1999
[Begin Interview]
HT: [Today is February] 8, 1999. I'm at the Special Collections/University Archives Reading Room with Mrs. Reva Ingram Fortune, and we're here to conduct an interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection.
Mrs. Fortune, if could you say a word or two, like what was your maiden name and where were you born and where did you grow up?
RF: My maiden name, Reva Pauline Ingram. I was born in Colfax, Illinois, out in the middle of a big cornfield. I came to North Carolina when I was three years old and grew up here in Greensboro, went through the school system, and later to the university here, the Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina].
HT: Mrs. Fortune, thank you so much for meeting with me this afternoon. I really appreciate it. It's very kind of you to do this. Could you tell me a little bit about what your family life was like before you entered the service, and where you worked, if you did work, before you joined the military?
RF: Well, it is a pleasure for me to be here. I'm just happy to be part of this, and I hope that future generations will appreciate what you're doing.
Our family was made up of six girls and one brother. We were ordinary folks. My father was a farmer, and he also worked sometimes at public work. When we first came to North Carolina about 1920, he got a job working for the Southern Power Company, which was the forerunner of the Duke Power Company. He was the foreman in the boiler room, and I remember standing outside, possibly when we went to take a lunch or maybe to meet him to walk home, that his job was to keep the boiler firemen shoveling coal into those hot furnaces. And there was a big open door that would allow us to see inside. He was a hard worker. My mother was from the Ozarks in Missouri. In fact, both my parents had about, I would say, a maximum of six years schooling in a one-room schoolhouse. Both were very intelligent people, they worked hard. Their language was—I would not say impeccable, but it was very good. They did not use slang, they did not use profanity. My mother had the most beautiful penmanship of anyone that I think I've ever seen. So, we children tried to emulate them as best we could.2
We worked on the farm. I used to love to run along behind my dad when he'd be plowing the fields, and my feet, my bare feet, loved those furrows. [chuckling] I also did my share of helping replant corn. I even helped him with shucking corn. Since I was the oldest child, I think I got the lion's share of a lot of the hard work. My brother next to me was small. He didn't even reach my shoulder when I graduated high school. But then afterwards he started growing. He's now more than six feet, but I think that was the big excuse that he had: he didn't have to work hard, he was too little. [chuckling] So I learned how to shuck corn. I also milked a cow. We had three or four cows and one was assigned to me to milk, and I did that religiously until one day she almost cut off one of my toes. My younger sisters worked in the house. Some of them worked helping in the garden, too. But generally we all had a lot of fun. Being a farm family, we didn't live near to anyone for a long time. We all sang, and we entertained ourselves singing. At school we each learned possibly a different song every week. So when we came home every day, we loved to tell everybody what we had learned, and everybody else learned all the songs that each of us knew. So we had quite a repertoire.
We were pretty fair students, most of us. And none of us, until my youngest sister, was able to go to college at the appropriate time. The rest of us, at some time or another, with the exception of three girls, did not go to college. Say, for instance, my brother and I both went to school under the GI Bill. My younger sister, we all helped to send her and another sister with [her] to the Eastman Kodak School under her GI Bill. So we tried to take advantage of a lot of the things that were available to us.
HT: And so you did not go to college before you went to the military?
RF: No.
HT: Did you work outside the home or outside the farm before you went in?
RF: Yes, I did, after I graduated high school. I had a business course, or what served me as a business course in high school, and I could do secretarial work. For instance, I started at Greensboro High School, GHS. I believe we were about the second year after it was built. It was a beautiful, beautiful—and still is a nice school. It was completed before the stock market crash, so it was a million-dollar school. And by the time I was in the tenth grade, teachers in North Carolina weren't even being paid, they were given scrip because of the Depression, so the class of shorthand, bookkeeping, and typing were put to work to help administer the school. Mr. Charles Phillips was the principal at that time. He had no secretary, but all the girls—and boys—in the business school did work for him. I remember taking his letters in shorthand and then going back to the class, and we'd all check it over to see, to make sure that I had the right—we thought we had the right phraseology and everything, typing the letter and taking it to him, and he would sign it and mail it out. So we were getting some real good training early.
HT: And this was in the mid-thirties, I guess?
RF: I graduated in '33 from GHS, so it was '30, '31, and '32.3
HT: So, this was at the height of the Depression. Can you tell me what life was like in those days?
RF: Well, we lived in a rural setting. We lived on a farm part of that time, and we raised practically everything that we ate. Sugar and coffee and tea and peanut butter and things like that we did have to buy. My father got a job at Pomona Mill, which was a cotton mill, as a maintenance man and artificer. So he had a little income in that area, and at other times he would find work helping install telephone poles. I remember one time there was an ice storm and a lot of the poles came down, so they hired a lot of people just for short-term to put these poles back and do that kind of work. So he was always looking and working at something. He was not idle, never. The only time I remember seeing my dad idle, when he'd come in from work he would sit down and almost immediately he would go to sleep while we were fixing supper or whatever. But he was a hard worker.
We did not have a lot of the—well, we didn't have any more than the bare necessities, really. I remember they would order our shoes from Sears Roebuck, and they would be the little leather—[chuckling]. They had a high cut up over the ankle, and there would be no heels on them. Now, my dad had an—what is it, an anvil? No, not an anvil. A shoe last, that's what it was. A shoe last, and he would take all those new shoes and take some of the scraps of harness from his team, some of the old harness that had worn out, and he would make heels. And he would sole those, half-sole them if we needed—if we wore through the original sole. Dad kept our feet off the ground like that. And we didn't mind wearing those shoes to school because a lot of kids didn't even have that.
We walked to school most of the time. We were too close in to ride the school bus, but we were at least a mile away. But the school bus, when I was attending the first grade, went all the way to the battleground, and once in a while we might be able to get a ride part of the way home. But walking was just part of our life, a big part of it.
HT: And did your family own an automobile at that time?
RF: Yes, before the Depression hit and while Dad was working at Southern Power, he saved enough money to buy a Model T Ford touring car, a brand-new one. It was about six hundred dollars, something like that. Mother and Dad drove that old car until it just gave up, really. The top was frayed. We looked like the Toonerville Trolley [dilapidated cartoon trolley], but we looked like a lot of other people too. [chuckling] But we didn't know that there was another way, I guess.
HT: Because everybody was in the same boat in those days.
RF: Everybody was in the same boat. And we had plenty to eat. My folks saw to it that we had milk, we had cows, we had a garden. My mother canned and canned and canned all summer long, and we girls learned how to do it too, and I still can. We had tomatoes and beans and corn and greens and onions and everything that you raise in a garden. And she canned everything that she could, that we knew how to can. I know she didn't can green beans because it was not thought to be safe, really. Botulism was something that was rampant, so she didn't attempt that. But we dried beans, we dried apples—we dried apples like you wouldn't believe, bushels of them. So we had plenty of food.4
And I remember my fifth-grade teacher, as a project for us, she asked each of us—and I think it was more than a project, I think she wanted to find out how many of us were going hungry, really. She wanted us to go home and check our mother's pantry and see how many cans of food we had canned that summer. Everybody canned. Well, I counted and counted and counted, it was something like five hundred and something that we had in our pantry. Well, she didn't believe it; she thought I was telling her a falsehood. But it was true. I think my mother wrote her a note and told her that I had given her a correct figure.
But a lot of the kids would bring a light-bread sandwich to school, and I thought, "Oh, how wonderful to have light bread, and here I am eating a ham biscuit." [chuckling] And they were wishing they had my ham biscuit, I'm sure. But you don't realize those things until a long time afterwards to get the full meaning.
Times were difficult, but our family hanged in there together. We sang. And the nearest neighbors to where we lived were a quarter of a mile, and they would hear us singing in the evenings. We'd sit out there on the steps, and all seven of us—six of us—seven of us—and they opened their windows or they'd come outside and listen to us, because they could hear us all the way.
HT: Did you have musical accompaniment?
RF: No, we didn't. We did not have a piano, anything like that. None of us got any musical training from piano, but we did with the violin. I started violin when I was in fifth grade, at school, and I finally—I did play in the high school symphony. I was second violinist, and we did pieces like—now, this was at GHS in '30, '31, '32, and '33. We won the state contest three years in a row, playing Finlandia one year, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony the next year, and Oberon by von Weber the next year, those pieces. They were great. And Mr. Slocum, Earl Slocum, was our director. What a wonderful person. He taught us how to play the instruments, in addition to directing us. We did not have any special teachers for violin or oboe or whatever it was. He just knew how they—and taught us as we were playing.
HT: After you graduated from high school and before you entered the military, what type of work did you do?
RF: I was a secretary. I worked at Pomona Terra-Cotta Company, which was a brick and tile, vitrified clay concern. They were shipping loads and loads of drain tile, huge sewer tiles to the military bases, building all those bases preceding the war years, all over this part, to the Marine barracks at Camp Lejeune [North Carolina], to Holly Ridge [Camp Davis, North Carolina], Fort Bragg [Fayetteville, North Carolina], up and down the seacoast to the naval bases. I took dictation from all of the staff and I helped with invoices and, well, just whatever needed to be done. And I left there and joined the military after our brother was called up in November of '42. I went the next spring.
HT: So, you joined in the spring of 1943?
RF: Yes.5
HT: And which branch of the service did you join, and why?
RF: Well, I joined the WAAC [Women's Army Auxiliary Corps] because it had just become an organization. Edith Nourse Rogers had presented that bill in Congress on May 14, 1942, to establish a women's army corps, or an auxiliary corps. Anyway, it was established as the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. So, my sister June [Ingram] had signed up earlier than I had. She had already left. She left in November of '42, shortly after my brother, and I went the next May of '43, and I was sent to Daytona Beach, Florida. This was a new area that had been built especially for the WAAC basic training. June, in her training, was sent to the Coquina Hotel on Daytona Beach. They converted a lot of those resort hotels into military dormitories at this time. And she was given driver instruction on Daytona Beach. She had never driven anything in her life, and they put her out on the beach learning how to drive. And a lot of it was blackout driving too, at nighttime. So, at every turn there was something exciting happening.
HT: So you went to Daytona Beach for your basic training?
RF: Basic training, yes.
HT: And how long did that last?
RF: I had four weeks of training, and you saw the picture of all of us sitting there. That was a fantastic bunch of women, I tell you. Everybody was there because they wanted to be there. You heard no complaining, no griping. Everybody, when they'd say, "Fall out," we fell out. We'd be out and gone from our barracks area all day many days. They just put us through the paces. I mean, four weeks of extensive training.
This was interesting. [chuckling] I got to the point that whoever was in front of me, I was just following that head. I didn't think what I was doing; I knew that I had to follow whoever was in front of me. I even went to the parade the first anniversary of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. We rode in a bus from the cantonment area to the staging area in Daytona, and then got off and marched. And if I had been told we were going on a parade, I don't remember it. But anyway we wound up at the band shell on the beach, where we heard a general give us a speech. And I looked off to my right at the ocean, and there was a convoy going past, going south. As far as I could see, there were ships. I was just so—I guess you would have to say that was sensory overload to the extreme. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and here I am sitting, hearing a speech. I really had not connected it with the fact that it was the first anniversary of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. So it was kind of like that through most of basic. They didn't give us time to do thinking for ourselves. They did every bit of it.
We lined up to get our clothing. They took us into town. They didn't have the facilities out at the cantonment area. That's what they called our area. We went into a huge framed building, and there were nobody but men in the place that were issuing the garments. As we walked through the front door, on either side there was a GI and he handed each one of us three pairs of khaki-colored underwear. They had long legs. He says, "Go to the restroom and put on one pair of these." [chuckling] We didn't know—we6
did as we were told. And we later learned that it was a pretty smart thing, because all the walking that we would have had to do, up and down and up and down, it kept us from chafing our legs. [laughter] And I thought here is this guy throwing us three pairs of pants. The next guy handed us a duffel bag. "Put the other two in here."
HT: I have a quick question about your underwear, please excuse me. But were they all the same size?
RF: No, they managed to look at us and kind of get an idea. But another thing, they were supposed to have had elastic in the top. And it was not elastic, it was braid. There was no elastic available. All the rubber was going into tires and things like that, so we did not have elastic in the waist. [chuckling]
And from then on we went from station to station to station, up into about four stories in that huge old building to get—everything was khaki-colored: pants, slip, bra, shirts, ties, skirts, cap, everything. It was a scream. And when we got to the top floor we had a full duffel bag. Then we had to carry it down on our shoulders, you know. There was nobody there to help you carry it like the little girl who helped me a while ago. No sir. And those duffel bags became—they were just like our right arm. They stayed with us from then on, until we got to our permanent base.
HT: Did you have some sort of physical exam or get shots and that sort of thing?
RF: Oh yes. We had to have a physical, of course, before, with our family doctor. Then, yes, we had a physical. And another time here they are, one on either side of the door with hypodermics. And they'd grab you, and you're stuck before you know it as you go through that door, two or three shots. I've still got my old immunization record somewhere. Typhus, typhoid, tetanus—I forget what the others were, but we got three the first day. And then they were renewed every couple of years. The people who gave us the shots, there were no women anywhere to be—who assigned anything to us. They were all men, of course. Not enough women had been trained yet. The only trained people were officer personnel.
HT: Do you recall what a typical day was like in basic training?
RF: Yeah. We'd get up after the corporal had blown the whistle, usually at six o'clock. We had to fall out, have our beds made, [be] in class A uniform in formation in front of the barracks at 6:30. And there the corporal of each platoon would give the first sergeant a report, "All present and accounted for." And boy, they meant it. There was nobody saying, "Oh, so-and-so didn't feel like coming today." That never happened. [chuckling] We had one tall girl. She was so tall, I know she must have been seven feet tall. And one day she started out and she tripped, and she just fell, fell, fell. It looked like she was just falling in sections. And she landed right in front of her platoon. But anyway, when they said "Fall out," we fell out.
We were in formation when we went to the mess hall, and lined up; this was the only time that we were in a semi-formal arrangement, you know, in the chow line. We'd get our tray that had all its sections in it, and our silverware, and go have—whether it was 7
French toast or scrambled eggs and toast or whatever, coffee usually. We didn't have great big bubbling breakfasts, no. We had to eat it and get out of there and get back. We were given about a five-minute break to go back to the barracks, use the latrine if we needed to, and then be off to a class, all of this in formation. You didn't see any stragglers anywhere, everybody in a formation.
And the ones who were not in class would be on the drill field. And the drill field was a huge area. It had been constructed of beach sand, which in that part of the country has a whole lot of shells in it and more. Well, you do an about-face in a pair of slippers, and all of us had been issued a pair of brown slippers that had a heel about three-quarters of an inch high, you do an about-face and you wind up with a shoe full of sand and shells. Well, that went on for I guess maybe a week after we were there. They issued us a man's high-cut shoe, and we called them “Li’l Abners”. I still have my Li’l Abners. [chuckling] And we were issued a GI-colored—a khaki-colored sock to go with it, and we'd wear those Abners with our lisle cotton stockings in Daytona, hot as it was. We never could go without our hose, wearing the Li’l Abners. We had to have them on with our socks and our lisle hose. And I don't know how a lot of the girls held their lisle stockings up, really. I guess maybe some had garter belts. I think I did. But if you sat down with those lisle stockings, when you stood up you had a great big ball on the front of each knee. So you were always pulling and trying to get yourself in order. [chuckling]
HT: Why did you have to wear both stockings and socks?
RF: I don't know, for the same reason that we had to wear our long sleeves down and our neckties, too. [chuckling]
HT: For appearance's sake, I guess.
RF: Yeah. Those were orders of the day. Listen, it was not until I got to Buckingham [Army Air] Field [Fort Myers, Florida] that we were able to take off the neckties. We had what they called cantonment mittens. Our hands would be just as brown as they could be. You should see the outfit when everybody undressed at night, brown hands and a brown face, and the rest of you was white. [chuckling] They called these cantonment mittens.
So, yes, we did not like a lot of those regulations, but we didn't complain because we were in the army then and we knew it. And they knew they had the upper hand. We didn't mind that a bit. We loved our CO [commanding officer] and the officers that she had to help her, and the cadre. They had gone through the class just ahead of us, so they weren't too trained either. And then every now and then somebody would come back from a noncommissioned officer school where they had made corporal and were given a job to be part of the cadre.
HT: What is the cadre?
RF: The cadre were the enlisted people in the squadron. You had the officer personnel, the commanding officer, the adjutant, and the supply officer. The enlisted personnel in the cadre would be the first sergeant, and possibly three corporals that would be platoon leaders, and maybe a couple of PFCs [privates first class] that would be squad leaders,8
and that would be it. But through the channel of command, you know, everybody had a job to do. The squad leader had to make sure that all her twelve people were present, accounted for, and doing what they were supposed to be doing, and the corporal above her responsible for those three squads all the way to the first sergeant. The first sergeant then would make her report to the squadron commander. And there was all this going on every morning at reveille.
Then, after we had spent the day drilling—and if it was raining at Daytona Beach and we were on the drill field, we continued right in the rain and drilled. We didn't run to the side and try to get under a tree or anything, we just—because it was like it was programmed. The sun would come out in about a half an hour, and it would be so hot it would dry us off. By the time we got back to the squadron area at five o'clock, we would be dry. After we had finished at five o'clock, as I recall, we were free to go to the mess hall on our own. I believe that was the way it was. But then there would be classes at night and we'd be back in formation again. The day was—we kept so busy that it went by in a hurry. And if we had any spare time, why, we were usually sitting. [chuckling]
The water was terrible there. I think they had put down wells in the area. It was brackish, and so there were Coke machines everywhere. And I remember I drank so many Cokes while I was there that I started having terrible kidney pains in my back. I reported to the commanding officer, and she in turn apparently had had this same problem with a lot of others. She said, "Well, you cannot drink any more Cokes. You'll just have to leave them off." And that took care of it. But there were too many Cokes. But you can imagine down there in a temperature of 110, it wasn't unusual for it to be that hot.
HT: What time of year was this?
RF: This was in May. So, I says to myself, "They cannot send me any farther south, that's all there is to it." [chuckling] And I said, "I'll be out of this hot weather before too long." Well, when June came after our four weeks were up, and every day was just about the same as what we'd had there, I got my orders, along with thirteen other stenographers, to go to Fort Myers, Florida. There were thirteen of us at one time. So the hot weather continued.
But let me tell you some of the crazy things we did. Now, in the evenings, if we weren't in class, I remember the first weekend a lot of the girls went to Daytona. I think I was on KP [kitchen police] that weekend, and so I had to be there in the area. And I'll tell you about KP a little later. [chuckling] But anyway, this particular weekend five or six of us were left in the barracks. It was a new building. All these barracks had not—they hadn't been cleaned, you know. They just had the carpenters' sawdust and that sort of thing in a lot of areas. So a couple of us, after having been assigned, we volunteered, which was the last thing I was supposed to do. Somebody told me when I left home, "Don't volunteer for anything." Anyway, we helped to clean a new mess hall. And they had to have it cleaned because the rafters and everything had dust and so forth. We had to clean, sweep, dust—however we could get the dust and dirt out of that new mess hall. So, we got the bright idea to get—and we had a hose, a garden hose—to use that hose to clean all the dust and debris that was in the shower room, in the bathrooms, and that area, and we just had the best water fight you ever knew. [chuckling] It cooled us off, you know.9
Well, we were into mischief for sure. So we decided we were going to short-sheet a bunch of beds that night. And we did. Each of us had an old folding army cot, we had two sheets, and we had this nice thick comforter. Well, there was also a mattress cover. We didn't have a mattress. We were supposed to put the comforter in the mattress cover to make the mattress. Well, there was one girl in our squadron whose name was Alice Faye, and she was from Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a real socialite, and just a wonderful person. And we had just all kinds of folks that were representative of womanhood in the USA, so we felt like we could get away with this. We took all the comforters from about twenty beds and put them on Alice's bed. Made her bed about this tall, you know. She was out and enjoying the town. We took another mattress cover and filled it full of paper, newspaper, just wadded it up real good. We knew this girl would be the last one in—and she was—and we, of course, had to stay awake to hear what went on. One bed we moved out completely. I don't know how we came up with so many different ways to mess up those beds. We short-sheeted a bunch of them, too. But the ones that we thought would make the most noise, we really gave them a good going over. So, when Alice came in, and here is her bed, she said, "Oh, this is heavenly!" [chuckling] She had all these nice comforters, and we asked her if she needed some help to get up in it. And Pitkin was the last one to come in, and her bed was the one filled with shucks and papers. And she rattled around all night long. I don't think anybody could sleep. [chuckling]
HT: Did she ever complain?
RF: No, she didn't. And we knew that we were going to be next on the list if we left the barracks on a weekend. The ones of us who had done that were going to catch it. We did. But it was a lot of fun, really.
I don't remember too much about some of our other antics, but there were some. Some of the girls went to the beach and enjoyed themselves. When we had inspections—What was her name? We had a wonderful major who would come around. She was the motherly type, but she was tough. Julia Moses lived at the end of one row in the barrack. Right outside her door was the mop rack, and there were eight slots on it and there were eight mops. Well, she was putting some finishing touches on something with one of the mops and she didn't get it on the rack. She just threw it under the barracks. [chuckling] So when the major came, of course she caught that, you know, and Julia got a demerit for not having the mop where it was supposed to be, and so did the squad. But these were about the most hilarious things that happened. We didn't have a lot of time for hilarity.
HT: This was all during basic training?
RF: Basic training, yeah.
HT: Was this the first time you'd ever been away from home for any extended period of time?
RF: Well, with the family, we went to Illinois and Missouri in 1932, I think it was, and visited my mother's family. She had five sisters and three brothers, and her mother was living. Her father had died, I think the year before, so we didn't get to see Granddad. But we spent maybe a couple weeks out there. From Missouri we went up into Illinois, Pontiac, 10
and past the place where I was born. My dad was from here, Mom was from the Ozarks, so she didn't get to see her family too much. But when they did, they were just the most gregarious bunch of people. Those girls loved each other. I wish that we could have had the same kind of feeling among us. We just didn't have that that Mom and her sisters had. But we all sang. I mean, not that we didn't get along, but it wasn't just as pronounced as they were. They were so happy to see us and we were happy to see them.
I guess it was a couple of weeks, and we came across the mountains. It was a Model A car that time. The Model T had bit the dust a long time ago, but there were eight of us. My brother didn't go on this particular trip, but eight of us in that Model A Ford going up through the mountains. And there were no places to stop and spend the night, maybe a few around some of the towns, but we knew that we couldn't afford it, to find a motel or—They didn't call them motels then, they were cabins, little cabins, and maybe five or six of them in a place. So we slept in the car because somebody told us there were bears up there in those mountains. [chuckling] And we slept in the car, all eight of us.
HT: That must have been tight.
RF: It was. It was cozy. [chuckling] But at the same time, those mountain roads were not paved either. A lot of them were not. The Cumberland Gap was one area that we went over, and I remember seeing mules pulling drag pans where they were making the road. We came down the New Found Gap, that area, through the Smokeys [Great Smoky Mountains], and that was certainly under construction in 1932. And this was somewhere about the same time that the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, was doing all its work in the mountains, so there was a lot of road building going on. I don't know how long it took us to get out there, but it was eight hundred miles. So you can imagine a Model A that would go about thirty-five miles an hour. [chuckling]
But we had a great time. I remember crossing the Ohio River at Paducah [Kentucky]. And the ferry was one that you pulled yourself across. There were pulleys on it, and the men would pull those pulleys till we got to the other side. You know, we just took it in stride. This is the way things are, you know. I wish I had a lot of pictures of those days, but film was not something that we could afford either too much. We did have a little once in a while. But that, I guess, would have been the longest spell away from home. Then, when I got down there, oh, goodness.
HT: But joining the military was the first time you had been away from home on your own?
RF: Yes, and I want you to know I did not realize just how much my mother meant to me until I was there. And everything that happened to me I had to be responsible for. Nobody to say, "Mom, can you press this for me? Mom, would you mind washing this while I'm out?" Everything, you know. Boy, it hit you like a ton of bricks. It did me anyway. And I did a lot. I seldom had anybody doing for me at home, but it really made an imprint on me that here I had been dependent on other people a lot more. So, that made me wake up and say, "You have to pay attention. You're on your own from here on out. Whatever happens to you, it's your responsibility."
HT: Well, what did your family think about you joining the military?11
RF: Oh, they were happy for us. You see, our brother had left in November of '42. And believe it or not, my attitude was that we had to go to help him. And I put on my application that I would be glad to cook, scrub, do anything like that, if it would help get my brother home. And of course that didn't make any imprint with them, but this was the attitude that I had, that we owed it to him to help get him home. If it would do it one day earlier, it would be worth it.
HT: And what about your sisters who joined other branches of the military, did they feel the same way?
RF: I think they did, yes, because we did not sit down and discuss this thing in a group; it was just something that each of us did on our own. Mom was happy for us. She had a flag in her window that had five stars on it. And it wasn't that we were trying to be different from anybody else. There were other women, a few others around here, who did go—not too many. You'll notice in that paper there are not very many. But that didn't make any imprint on me at all, the fact that—what other people thought about it.
HT: I think you said earlier that the reason you joined was because your brother was in the service. Do you recall ever seeing recruiting posters advertising for women to join?
RF: Yes, I'm sure we did. There was one with Uncle Sam pointing that said, "I want you!" [chuckling] And I believe I can still see that in the back of my mind.
HT: The feeling was that if a woman joined it would free a man for combat. Did you have any feelings about that?
RF: No, I didn't. But it really came to light when I was in Florida, and it was when they were sending a lot of troops over. And I remember we'd go to the train station—a lot of us girls would—to see the fellows off, some that we had known through the different organizations. And some of the boys were crying, I'm telling you. They didn't want to go. Absolutely they didn't want to go. And I didn't feel any remorse or anything at that. I just felt like, well, we're all in this together. And when they kept taking and taking and taking the men away from Buckingham, we saw that the girls were more and more and more running that base. The motor pool was practically manned by the women. The only place that we were not assigned was in ordnance. That was just too heavy for the women to do that kind of work. We wrote to a lot of the guys, and we'd hear from them. I have a few letters that came from Germany and Australia and places like that, the troops—and they had gotten over their initial anxieties apparently. But no, it did not make me say that I'm glad to release somebody to combat, because we had sent a lot of our girls from Buckingham—
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]12
RF: Some of the girls that we sent to Europe were not too far behind the troops in Normandy. They bivouacked in apple orchards, we heard from several. There were several cooks among that group, and some medics. I guess that was the main emphasis then, to have food and medicine for the troops that they needed. We'd hear back maybe a month or two afterwards, you know, that they'd made it. We didn't know whether they made it safely or not. We didn't know, really, whether the ships would even make it, because so many of them were being blown out of the water by those U-boats. And a lot of the troops did not get to their destinations.
HT: Your permanent duty station was at Buckingham Field?
RF: Buckingham Army Air Field.
HT: And that was in Georgia?
RF: Fort Myers, Florida.
HT: What was your job there?
RF: I was a first sergeant of the WAC [Women's Army Corps] squadron.
HT: Okay, and can you tell me what some of your duties were in that capacity?
RF: Okay. Well, as I went down with the thirteen stenographers from Daytona, we were all assigned to duties there on the base, and I was assigned to the squadron. That's all I heard. They said, "You're assigned to the squadron." Well, I couldn't imagine. The word squadron was new to me to be an assignment. I thought of airplanes in a squadron, you know. Of course, this was an air base and the basic unit was squadron. So they sent me down to the WAC squadron, and I was assigned as company clerk. And that job was just keeping the morning report and letters home to people who asked about their daughters and doing whatever the commanding officer had for me to do.
The first sergeant was a little girl. She wasn't very popular with some of the troops, and apparently was not popular with the officers. I didn't know that. You know, I just felt like everybody was accepted. So, after about two weeks, the squadron commander called me in and told me she wanted me to be her acting first sergeant. Well, I didn't ask her any questions. I said, "Yes, ma'am," you know. It wasn't my business to ask her. We went out in the back area where we parked our supply vehicle and she gave me some voice and command training and a little bit of close-order drill training, and that was all the training that I had to be first sergeant, other than what I had under my hat. [chuckling] So the next morning I took the roll call and gave it to the company commander from the corporals. And from then on I was first sergeant. Wherever I was stationed, I was the first sergeant of the squadron, all the way through the Army Air Corps and through the [U.S.] Air Force for the next almost ten years.
My job was to be a liaison between the troops and the squadron commander. I was responsible for discipline, for their presence on duty, for their presence at formations, for their health, for their well-being, for their food, for everything. I mean, it had to come 13
through me. If there was something wrong and if I saw something wrong, I had to correct it. It was a pretty big job. I was kind of a mother away from home to these troops. And really, some of them needed that kind of attention.
HT: How many girls were under your command?
RF: Well, when I first got to Buckingham Field, I guess we probably had 150, and they were just building up that base, building up that squadron. I would say that the biggest number was right at three hundred. This was an aerial gunnery training school. We trained the gunners that flew in the B-25s, the B-17s, the '24s, and all the big bombers. And there were thousands of gunners going through that training school every week, so the amount of—most of these girls were clerical technicians. We did have some girls who had been to airplane mechanic school, gun camera technicians, medics. Well, we just covered a wide expanse.
They said there were 237 different job descriptions that the WAC could fill. Well, we filled a bunch of them, but we didn't do 237. There was a lot of administration with handling that many troops. So our girls worked in payroll, in classification, training; we had girls who worked in the Link Trainer Projects training officers in flying. Then, of course, our own cadre, we had our mess hall right in the same area where we were located with our two huge clapboard barracks. In our mess we had a mess sergeant, ordinarily six cooks, and then we supplied KPs who did all the dish washing, pot washing, potato peeling, and that sort of thing.
It was a very industrious and busy time. You know, at certain times you'd go out, you wouldn't see anybody out of their area because everybody was working, either in training or in a situation of marching to and from. We were between the base and the hospital, so there were forever and a day troops in marching formations going to the base hospital for shots, examinations, and so forth. They all had to be A number one before they could go overseas to be shot at.
There was not a whole lot going on outside of Buckingham Field. It was secluded almost there in the edge of the Everglades. They just built a base in the edge. I'm sure they drained a lot of it, they had to. And it's grown up again now. I was down by there October of '97. The only thing that's left that I could see of Buckingham Field—and I had to really put my imagination to work—is a scrap of the runways. And they're now used for mosquito control. They have a bunch of old—looked like C-47s to me sitting there that are doing mosquito control in south Florida. But we talked to a fellow who was standing there at the gate. He didn't even remember or know anything about Buckingham Field. Then we kind of refreshed his memory a little bit and he said, "Oh yeah, they trained pilots here." [chuckling]
HT: Well, it sounds like you really enjoyed your work there at Buckingham.
RF: I did. It was a miserable place. We slept under mosquito nets eight months out of the year. And we knew they flew in formation and—
HT: The mosquitoes?14
RF: The mosquitoes did. And they were big ones! [chuckling] No, we had to have the mosquito nets.
Yes, I enjoyed it. Once in a while I would get to go to Miami, or one time to Sarasota, or to Tampa. Well now, Cuba was friendly then. And some of the men had been able to get passes to go to Cuba. And so a couple of us thought, well, maybe we could do the same thing. We did. The mess sergeant, and one of the technicians who worked in our family doctor's office in the hospital, and myself, got a three-day pass to go to Havana in 1944. And we caught a Pan-American plane from Miami and got off at José Martí [Airport] in Havana, and just had a marvelous time.
The people there were overjoyed to see us. There were a few military people stationed there but they had not seen WACs. We just didn't have any special itinerary planned, but we no sooner hit the street in front of the hotel that we stayed in—the Hotel Nacional I believe it was—when we were besieged by an army of little urchins. I have never seen so many little tiny boys in my life, and all of them wanting a penny: "Give me a penny, give me a penny!" Well, I think we gave out all the pennies we had. [chuckling] And there was one bigger boy among them who said he would like to be our guide, asked us if we had a guide, and his English was very fine. We said no, and he said, "I will show you where to go." So, he took us to a lot of places. We went to the capitol, we went into some of the entertainment areas. They seemed to have gambling for everything. Girls were hitting tennis balls at what they call—I believe it was Boleto, which—B-o-l-e-t-o, I think, was the name of that establishment.
There was another one. They took us to a Cuban cigar factory. And that was the most fascinating thing I believe that I have seen. It was a big square building. The people sat in a big circle on the floor, well, on a low stool, but they were in a big circle, rolling cigars. In the center was seated, on a high stool, a reader, and he was sitting there reading to them as they worked. You know, they were absorbed in their work and listening to him read. And they had a pile of tobacco here and they'd just roll, roll, roll. Every now and then, though, and this got my gut, they would spit on that cigar that they were rolling and make a finished Cuban stogie out of it. And I understand that's how they make them. I don't know whether they have changed any of that, but when I saw that happening I thought, "Oh well, if you're going to smoke cigars you have to put up with the whole bit." But that was interesting. And they'd have a glass of water to replenish their saliva. But apparently that is one of the secrets to the Cuban cigars. But I thought that was the neatest place, really, just as quiet as it could possibly be on one of the main streets there. But this reader sat up high. I don't know what he was reading, but stories, and he'd go read the newspaper and keep them apprised of what was going on.
HT: That is amazing. Did you do any other trips while you were stationed at Buckingham?
RF: Oh yeah, I went to—wait a minute, Buckingham? No, nothing but Miami and to Cuba. I didn't even go to Key West. I would like to have. That would have been a good—but I don't think anybody was there but [Ernest] Hemingway then. [chuckling] I didn't get to Key West until '97.
HT: Well, other than trips, what else did you ladies do for fun on your spare time?15
RF: Well, the men trainees, aerial gunner trainees, would be taken up in a medium-size plane, like a BT-13 or maybe—They didn't have B-25s there, but they were a medium-size plane, eight or ten gunners at a time. They would shoot their colored bullet at a tow target that was being pulled by an AT-6, a trainer plane, and some of the WASPs [Women's Air Service Pilots] were piloting those planes. Of course, some of the other pilots were too, but the WASPs did that, pulled tow targets. Now, when they came back down to the ground, their tow target was taken off and they could check by the color of the holes in it whose bullets went where.
Every now and then a planeload of gunners would go down in the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes they'd come too close to another plane. We had a B-17 to go down one time when a fighter plane hit it. A pilot had come back from North Africa and he was showing off in his plane. He took the wing off a B-17 and everybody in it went down in the gulf. They had crash boat crews, crash boats and crews that would cruise up and down underneath the area where the training was taking place, and they would pick the guys out of the water. Well, we could go out to Captiva [Island] or Sanibel Island [Florida] and catch a crash boat and spend the day on board the boat. It was just a nice boat ride, really. Not much to do, but it was certainly a diversion from what went on. And every now and then there'd be another planeload go down. Sometimes they'd be lost, sometimes they wouldn't.
Also, I did one such trip, went out to Sanibel Island. Now, if you've ever been there, or heard about it maybe, it's one of the famous shelling places of the world. At the time I went, there was not a thing on that island but a little shack, I guess it was about six by six, that a writer had constructed, and he was living there in seclusion, writing. It wasn't Hemingway, but somebody about like him. Nothing else on that island. And I did not go out on the boat, I went looking for seashells. And I found quite a number in a couple of places, but I didn't go too far from our dock because I didn't want to miss the boat and be left out there. But some of the other girls would go out, and did go out on the boats that cruised up and down. When I tell people that I saw Sanibel when it had just one little six-by-six shack on it, they say, "You ought to see it now." There's a road from the mainland over there. There was no road then, of course. You had to catch a boat to go over there.
Some of the girls would go up to Tampa or Sarasota. I went to Sarasota one time and visited the Ringling Museum and just enjoyed being in a different place. That was about it. There was not much doing. There were no young people, no young people around at all in any of those places. We were the young people that were there. Everybody else was gone to war.
And then let me see what else. What else did we do? [chuckling] We had a cottage, yes. Special Services rented a cottage for the WAC on Fort Myers Beach, and our girls could get three-day passes to go out there and spend the time. Now, I never was able to do that. I mean, the first sergeant, you've got to be on duty. You don't always have an understudy. I didn't. So, the things that I did were limited. A lot of the girls would go every weekend somewhere. But I enjoyed what little I did do.
But that was a very, very isolated place. They had to have it so they could have the shooting range over the water, they had to have a place where they could build the dormitories or the barracks for the troops, and that had to be on the edge of the Everglades. And then there was a fighter base at Naples [Florida] on down the way where 16
they had the fighter planes. Oh yes, those were interesting days.
HT: Did you ever encounter any discrimination because you were a woman while you were in the military?
RF: Did I ever what?
HT: Encounter any discrimination because you were a woman?
RF: No, I've thought of that. The only time that ever would have happened, and it wasn't because I was a woman, or maybe it was, was back home, one of our neighbors. And my mother straightened her out in a hurry.
HT: What happened?
RF: Well, she apparently was not very careful in what she was saying, and she said something to my mother about her daughters being out in the military service for the benefit of the men. Well, I didn't know that she had said that, my mother never told me, but Mom laid her out but good over that. And I noticed that when I would come home on furlough she would avoid me and not have anything to say. So, you know, I didn't run her down to find out what went on, and Mom never told me until a long time later. But that was the only time. I think it's remarkable, I really do, because there were a lot of folks out there who probably had some feelings like that. I think the fact that there were not more women from—well, from Greensboro. I know of only two other people besides my sisters who went into the military. One of them was Peggy Idol, who was the daughter of the principal of the high school at Pleasant Garden, her father was principal, and the other was one of our next-door neighbors, Mary Edwards. So there were others, but I didn't know who they were.
HT: What was the general perception of women who joined the military at that time, do you recall?
RF: I think that it was very good. In my church, every time I came home on furlough—Well, I had been active in the youth work there, and when I would come home, of course, I didn't have anything else to wear, I wore my uniform. We were not allowed to wear civvies [civilian clothes], and I never dreamed of wearing civvies after I was in the military until they said we could. I was always greeted. And if I were in town, I've been saluted more times than you can imagine—GIs that would be there.
And even on the trains, the troop trains that we were on, we were not hustled or anything. We rode from Boston to Washington [D.C.] when I went from Fort Myers up to Boston to meet [my sisters] June and Laura . They were both stationed in that area, and then we three came home together. We rode in an old 1918 wooden passenger car of some kind. It had no screens on it or anything else. Stood up all the way from Boston to Washington. GIs were lying in the aisles, they were so tired. Most of the GIs were sleeping anyway, and I would not dare even think of asking one of them to move for me. I had the feeling that I may not be your equal in some areas, but right now you need the 17
rest. You're probably going to combat, I'm not. We stood, and I got a cinder in my eye. It was one of those old steam engines, puffer-bellies, and cinders were flying everywhere, windows were open—it was pandemonium almost inside those cars. Hot! Oh, great day. But never, never—I never had anybody to make a wild pass at me when I was in uniform.
HT: I was reading recently that I think it was in 1943 there was a scandal that was started by army men against the WACs, and the British military women and the Canadian military women had the same problem. Do you recall that at all, or hear anything about that?
RF: No, but I'll tell you, Drew Pearson was a [newspaper] columnist in Washington, I believe it was Washington, and he was the one who propagated this idea, like when Miss Hiteman, our neighbor, had said that we were there only for their benefit. Well, Eleanor Roosevelt took care of him in a hurry. Yes sir, she came to the aid of everybody. And I think Drew Pearson tucked his tail and left. [chuckling] I don't know what happened to him, but anyway he—You know, the radio was full of this kind of thing for a little while.
HT: Right. You don't know why Drew Pearson would have started something like this, do you?
RF: I don't know. I don't have any idea. But I thought one day I would like to research that and see if I can find out what was going on. I never heard of anything that would even indicate that.
Now let me tell you, at Buckingham I told you we were away. The base is here and the hospital here, and we're here. Our area is open on the front. We have barbed wire all the way around on the back and the sides, but we have a pretty good-sized area. We have a day room, supply room, and cadre in one building. Then we have two big barracks, and we slept double-deck, and then we have the mess hall. Well, GIs would get into our area every now and then, and some of them, I'm sure, were trying to get in. And some of them did get into the barracks. But we were ready for them. My cadre room—Now, say the barracks is built like this, my room was right here. Here was the door, and right here was a whole row of beds, and over here beds. But I had a room here, and then there was a room down here, supply sergeant, then back here were the latrines, then upstairs was all bunks. I have chased more guys out, and I had a baseball bat in my room. [chuckling] If I caught them—and I wasn't the only one. Some of the other girls would do the same, too, the supply sergeant especially. I'd grab that bat if they said, "There's a man in the house" or trying to come in. And if I got him going this way toward the fence, I could hear him groaning and his clothes ripping as he went through that barbed wire. I'm telling you! But we discouraged that. [chuckling]
HT: I can imagine. You said you chased them to the fence. Did you ever catch any of them?
RF: Well, not in that I—They outran me, and I was a pretty fast runner then, I guess. But this was interesting, one time we had an inspection team come from Maxwell Field [Alabama], and this was a base inspection. They had a warrant officer and a captain and a major, and they had flown down. Well, here's the base, here's the hospital, here's us, and right here is the officers' club. So the officers apparently had spent the evening after they 18
got there at the officers' club. And the warrant officer—mind you, I want to think that he was just mistaken where he was, he was not familiar with the base, but he got in. He came into one of our barracks. And he was drunk. He was a great tall guy, a redhead. Well, the charge of quarters called the MPs [military police] right quick. We cornered this guy, [chuckling] about six of us, and we got him out of the barracks. And we were in our nightclothes. We had flannel pajamas and a red maroon corduroy robe. I remember that's what I was wearing. And the MP came. We loaded him up and took him to headquarters, the three of us in our night robes and the MP, this redheaded chief warrant officer from Maxwell Field, Alabama. And the officer of the day was Captain Pittinger, who was a white officer in charge of the black troops. Well, he laced that guy up one side and down the other. You know, we had done our duty. We had the MP take us back to the barracks. The next morning before daylight, that inspection team was out of there on the way back to Maxwell Field. They weren't about to do an inspection. I don't know what happened to the warrant officer, he probably got a demerit of some kind, but they turned around and went right back. And I really think that he was just lost, but it didn't look that way to a lot of folks. [laughter] Sitting in the back of that pickup truck, the MP at that time had a pickup truck, this one did, and they had the warrant officer in the front seat and we three WACs in the back, and—[chuckling]
HT: That must have been quite a sight.
RF: Yeah, I think it was. I really think so.
HT: Well, sort of in the same vein, do you recall any embarrassing or hilarious moments?
[Tape turned off]
HT: I think we were talking about hilarious and embarrassing moments, and you were going to tell me another story about—
RF: Well, that was embarrassing for the warrant officer, I'm sure, very much so, and for the inspection team, because that apparently—I mean, it had to be reported to the base commander. The officer of the day, why, [chuckling] he was so flabbergasted, he didn't know what to think of it, really. And he did, I'm sure, read the riot act to that warrant officer.
Well, I don't know, there were not too many embarrassing things, I guess. Maybe I just didn't see them or they didn't embarrass me. I thought that generally overall, the whole time I was in, that I was with some of the best people that I could possibly never in my life in any other way have ever met or managed. I had never been in a group of people where there were Italian, Polish, French, English, Russian, any nationality—you name it, Bosnian, Croatian. My squadrons, the names looked like an international roster of some sort. And I knew every one of them. My first squadron, I even memorized their numbers. You know, we had the name and number together, and it just became part of it. The army serial number is what I'm trying to say.19
We had girls from every state in the union, and some of them were very different from others. Some of them had strange ideas. I left a lot of superstitions at home, I think, when I left, ways that I had done things and understood things. Well, I'm sure that it was the same with them. We had socialites in our group, Alice Faye, for instance. We had the wife of one of the editors of the Washington Post, I think, in my squadron. And we had people of means that could have anything they want. And they didn't have to be in this terrible, mosquito-infested place in Florida, but they were there because they wanted to be there. And it was just such a wonderful group of people. The thing that I liked, I guess best, was the fact that everybody was a buddy of everybody else, one for all and all for one.
My supply sergeant, Lee Allmon, was from Blooming Grove, Texas. I never will forget her. She was one of the toughest critters I think I've ever known. She walked with a decided limp, but she had had both her legs broken. I believe she said she was riding on the back of a truck and somebody rammed the truck. She had her legs hanging off, both were broken right mid-wise, and they were misshapen and scarred. She had a time getting in the military, I mean a time getting in, but they finally let her come in after they put her through extensive tests. She was our drill sergeant, she was our supply sergeant, and general philosopher I guess you'd say. She was just a wonderful person. She had had some college. She left when Buckingham closed. She went to physical therapy school, that's what it was. She became a physical therapist and became a lieutenant, and then after she got out she worked in the coal fields in Kentucky as a therapist, a lung therapist. She was just a fantastic person. Plain, down-to-earth, [chuckling] a Texas drawl that you could hear a mile away. Just somebody that I really kept in touch with for a long time. I don't know whether she is living or not. If I didn't have her current address, I'd just write "Lee Allmon, Blooming Grove, Texas," and she'd get it. So it must be just a little hole-in-the-wall out there somewhere. But just like she was, it's pretty important.
Some of my officers—Well, now all those at Buckingham I didn't get to know too well. Lieutenant [Louise] Smith left us after about six months. Her husband had come home from somewhere, I think it was North Africa, and she became pregnant. And you couldn't stay in then, she had to get out, so she went back to West Palm Beach, Florida. Our second-in-command then was Eloise Husmann, who was from Chicago, and she was a great person. I visited her when we went on one of our trips to Illinois later, she and her mother. I don't know if she's still living. She may or may not be. Of course, I was younger than most of them, and I'm eighty-one, so you can imagine. They're all in their eighties if they're around.
I never thought of embarrassing moments too much. I really didn't. We were so focused on what we were doing, and we really were. I think you get embarrassed when you become unfocused sometimes, and so there was just not room for it.
HT: Well, on another vein, what was the hardest thing you ever had to do physically, either in basic training or while you were at a permanent duty station?
RF: The hardest thing? Well, I think I was in pretty good shape when I went in. I had been a secretary. I wasn't a 100 percent perfect specimen but in pretty [good] shape. I had gone on hikes and that sort of thing, belonged to the hiking club and so forth. Basic was difficult, yes, there was no question about it, but I really think—Now this is from a 20
physical standpoint you're talking about?
HT: Yes.
RF: Well, I learned fast not to volunteer after I did that first time. That mess hall that we had to clean from one end to the other, including the rafters, was not any child's play, I can tell you. It was a new one, and the mess halls were made to feed maybe a thousand people at a time. We had those huge tables with the benches built to them, and we had to move and tug those things around and put them in place. We had to leave that mess hall ready for the troops to come in and the cooks to get in the kitchen. I guess that was the hardest physical job that I ever tried to do, and there were about eight or ten of us girls who were doing it. We'd have to hold each other while one is up here reaching and raking. We didn't turn the hose on it like we did in the latrine. It would have been easy. [chuckling] They wouldn't let us do that. But I guess that was probably the most strenuous activity that I had to do.
HT: And what was the hardest thing you ever had to do emotionally?
RF: Go to the morgue and identify one of the girls that had been killed in an automobile wreck. But that happened at Randolph Field [San Antonio, Texas]. Really, that was the one thing that shook me up. I guess the next would have been, and it pertained to death, we had a B-29 to go down at Randolph Field and all the crew was killed. And my squadron sang at the funeral, at the memorial. And that was almost impossible, really, because we knew some of those troops. But to identify Wanda Halstead was the hardest thing that I think I—I didn't know if I wanted to do it or not. My squadron commander, Arlene Goodridge, she was wonderful. If she hadn't been there, I don't know if I could have done it. But to go to the morgue at Randolph and identify that child. And she was killed in an automobile wreck. They were just driving too fast, on the way to an outing, to a squadron party.
HT: I guess that was very, very difficult. Well, do you ever recall being afraid while you were in the military?
RF: Afraid?
HT: Or being in physical danger?
RF: Let me see, yes. Our softball team from Goodfellow Field [San Angelo, Texas]—this was another base—we were flying to Phoenix to play the softball team at Edwards Field. And I had not flown very much, really, at that point—later on I did, I flew a lot—but there were no seats, no safety belts, or anything else in that plane. We all just piled in, parachutes, our bags, and everything in the back. And there were a couple of GIs along with us. And I thought I smelled gasoline, and these guys were sitting over there smoking, and I just knew we were going to go boom! It may have been that I overreacted, but I was scared at that moment. We had a whole softball team. There were total, with captain and supernumeraries and so forth, about fifteen or twenty people in the back of that—it was a 21
C-47 cargo ship, and we were just sitting on the floor, no way to be battened down if we did run into a problem, no seat belts or anything. That, to me, I guess, would have to be. And I know that I voiced my concern to those guys to stop smoking.
HT: And did they stop smoking?
RF: Yeah.
HT: Well, you say you were on an outing for a baseball team.
RF: Softball team.
HT: Softball. I'm sorry, softball team. What other things did you guys do for fun, social-wise and that sort of thing?
RF: Okay, we didn't have a softball team in Florida or at basic, but there was a basketball team in Florida. I didn't play on that, but we did have softball at Goodfellow Field, San Angelo, and at Randolph Field, Texas, Randolph Field in San Antonio. We also had and did go to Trinity College [San Antonio, Texas] for night courses. Of course, in San Antonio there were many, many things to do, really. This was my last big duty station, too. I went many times to the auditorium. The Metropolitan Opera sent four operas to San Antonio one weekend. I sat there through three of them, I couldn't manage the fourth one. [chuckling] Carmen was one, Tristan and Isolde was another one, and Aida. Can you imagine three of those? Two on Saturday. I got the first one on Sunday, but the second one I just simply couldn't make it, and that was the Marriage of Figaro. I heard Arthur Rubinstein [pianist], I heard Sir Thomas Beecham [English conductor] directing the San Antonio Symphony. I don't know how many other greats, but I went to the symphonies a lot there.
HT: And when was this?
RF: This would have been in 1946, '47, '48, that area. It was after the war. In San Antonio. To tour San Antonio then was a charm, really. None of these crisscrossing highways. It was plain and simple. The Mexican influence was so prominent everywhere, the old missions and all, all the old buildings, and the old eating places, the Buckhorn Saloon. There was just a world of things to do there. You couldn't do everything you wanted to do in one trip to town; whereas, you know, Buckingham was so little to do that we'd get out on Sunday afternoons and just imagine that we were doing something interesting.
HT: Now you were stationed at Buckingham for the duration of the war, until the war ended?
RF: Yeah, I went there '43 to '45, right.
HT: And where were you when VE [Victory in Europe] Day and VJ [Victory in Japan] Day came?22
RF: Well, I was at Buckingham.
HT: At Buckingham. And then after the war ended, you were stationed—?
RF: Okay, we closed Buckingham Field. We didn't need any more aerial gunners. And my squadron, we had to bring it up-to-date and then close it. [chuckling] And so I was transferred then to Turner Field because the first sergeant there went home. You could either go home—As soon as the war was over, a lot of the troops did just go right home. But I didn't. I went to Turner Field, and that's where I ran into the German POWs [prisoners of war], and I was there about six months and then we closed that base, closed the WAC squadron anyway.
HT: And where is Turner Field?
RF: That's in Albany, Georgia. We just closed the WAC squadron. And then from there I was transferred to San Angelo, Texas, to the WAC squadron, and that was deactivated in about three months. So I got in on the closings of three. But it meant that you had to bring everything else up-to-date administratively, and a lot of things were left dangling, you know, and we had to turn in all equipment. There’s a whole lot to deactivating a squadron. So then after I left San Angelo, I was transferred to San Antonio. Now I think it was kind of hit-and-go. They didn't really know what was going to happen. The squadron fell way down to less than twenty people, and then they started building it up. And then the Korean War comes along and they build it up again.
[End Tape 1, Side B—Begin Tape 2, Side A]
HT: We were talking about, I guess, the end of the war years. What made you decide to stay in the army? Or I guess by this time it was the Army Air Force. What made you decide to stay in, as opposed to getting out like most of the people?
RF: Well, we go back to Buckingham for that, because I was there when VE Day and VJ Day—I really liked parts of what I had been through. I mean the whole idea of the war was not very palatable, but I liked the fact that I had been able to do something, and certainly a whole lot more than I had thought I would do. I liked the people that I worked with and I thought, "I can't leave this right now. I want to stay here some more." And some of the other girls had the same feeling.
I had gone [on] another trip to see Laura and June on furlough, and I was on the train—Wait a minute now, on the train from New York to Boston. Let me see, yeah, New York to Boston—this was the second ending, when the A-bomb was dropped. And like everybody else, I didn't know what it was. I had no idea. We were sitting in the station, my train is going this direction, the other one this way. This train that is going west was loaded with GIs, and their window was as close as that to my window, but you couldn't hear, you know. So, I drew on the window backwards so they could read it. I could see they were the 28th from Pennsylvania, and I drew my number of my squadron, and North 23
Carolina and so forth. You know, we just corresponded like that while we were sitting there in the station. And I looked at those guys and I—Now this was before I knew the A-bomb had been dropped. I looked at them, and here they had come back from Europe and were on the way to the Pacific. And I thought, "How sad. How sad." I just couldn't believe it. Even before the war when they were having the maneuvers down at Southern Pines, [North Carolina], the 28th Division was here, so was the Yankee Division, the 26th from New England, and the 78th, the Rainbow Division from New York, and so I recognized their insignia. I knew who they were and what they were: infantrymen. Well, you know, that left a weird, terrible feeling. And then by the time we got to Boston we'd heard that the A-bomb had been dropped. We still didn't know what it meant. But I have thought of that many times. I wonder where those guys were when they learned that they were not going to be needed any longer to go to the Pacific.
HT: I'm sure they were very grateful.
RF: Don't you know they were! And while we're on this topic, in New York, several times I made that trip, and another time I went with one of my troops to New York on furlough. I didn't get very many furloughs, but the few that I did, why, were pretty lengthy. I went in Grand Central Station, the door off the street one day, and it's—you drop down into the concourse. I have never in my life seen so many GIs. [chuckling] It was solid khaki. Well, I have seen that many too in parades. But it was interesting; everybody in that place was in uniform, solid khaki, waiting for a train or just gotten off a train. But that's the way it was everywhere you went then. You seldom saw anybody moving about unless they were in a uniform.
I was home on furlough when Victory in Europe happened, and of course that was a good feeling, too. When I got back to the squadron, I had learned that the girls in the upper decks had taken the mattresses off their beds and had slid down the stairs on mattresses celebrating. [chuckling] I can imagine carrying that mattress back upstairs to slide. It didn't tear holes in them or anything, I don't suppose. But there was quite a celebration, I guess.
HT: I can imagine, everywhere.
RF: Yeah, but when the A-bomb was dropped, oh boy. Yeah, it was interesting to be in New York. On one of my trips, and it must have been—I can't remember when, but the 82nd [Airborne Division] landed the day after I had to come back home. I didn't get to see a parade down Fifth Avenue.
HT: A ticker-tape type parade?
RF: Yeah, the 82nd. Well, you can't have everything, and I missed that one. [chuckling]
HT: That's true. Speaking about special events and that sort of thing, do you recall when President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt died?
RF: Yes, I do.
Continues in Part Two