Oral history interview with Sherley Mae White, 2010

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Sherley Mae White
INTERVIEWER: Beth Ann Koelsch
DATE: May 6, 2010
[Begin Interview]
[Redacted discussion of scrapbook]
BK: So, all right. And away we go. Let’s just make this official here. Start over. Today is the 6 of May, 2010. My name is Beth Ann Koelsch. I’m at the home of Sherley Mae White in Elon, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And so, you would like it as Sherley Mae White Collection. Okay.
So, let’s start with general questions. Where and when were you born?
SW: In Fort Wayne, Indiana, on May the 18, 1923.
BK: And that’s where you grew up?
SW: Yes.
BK: Okay. About your—Tell me a little bit about your family and home life.
SW: Oh, gee. Excellent. This is the core of what’s going on, I think. My mother was from upper state New York and my father was from Indianapolis. And they—mother was being trained as a concert pianist up there, had a honorary—what am I trying to say—scholarship. She had a scholarship to either New England Conservatory or Curtis [Institute of Music] in Philadelphia. Curtis is still the finest training place that we have. It out—You don’t even have to pay to go there. The only way you can get in is by exam and what not. And she was going to do that, but her dad died. So, she had to stay home and help support her mother and her younger sister and got some office skills and that sort of thing and was working in that area.
My dad, in Indianapolis, worked with the—Indianapolis used to be the Detroit of the country. That’s where all the first automobiles were built.
BK: Wow. I didn’t know that.2
SW: He used to test cars on the brickyard for them, as a young kid.
BK: Like test drives?
SW: Yeah, test drives.
BK: Oh, okay.
SW: He used to test drive the cars on the brickyard. And I don’t know how he got up into the Syracuse area, but it was because there was—You had to be working in ammunition or something like that, doing some sort of factory work during World War I, as well as World War II, I think. And anyway, he was transferred up there. And they met up there and were finally married up there, and then came back to Fort Wayne at some point, which I don’t—I’m not too sure because I wasn’t even there at that point. My sister was born in New York State, in that area—Syracuse area somewhere. And then—but I was born four years later down in Fort Wayne.
I wouldn’t trade my mother and father for all of the gold, diamonds, status, celebrity, kings, queens of anybody you could suggest. They were the parents of parents. They knew they were the parents and we were the children, my sister and I, and that we each had our own role to play in that sense. But it wasn’t a very—It wasn’t a confining kind of thing.
My dad was a—became an engineer, and he—My mother was one of the best book reviewers in Fort Wayne. She was in demand around various clubs and things. She belonged to a couple of clubs. And also—but was asked on the edges of that. They were good church people. They went a lot, and we went with them.
BK: What church?
SW: Simpson Methodist Episcopal. I don’t know how that got to be that way, but anyway, that’s what it was. And they—There were no babysitters, so we had to go. We had to go with them. There was—You can’t leave them at home! So we went with them everywhere. And I have done more high school and junior—what would be junior high here, I don’t like that idea—but that kind of homework in the cloakrooms of the Shrine [Temple] in Fort Wayne, Indiana, than I can think of because we had to go too. And just because that’s the way it was.
They were great lovers of learning, naturally, because they had to get their own education themselves. And they—I shudder every time I hear these people on television, “Oh, it’s a snowy day. You don’t have to go to school. Isn’t that wonderful?” And that whole attitude, and parents groan when their kids are going to be home. And there is that—We’ve lost that whole concept. Mother used to tell us, “It’s your job now. You have to go to school and learn all you can possibly learn. It’s terribly important.” And she was very serious—They were very serious about it. I think that whole concept has been lost and it’s—we’re going to pay for it more ways than one.
It was a—Everything was fine. They—I was born in one part of the town. And they built a new home at the edge of town, the south part of town, and we were there only 3
a few years when the Depression hit. Daddy lost his job, they missed payments, and they lost their home. I’ve been through this. [chuckles] I’ve been through this. I was about seven or something like that when this was all happening.
BK: And where was his job? What—
SW: He was with—oh, golly. The Wayne Pump Company, I think it was, in Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne had a big GE [General Electric] plant. It had Magnavox there, the Zollner Pistons. Detroit can’t—That was our basketball team. They were the Zollner Pistons before they were the Detroit Pistons or wherever they were playing basketball. And Indiana is more basketball than North Carolina ever thought of being.
BK: Okay. That’s pretty basketball then.
SW: Oh honey, it was not a free choice. Oh lord. Anyway, yeah, they lost the—I can remember the day that Mother told us. She just sat us on the couch in the living room and said, “Well, Daddy has lost his job. Everything’s going to be all right, but we’re going to have to find a new home. And while we do that, Uncle Fred down in Indianapolis said he’d be glad to have you keep Aunt Minnie company. And so, we’re going to take you down to Indianapolis at the end of the—in the next day or two, and you’ll spend probably a week down there with them. And we’ll come down there and get you as soon as we have a new house. And it’ll probably be just a week or two. We’ll find a place.”
That’s all that was said. And, “Okay,” you know. A couple of little kids, what—“Okay,” that was fine.
We were never, ever involved in the family financial—I never knew what my dad made. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what his salary was. We never talked about it. Mother ran the show, of course, I think most women in those days did. He’d bring his pay envelope home and his check, and she paid the bills. And we’d go downtown and do those, because all the places had—the gas company and the telephone company, they all had their offices in town.
And Fort Wayne is the size of Winston[-Salem, North Carolina], and it always has been about that size. And it was a great town, really, because it had three—I guess it was three. We had the public school system: North Side, South Side, and Central High Schools. Then we had a complete—and the Purdue [University] and Indiana [University] both had branches of their universities there that we could go to. The other one—the Lutherans had their own batch of schools. They had their own grade schools, and they had a college, Concordia [Senior] College. And the Catholics had their own grade schools and whatnot, and they had their [University of] Saint Francis.
So, it was a completely mixed place in town, and everyone was attached to whatever they were attached to. And we lived on a street, when they finally found a place for us, not too—It was north. It was out of that section of town, which was too bad. But it was close enough that we could go—I could go to the same schools and graduate. But we lived next door to a Catholic family, a Jewish family, and the Lutherans were in the next—See, we played with the kids in the neighborhood, and then we had school chums, and we played with those when we were at school. But the two didn’t meet. We had two different lives, you know, in a sense. But our streets were made up like that, of all—4
Everybody was mixed up. But we didn’t play with the people in school much. We didn’t have that kind of thing, but I think it was more healthy, probably, socially and so on. Anyway—
BK: So this is about 1930, ’31?
SW: Yes, yes, in that area. And I do think that when they pulled out the six—is it sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and made a middle school out of them? That was the biggest mistake that they ever made in their lives. We had kindergarten to eighth, and nine to twelve. For the simple reason: kindergarten up through the fifth grade was on the first floor, and with all that they did and that kind of thing. And when you got to be in the fifth grade, you went upstairs, and you started to go passing from class to class. You didn’t have to stay in the same place. And the kids up there knew about the little kids downstairs, and there was a great deal of—You know, they were protective of them. And the little kids looked up to those kids like mad, because they were upstairs and they were going from class to class to get their infor—and they had to stay in the same room and all this other good stuff, you know. It was an entirely different atmosphere.
By the time they got out and went to high school, the kids that came through that, they had been taking care of some of the little kids. They had grown up, because they had had some responsibility. They’d had a responsibility of—Yeah [unclear] and it wasn’t always the greatest in the world, but it was a different kind of aspect when they hit high school. They knew that that was the bigger one and they were going to have more responsibility at that point, too. But it was a different gradual training of youth, I think, that makes more sense than what they’re doing now and separating out. My goodness, what’s going on? [chuckles] It makes me shudder to think.
But anyway, it was an excellent town to grow up in. As I say, my parents were my parents. They had—Mother had a delightful sense of humor, and so did my dad. He was very quiet. And as I say, she ran the place very efficiently. We did things together. Every Saturday noon, when the new movies came into town, we went. Daddy loved the movies and Mother loved the movies. And although he worked at the office Saturday mornings, he’d tear home because we’d get in at one o’clock, it was a dime for each one of us kids, and I think they paid fifteen cents. If you went after 6:00 [p.m.] it was a quarter. So, you know, we—
But those movie places were like palaces. Oh, they were gorgeous places. You know, everybody was quiet, the guys were all dressed up, and there was no eating and all this other stuff. You went downstairs, these swirling staircases, you know, and swirly ones up to the top. And they had maids down there who took care of your needs, and that’s where little babies could get their little pants fixed up, you know, and all that good stuff. But it was an entirely different atmosphere than what goes on here now.
We liked the movies. Daddy liked them. He like—He loved the Western thing. But we liked the musicals and all the rest of them. So, we were good movie fans. Every neighborhood in town—I think we had three of those movie houses downtown, and every neighborhood had its own, that had the—If you missed the movie there you might get it later on in your neighborhood, sort of business. I think it’s just like Winston. So that was part of—5
But the business of going places: Mother and Daddy belonged to a Saturday night club, and it was a bridge club. The men smoked cigars and the ladies—It was pot luck, and someone was the hostess and you brought those things. Of course, we went to that too. We had to! And that was okay, and people accepted it. We didn’t—We were good little kids. And we loved it because these various houses we went into, of our adult parents, had different kinds of magazines than what we had at home. We had standards and they were very good. And so we always looked forward to seeing the magazines, and so we’d just plop down in a big chair and be very quiet. And when we got too tired, well, we’d wander into a bedroom. They usually put the coats on the bed somewhere. And we’d wander into a bedroom and just flop down on the bed and go to sleep until they got through about midnight playing cards and take us home.
So, we—it was a different kind of growing up, I think, than kids are getting these days. We participated. Every Saturday we went to the library, and every Saturday we came home with books. Or they deposited us there until they did what they wanted to do in town. “We’ll pick you up at six o’clock. Be ready.” And I have to laugh because of this 3D thing. Honey, when I was eight, nine, and ten, I was taking home stereopticon views, and the big batches of cards with them.
BK: Oh. Did you have the viewer at home?
SW: Oh, yeah. No, no, no—
BK: Oh, so you rented the viewer.
SW: They checked it out. It was just part of the deal. You know, you had a library card and you could take out the whole kit and caboodle. And we saw all this 3D stuff, god, back in the thirties. Come on, give me a break.
BK: Not impressed.
SW: I’m not impressed one bit with it. Mother told us you didn’t have to look at the African naked men. [BK chuckles] But then that was all right. We didn’t care. We weren’t interested in naked Africans anyway. But we saw a whole batch of stuff that way, in stereopticon view. It was very nice.
So, we were library people from way back, and a reading family. My dad read the Saturday Evening Post when it came in the door. He read it from cover to cover. Took National Geographic, Mother took the Good Housekeeping. And this was the time when canned goods were just beginning to come on the market. She would not buy anything that didn’t have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
BK: Got it.
SW: We were close enough and we had—I, you know—You talk about organic food, I grew up on it, I guess. Because Mother always—The farms were right around us all over the place. We had two huge open air markets. One was in the center of town. It was a big stone building with three blocks, I think, down the middle of town. And then we’d got a 6
big one out by where we lived, at that point, too. And it was just like it. But the farmers had all the fresh stuff. Mother never bought fresh stuff in the grocery store. We got all of our fresh stuff from the farmers. And I think it was before they were making fertilizer. [chuckles] So, you know, it—Well, anyway.
BK: So your dad did find another job?
SW: He found another job. And when they did, of course, he—They came down and picked us up. I think we only stayed at Uncle Fred’s place for maybe—maybe a week and a half. And they found another house.
BK: And they rented.
SW: No.
BK: Oh, they bought it?
SW: I think they—I’m not too sure, you see—
BK: Right, exactly. He didn’t talk about it.
SW: We didn’t talk about it. This was where we lived, and this was what we had. And it was good. The neighborhood was fine, and the kids were good on the block. They were all different from what we’d had. But I had to get special permission to graduate from my grade school, because we moved when I was in, evidently, the eighth grade—seventh or eighth grade. Then I had to have a bike to ride back and forth, which I thought was a good idea. But they were a little bit horrified about the whole idea, but it worked out okay. And I rode a bike back and forth when I was in the eighth grade to get—so I could graduate with my class. But then the high school was no problem, and it was closer to where we lived anyway. I used to probably ride a bike to school too, once in a while.
And the kids, we walked. We walked no matter what. The kids would start at one end of the block and just collect. Kids would drop in going by. You might start with one kid, and by the time you got down to the end of the block you had six or seven of us there. Pick each other up in this way. [We] walked home at lunch, walked back in the afternoon. This was all in an hour. [chuckles] Although they had a cafeteria, which you could stay in if you wanted to, or could. And we—
And we knew what adults were, and we never if—We never stepped on anybody’s yard; we never cut through. And we knew that every adult had the power over us that our mother and father had. All they had to do was come out and say, “You will not do that,” or, “Why are you doing what you’re doing?” And we didn’t do it again. And by George, they—sometimes they told our parents, sometimes they didn’t. But we had a great, huge respect for the adults. No matter who they were—and for property and for things of that sort. If it wasn’t ours, you had no business being there. Period. You know, it didn’t hurt! I’m a happy, silly person. I managed to get through all of that. But the thing that worries me more is that they were parents. Mother was never “Mom.” She was always Mother, and it was Mother and Daddy. 7
And oh, for the health thing, not much wrong with me except my eyes. I didn’t do that. Alamance Eye did it. But anyway, when we were little, of course we were banging around and got hurt and scraped and everything else, and Mother would take care of us with a—not Band-Aids, but whatever had to be done. And then when Daddy came home—because he was the first aid guy on his floor, in his business that he was in. It turned out to be Oil Burners, finally. Wayne Oil Burners instead of the other one. He was the first aid guy, so Mother would tell him, I’m sure, ahead of time, what had happened and what the problem was. But anyway, she said, “We’ll just turn Daddy over to it. Daddy will help you with this, and he’ll take care of you when he comes home.”
So he would get his little black box of all this first aid stuff and come out to us and say, “Now, tell me what happened.” And he’d sit there and we’d tell him all the things that had happened and why we were hurt and how it happened and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m sure the stories were great. And he’d listen very carefully. “Okay,” he said, “let me take a look at you. Let’s check this bandage here, see if Mother did a pretty good job. Eh, that’s not bad. Let’s see if we need to change this,” and the whole thing. And then he’d be very quiet and he’d look at us, and he’d say, “Well,” he says, “I think I know what’s wrong.”
Oh, my eyes would bug over, I am sure. “Yes?”
He said, “This isn’t too bad.” He says, “I don’t think you’re hurt real bad, but you do have the epizootic.” [dramatic sigh] And he said, “Now, don’t worry about that.” He said, “I think you ought to go to bed early tonight.” And he said, “We’ll check all of your bandages and see that they’re all fixed and everything is fine.” And he said, “I think if you get a good night’s sleep,” he said, “you’ll feel better tomorrow morning.” Honey, when we got up the next morning, we didn’t have a pain or an ache or nothing was wrong with us. Now, I’ve always—Now, you remember about the epizootic. It’s all in your head.
BK: Got it.
SW: It’s all in your head. And I have carried that with me all since. And that’s true. Something’s wrong, well, I probably have the—I don’t know how you spell it—but I probably have the epizootic! Daddy said you had it, go to bed and forget about it and get up the next morning, maybe take an aspirin these days, but not very often, and you’re okay.
BK: Wow. That’s great.
SW: So that’s the solving of the medical problems of the world.
BK: Got it.
SW: The epizootic.
BK: So you have one younger sister?
SW: Older.8
BK: Older, okay.
SW: Four years older.
BK: Four. And you all—
SW: And one day she—Evidently she called up to Mother, who was in the kitchen, and said, “Sherley’s eating dirt!”
And Mother opened the thing and said, “Okay,” she said. “That’s all right. You have to eat a peck of dirt in your life anyway,” and put the window down. [chuckles]
BK: Yeah, there’s studies on that.
SW: So, that’s the end of that one. But it was a happy family. And I will say this, which shocks everybody, I do not ever remember Mother and Daddy ever saying, “I love you.” But we knew it by the way they—We lived by the way they treated us. We felt safe. We felt loved. We had fun. As a family, we played together, we went on trips together. Everything—We went to the Saturday night club together with all the cigars and everything else. And—But I don’t remember this business of the minute you walk out the door “I love you!” and then you go off and leave for the next ninety hours or something of the day. I never remember them actually saying that. You know, taking and saying “I love you.” But we knew it down to our core. And we were right. We were safe. We were loved. We were taken care of. We were never involved in their business, which was money, whether or not they bought a house or not. But they said, “We had a nice little house that we bought.” And they said, “We’re going to be happy there.” And we were. It wasn’t the same. I found later that it almost broke my mother’s heart when we lost the other house. It was a nice house. So, I think there’s a difference in bringing up kids these days that could be looked into.
BK: Now, did you get along with your sister? Were you similar?
SW: Yeah—no.
BK: No?
SW: We were entirely different. But she was the talented one. She was a budding artist, without any doubt. Mother had the music and—I messed with music a little bit, but I didn’t want—I don’t like to perform, and I didn’t want to get involved in that. But Elinor could out dress-design any of them in Hollywood. She made beautiful things. She went to every art class, every art school we had in Fort Wayne, and had a—won a scholarship to Chicago Art [School of the Art Institute of Chicago] when she graduated, and turned it down and I don’t know why. She was in Bill Blass’s class; Bill Blass was in Fort Wayne.
BK: Oh wow. Okay.9
SW: And that idiot—And she won all the prizes and he didn’t. But what did he do? He went and packed up his bags and went to New York and became famous and healthy and wealthy. She turned it down and we—I wasn’t involved in any of the conversations. I don’t think the folks discouraged her one bit. But I do know she finally went to Ball State [University] and did—I don’t know whether she—She didn’t graduate from Ball State. I think she only went two years. She hated it and—because the only art she could get there was teacher’s art training, that sort of thing. And she got married down there. The thing that I was thoroughly aware of: that every morning or on weekends—I can see her now, at the back door, you know, pouring rain, sopping wet, crying and crying and crying, and she was homesick. They sent her home—homesick more than—you know, at least once a month, and sometimes more often than that.
BK: From Ball State?
SW: From Ball State.
BK: Wow.
SW: So, I don’t know what her—what that problem was. But it was the loss of a gift somehow, and why it couldn’t have been forced or something, that kind of hurt was carried through her life. She also graduated and got other degrees and became a reading teacher and was excellent in that area with the kids and—But her artwork was something that Adrian [costume designer] couldn’t do.
BK: Wow.
SW: It was all costume design. It was all the kind of thing that these guys made a fortune in. And they still—Charlie still has a lot of her stuff at home. She died of breast cancer. Or, no, no, no, that was Susie, wasn’t it. Anyway. She had—I don’t know. I think she had strokes and they said she had Alzheimer’s. And she was poured through with all those drugs and didn’t make it. But we were very different.
BK: So, if she was the creative one, what were you?
SW: I guess the tomboy. Hello [rag house white. Hi, blue?] We were very active: we played tennis, we skated. I had a red wagon. I had skates every summer. And we played tennis out in the street. And we were always by a park in Fort Wayne. We’d play out there in the summertime. We’d spend our time at the park and back and forth. I don’t know. I was—I liked to write. I liked to write and did things of that sort. But I was a little more physical. And as I say, Amelia Earhart was my—
BK: Right. Well, tell me about that. Tell me about your interest and how—when your thoughts—10
SW: I was interested in flying, but I was carsick all the time. No matter where I went, I was carsick. Even when Mother had to go back when her father died, and she had to—or her mother died, and her sister was left. I was an infant, evidently, and she said, “You were sick every mile of that trip on the train back and forth.” And I’ve been sick every since. There’s something wrong with my—whatever’s in my ears or something. I don’t know. But I get carsick very quickly. And I managed to overcome it when I was flying around through the air. I decided this was not going to work, so I tried to—and I did a pretty good job of it. But the—What was the train going to?
BK: Well, the Amelia Earhart—
SW: Oh, yeah. And I was fascinated by her. She was good-looking. She was quiet. She was from a good family. Her dad, I think, was a doctor. She had her graduate degrees in social service and was doing that. They were a fairly wealthy family—a little more than average. And I was fascinated with flying and soaring and all that other stuff. I’d get the books out of the library and had a little notebook at one point for diagrams and things. And I remember climbing trees there, before we had to move in that house. And I’d wrap myself around the trunk of the tree and I had my—I carved out a little bit, just slightly so I wouldn’t damage the tree—had my control board and that sort of thing. I’d climb up the tree and sit in there and look around and I’d fly my airplane around like an idiot. [chuckles] But—And I found out that she wrote poetry, and I found it in our library. And it was very nice poetry. It was very light, very—few words, few lines, and very nicely done. And I followed all of her races and things of that sort, and I wanted to be like her.
BK: You wanted to fly?
SW: Sure. That’s when I first decided I wanted to fly. They took me up as a birthday present one—somewhere along in here. Out at the Fort Wayne airport, for a birthday present, they let me take the trip. I think it was a five dollar trip around Fort Wayne in the air, and then you came back down again. And whoo, that was fun. That was fun. But when she took that last trip, I put a National Geographic map on the bedroom, and I put it in there and had her marked out where she was going. When she was lost, that was pretty terrible.
I didn’t learn until later. [chuckles] Mother told me this later, when I was tooting around the world. She said “Well, we thought we were going to lose you at one point.”
I said “I don’t understand that.”
She said, “When she was lost,” she said, “you almost died.” She said, “You were so grief-stricken and,” this sounds rather weird, “and concerned. And you knew she was going to be found. You knew she was going to be found, and she wasn’t. And all this was happening.” And she said, “I had never seen such grief in a child in my life.”
BK: Now, how old were you about?
SW: I don’t remember the date of that.
BK: Right. We can look it up.11
SW: I guess I was in high school. [White was fourteen in 1937.] And she said that was—But she was my ideal of a woman. She was feminine, but she was also very bright but very caring and had this dream. And she was doing her dream, and I thought that was what I would like to do and be like, somehow. So, and I still think about that a little bit. I still think about that a little bit.
BK: So, did you like school? Did you have a favorite subject?
SW: Oh, yes! Oh, I loved all of them. I loved—We both loved going to school. Yes, indeed. Liked them all. And I liked English, of course. I became an English major later on. But oh, yeah, we took four—I took four years of Latin and took the college prep courses.
The folks reminded us, they said, “We don’t have the money to send you. You’re going to have to get scholarships.”
And, “Well, that’s okay. We’ll try.”
Elinor got the scholarship she needed. By that time I was in the service. And of course we in the service did not have any idea about that they were going to pass that [GI] Bill for the graduate degrees and whatnot. And so that wasn’t the reason we joined, but that’s the way I got to Mills [College]. And they gave you money based on the number of months that you served, and I figured I could do three years. So, I said, “Okay, I’ll do it in three years.” And I did. I took overloads every three—every year, and I went to summer school and got all the credits. The thing that I regret is that I had no opportunity to take the electives that I would like to have taken at Mills. It’s an excellent school out in California. But it was an excellent education, and I managed to squeeze it out that way. As I say, I got that after I had my master’s, so—
BK: Right, exactly.
SW: One of those things.
BK: So, where did you go to high school?
SW: South Side. South Side High.
BK: And what year did you graduate?
SW: Forty—let’s see, ’37, ’38, ’39—I think it was about ’40.
BK: Okay.
SW: I think I was a freshman in ’37, I think.
BK: Okay, so—
SW: Four years.
BK: So Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened.12
SW: No, no.
BK: So, you graduated high school, you couldn’t afford to go to college, so what did you do?
SW: Lincoln [National] Life Insurance Company.
BK: You became—
SW: They only took, in their [chuckles] awful jobs, honor society students. You had to belong to the National Honor Society.
BK: [chuckles] Okay.
SW: I managed that one, too, so that was all right. I think we made thirty dollars every two weeks.
BK: Wow. What was your job? What was your position?
SW: I worked in the notice department. And it was a big room where they ran off, on some sort of machine over here, a three—a piece of paper that had the three notices of payment due. And there were two of us, and we were both about the same age. She was from Kendallville [Indiana] I think, or somewhere there. We got these two jobs together. We had to take them and sort them by state, because Lincoln Life is a big company, and this was the home office. We had to sort these things by state, by district, and that sort of thing. And back in the back corner was an efficiency expert. And he had his little black book and he had his little clock and he had his pen, and he’d sit back there and watch us. He’d count how many we did in certain periods of time and that sort of thing. Oh god. Honey— [laughs]
BK: How long were you there?
SW: Until I could get out. Until I got to be twenty. I guess I went there when I was seventeen or eighteen.
BK: Seventeen, eighteen, and in the meantime Pearl Harbor happened.
SW: Pearl Harbor hit and—
BK: Do you remember where you were?
SW: Oh, yeah, at dinner—
BK: At dinner?
SW: —that Sunday. Yeah, that Sunday.13
BK: Just heard it on the radio?
SW: Oh. yeah. Oh, yeah. We always had radio. And then that’s when I decided that maybe—I knew I wanted to do something else, that I wasn’t going to stay here forever, by George. Although it was a place that a lot of people liked to come and stay, some of the other people, but not me. And—
BK: Did you know before, you know, the SPARS [Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, from “Semper Paratus, Always Ready”] or that women joined? Did you have like an escape plan?
SW: Oh, yeah.
BK: Okay.
SW: My escape plan was this: that we were getting a lot of publicity down from Canada for the RAF [Royal Air Force].
BK: Okay.
SW: And what the RAF needed were trainees for their radio operators.
BK: Oh, okay.
SW: So, Daddy and I got our heads together. And he said, “You know, Purdue [University] out here, down the street in town, has a radio engineering course.” He says, “Why don’t we go?”
It was a night course, three nights a week. And you go down, take this regular radio engineering course. And he said, “Don’t—.” Because I was listening to Boston, which had Morse code courses on it.
And I said, “That’d be great.”
He said “I’d like to go with you.”
I said, “Okay!”
So, the two of us—
BK: That’s great.
SW: —packed up and went down to Purdue three nights a week. I think I accumulated something like six hundred hours of radio engineering down there. And I kept my eye on Canada. And I finally wrote them a letter and said, you know, “I would like to have more information about your campaign for people in the Canadian—Royal Canadian RAF and maybe radio engineering, and I have this as my background,” et cetera, et cetera. I was a pretty good letter writer.
One day Mother opened the mail and she came in holding it like this. And she said, “What is this?”14
“Oh! Is it from Canada?”
“Yes. Would you mind opening it for me?”
And so she gave it to me to open up and they said, “We would be charmed.”
BK: It was about 1940? [chuckling] That’s—That’s very British.
SW: I think I’m about eighteen. “Yes, your recommendations look very good, and we would be very interested in sending you more information,” and whatever. I’m not sure what the dang letter said. Oh, boy.
Mother said, “What has possessed you?” [chuckles]
And I, “Well, I want to join something, and they won’t take anybody over here in our country until you’re twenty-one.” I said, “I don’t want to wait that long.” I think I was eighteen or something.
And she said, “No.”
[sighs] “Okay.”
So, I just put that in my back pocket and found out that I could join—I went across the street. The big post office in Fort Wayne was right across from the Lincoln Life building. I went across the street to the recruiting offices over there, and I said, “How do you join the Coast Guard here?”
He said, “You don’t.” He says, “You have to go down to Indianapolis to join the Coast Guard.” And he said, “You want to join?”
I said, “Well, yeah—No, I just wanted to join the navy, I think.”
He said, “Well, you have to go down there for the navy, too.”
I said, “Okay.”
BK: And you’re what, eighteen, and it’s like—
SW: I was eighteen, and he said—
BK: Summer of ’42, maybe.
SW: Yeah, somewhere around there. He said, “This is the address.” He said, “Why don’t you run down there.”
Well, Indianapolis, we could go down to see Uncle Fred and Aunt Minnie. Why not? So, we did. We went down there. And I told them I’d like to talk to the recruiting people down there. Mother and Daddy, “Okay.” So, they went with me.
And we went to the recruiting officer, and they said, “You’re too young. You cannot go.” And he said, “The only way that you could possibly enlist would be at twenty, and then your parents would have to sign for you.”
And so, “Okay.” So, I went back home. I thought “Oh, brother.” [laughs]
Well, I lasted until I was twenty, and then I said, “Can I apply again?”
They said, “Yes.”
And so, I applied and I was sent up to the—The tests and everything were up in Chicago, and we had to go to the Naval Station up there. And all these people were in booths, and the Coast Guard and the [U.S.] Navy and the [U.S.] Army and Marines and all of them were there. And you had to wait in line. 15
And the [U.S.] Navy gal was real busy and the little Coast Guard was saying, “It’s practically the same thing.” She said, “I can give you all the basic information.” [BK chuckles] But she said, “And then you can just move over from when that line gets a little bit shorter.” And she said, “You can move right over and just slip right in. All your paperwork will be done.” And she said, “Would that suit you?”
I said, “Sure, that’d be all right. I don’t mind.” So, we sat down there and we did all that and we did the paperwork.
BK: Now, you and your parents? Who are “we”?
SW: Oh, no! No, I went on the train.
BK: Oh, just you and a friend?
SW: No, I went up—
BK: Just you by yourself.
SW: Yeah, I just got on a train and went up to Chicago.
We went through all that business and she said, “Well, I think that’s about all I can tell you.”
And I said, “What about the Coast Guard?”
And she said, “Well, I can tell you a little bit about that.” She said, “You can’t get in that line yet.”
I said, “No.” She said—I said, “Well, okay.”
Well, I went home and opened up the front door and Mother said, “How’d it go?”
I said “I’m a member of—I joined the Coast Guard.” [laughs]
BK: Now, why’d you join—Why did you want to be in the [U.S.] Navy versus the WAC [Women’s Army Corps] or the Marines?
SW: Well, because—Oh, I didn’t want to be in the army. Oh, no.
BK: Because?
SW: It didn’t—It just didn’t suit me. I don’t know. The navy was a little bit cleaner or something.
BK: Okay.
SW: I don’t know what there was about it. And the Marines were pretty tacky. They were pretty snooty, I thought. And anyway. And I couldn’t—I wasn’t a swimmer. I wasn’t a water person by any means. But I always liked the navy. And they—The navy had good publicity regularly in the newspapers. And they were—They had WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service—U.S. Navy] going by then.16
BK: So, the WAVES had good publicity or the navy in general?
SW: The navy, but also the WAVES.
BK: WAVES.
SW: And then the WAVES were in operation by this time, and they had big pictures of them in the newspapers and spreads of them marching up and down and doing all this stuff, and the kind of stuff I’d been looking at in my book and so on. So, I was going to join the WAVES.
BK: They just had better publicity, you think?
SW: Yeah. And the nice thing about the Coast—It’s a small group. It has a better job in peacetime than it does in war. It’s taken over by the navy in the war, and is subservient to the navy. Because they have all these skills with small boats and things like that, and they were the ones that took them all into the shore and off the big boats and off the shore and all this stuff. And they were—But they were the older. They were an older—August 4, 1790, Alexander Hamilton created the Coast Guard. [laughs]
BK: All right. [SW laughs] Semper Paratus [Always Ready].
SW: Semper Paratus right down to the ground. But it’s a fine little service, smaller service, and I’m real glad that I made that choice. She was nice and I couldn’t tell the difference particularly. And I thought, “Well, this sounds like a good idea, too. I can do it right. Let me go.”
BK: Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do?
SW: No.
BK: No? You just wanted to join.
SW: And you didn’t have much choice in those days. I mean, it isn’t like it is now. Except for the Canadians and they were looking for specific kinds of things, I think.
BK: Do you remember what day you entered the service?
SW: No. It was darned close to my birthday, because when I hit twenty—
BK: So, it was May ’44, maybe?
SW: Yes, I know it was May ’44. And I remember, yes, it was. That was—I said, “Okay, I’m—This is it.”
And they said, “All right. We’ll sign for you.” And they did. 17
And I’m not sure where all the—I’m not clear on where they got the papers or how we got them or anything else, but they had to sign me out of the family and into theirs, in a sense, because I was only twenty. And it was on my birthday that I—“I’m going!”
You see, it wasn’t because I was an unhappy kid at home. I cried every time I left. I really did. That went on even when I was working in New York and I was flying all over the country and doing all that work. When I—I always arranged my route so that I could stop by Fort Wayne and see the folks for a little while and then pack. And every time that—it was United Airlines—would start its engines and I was in the window and I’d see my folks, going back to New York, I cried every time. It was not that I wanted to leave home. It wasn’t that I was unhappy at home. It was a dilemma. The best thing that ever happened to me was my family. And it was not a perfect family. I mean we, I suppose, had some hard spots, but I can’t remember any of them except the hard spots the adults handled. We were kids.
BK: So, if someone asked you why you joined, what would you say?
SW: Oh, okay. The choice in Fort Wayne was you either are in service or you’re in a plant. Like I say, we had the GE, we had Magnavox, we had Pistons, and we had a whole batch of factories there. It was a factory town, in some ways. Everybody else was going to the factories and making a pile of money. So, I chose Coast Guard at twenty one dollars a month. [laughs]
BK: Because—Why’d you choose it versus making the money?
SW: I’m not a money person. I don’t work for money. [laughs]
BK: So, you wanted the—
SW: I wanted to be a part of what was going on. I wanted to be a part of the actual business, the actual affair. But I didn’t want any part of the army. I was never interested in the [U.S.] Army or the Marines. The WAVES were the ones that sort of appealed to me. Then when the Coasties came along, I thought, “I think I’d like that even a little bit better, because we’re a smaller family and it’s a smaller group and has a good reputation. And it doesn’t blow its horn. And it has a bigger job in the peacetime than it does in wartime, in a sense.” It’s more a—Look what they’re doing down there in the blasted oil thing. They took charge of that.
BK: They did.
SW It took them five seconds to take charge of it. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t want to work in the factory.
BK: Okay.18
SW: And people were making good money, had bonds coming out of their eyeballs and a few other things.
BK: Yeah. So, you just were drawn to the navy; they were classier. Lot of the posters at the time said that if you enlisted, you’d be freeing a man to fight. Is that—Did you view your enlistment that way?
SW: Sure. That’s what we did. That was our job. That was our job. And this is what I say that they lost in this. We took off—we were—we took off the—We took on the shore jobs. The men who were doing that were put out to sea on the ships and boats—and on patrol and things of that sort that they did. They had port authorities and things of that sort that they manned, too. They did an awful lot of escort work and things like that during the war. But that was not what our—Our job was to take all of that stuff away from them and to become the clothing, the people, the schooling, all of the office work, and all that sort of business. And that’s what we did. We learned to be yeomen and storekeepers, if you would, and to be in charge, to be managers, to run the clothing departments and teach.
Because we had to go to school in training. We had six weeks of boot, and we had to go to—August 4, 1790! And we—[laughs]
BK: Learned your history.
SW: We had to learn our history and the history of the country and all that other good stuff. That—those women that were in those top jobs—in the Coast Guard you had—The officers had to be paired with a male officer of the same rank. She could not get advanced until he did.
BK: Wow. I didn’t know that.
SW: I always thought that was just a little bit not nice. But they had a buddy all the time that they had to—They couldn’t be advanced. But those women were in charge of huge groups of people and a lot of money and a lot of responsibility. They became great managers. And when they got out there wasn’t any—There weren’t any jobs for them. And if they—If they had been a little more farsighted, they would have hung onto those WRs, the Women’s Reserves, as they do sort of with the state patrols. And we would become like that. We were completely trained. We didn’t have to go into training. And to dump us in with the men and think that that situation was going to be anything but what it is now—And I don’t think it’s working as well as it could the other way. In other words, we would still be the reserves, like the state patrols are, but—and could be called to do whatever had to be done. But our pay wasn’t what theirs is. You see, we were—
These exorbitant salaries that they have been giving to these contract people to cook—only they don’t cook; they haul it in over there by air. And one of the chefs was quoted as saying, “When people saw the kind of food we were feeding those kids over there—.” And what’s wrong with peeling potatoes? I don’t know. But anyway, that—My god, you know, you have everything here from pork to chicken to beef to et cetera, et cetera and seafood. Everything is fresh. And he asked one of the chefs, also hired on contract by god knows what, he said, “Yes.” He said, “It costs thirty dollars a plate to 19
feed these men, three times a day. And they can have anything they want, and it’s all flown in fresh.” Now, honey, that’s not right. I don’t care how you run an army or anything else. That is not right.
Anyway, they had this women’s group. And we had our own cooks. I mean, we had our—It was the only reason we had some men down there, because of the hotel equipment. But if they had kept the women’s reserve, at the prices we came, and yet at the skills we had and the experience we had after the war, it would’ve been an entirely different thing. There might—I don’t whether they ever merged the two or not. They haven’t put the guard in yet. Well, it is officially and unofficially, but they can be called up, but they don’t have to play with those boys. I mean, they do their own guard duty here and have their own set-ups and such. They do not have to be in a battalion, an army battalion, or anything like that until they are called up. But it seems that they missed the boat on that one in not hanging onto those reserves. Fully trained, eager, well-equipped to do any kind of those jobs, and to take over the shore duties again. Of those—all those organizations just keep those things and keep the guys out on the boats and the ships and doing all this kind of thing that they’re doing here, in that oil dump thing. Let the other stuff be handled by the women. Why not? And I’m not that—and I’m not a—I’m a feminist. Boy, you betcha. But I can’t see paying a—what was that? Who are those people down here? Black somebody or others? [unclear]
BK: Blackhawk? No.
SW: Yeah, black—somebody. [Blackwater Worldwide] Do you know that those guys are paid $695 an hour down there to escort the state department people so that they wouldn’t get hurt? And yet they were doing all this other stuff on the side and being ugly and a few other things. That’s—And look at what they are doing with the food. We had perfectly good food. It was good food. It didn’t have to be fresh off of the garden and flown in at the expense of the plane, the da, the da, the da, and the chef and all that. It’s got—It’s become out of joint, I think. Somehow it happened. I’m sorry about that.
And this was one of the things that happened as far as we—particularly those of us in the Coast Guard—we women, after it was over, getting a job. We were overqualified all over the place. All of us were overqualified for whatever we could do. But you know who took over—[chuckles] and I went to school and then I ended up in the brokerage firm in New York because I had pull. I lasted there for about three years, and I saw what was going on and I couldn’t take it. I said, “I’m not going to do this.”
BK: What do you mean you saw what was going on?
SW: On Wall Street, all of this mess and—Oh, no. I know more about that than I want to know. And they were going to send me to that fancy school in Philadelphia to get a—
BK: Wharton [School of the University of Pennsylvania]?
SW: Yeah. Another [degree] in finance.
BK: MBA [Master of Business Administration].20
SW: They were going to pay me to get that and stay with them. And I said, “I don’t think so. I don’t like what I’m doing.” I had a whole batch of businesses that I was responsible for, but you know what knocked me out of it?
BK: What?
SW: This was Lion, Lady and Company. Am I talking too much?
BK: No, I just—my only fear is that you’re going to—I don’t want you to run out of steam before we get you into the Coast Guard.
SW: Oh, I’ll be in the Coast Guard in a minute.
BK: Okay, great.
SW: I’ll be in the Coast Guard in a minute. I’m out of it now.
BK: No, I know that. Just story-wise we’re circling back. It’s good.
SW: Circling back. But I was hired by Dr. [Lionel D.] Edie, who was in charge of—He was the top economic advisor for President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower.
BK: Wow.
SW: He spent more time—He’s a good old Republican. He spent more time down in New York—or up in New York, wherever—up in New York—or I don’t know. It was down in New York—down wherever it was, than he did in the office. But I had some contact with him and he said, “When you graduate,” he said, “you come and I’ll give you a job.” Well, he did, thank you very much. I was hired as the editor for all of the paperwork that his company put out. They had all of these things for their companies: this is good, this is what this stock is doing, this is where you should put your money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these are the trends, et cetera, all this other stuff. They had a big research department. These guys did all this work.
He said, “It’s miserable.” He said, “Read some of it.”
Well, I did. Well it’s terrible! Those guys, you know, they couldn’t put—the sentences went on and on and on. You couldn’t read them. It was very confusing. It was a mess. So, I said, “I’d love to do that.”
So, I started. After about three months, there was a—when he finally got it back in the office—there were about three guys from the research department waiting for me.
“We’re not going to put up with this. She can’t change a word we say in our papers. [banging on table for emphasis] We can’t—We’ll not put up with that. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she doesn’t know anything about this business. And if she changes a bit of any sentence, it could be wrong.”
And he laughed. And he says, “You’re crazier than a batch of idiots.” He said, “This is ridiculous.” He said, “Look at the difference.” He said, “There’s not a—I’ve 21
looked at this stuff,” and he says, and there’s not a thing.” He said, “This is good writing. This is intelligible. It’s quick. It gets to the point, and not all this rambling and raving. Look at—They took three sentences to say what she said in this area.”
“No, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to stand for it. We just do not want her messing with our words.”
He said, “Okay.”
So, he turned me over to his assistant, Bill Rhodes, and he was a young fellow that did special things with special companies. The one that really—And I worked with him well. That was fine. They had a nice little library up there, and she was a real hellion when it comes to the library. I’ll tell you, you better not get anything dirty. You better not bend the page or anything else. Anyway, she was an excellent librarian. But anyway, we had Wesson Oil.
He came to me one day and he says, “I’ve got a problem here.” And he said, “I have to give a recommendation.” And he says, “I need a lot of research on it.” He says, “I’m going to dump it onto you.”
I said, “Okay.”
And he said “Here are your spreadsheets.” We had these big folders of spreadsheets. And he said, “Wesson Oil wants to move to Texas and set up a new plant.” And he says, “Now, you have some idea of what this means?”
And I said “Sort of. You have to move the people there to work and a few things, and you have a product.”
And he says, “Yeah.” He says, “We have to know about corn, because that’s their main interest, and about the farm situation and what—how it works there and what have been—We have to go back at least twenty years and find out what the weather has done to the crops and this sort of thing, et cetera, et cetera.” And he said, “Then there are the workers. Is there a good—we have to check the employment and what the workers might be and could they staff this place with good people and have good workers that they need.”
I said, “Yeah, okay. I see that.”
And he says, “And you have to see what the population for the whole area is going to be like, so we would have a source to sell our stuff at locally, for that kind of thing. But also to ship. Of course, we’ll have to ship. We want this to be a major—They want this to be a major plant.”
And I said, “Okey-dokey.”
By this time I was working a slide rule and doing all this fancy stuff after three years, you know. And I said, “Okay.” So I got into the library and got all the books I needed and started to go back twenty years and keep all these figures on population and pigs, because pigs eat corn, and people eat corn, and—but then you have to know what the population is and how that’s happening and all this other stuff. So, I had all these things to put together and finally got ready. I said, “What’s the deadline?”
He said, “Well, end of the month would be nice.”
I said, “Okay.” So, by the end of the month I had my spreadsheet and I took it in there.
He looked at it and he said, “Okay. Now we have total population and we have the pigs.” He says, “That looks like it’s a growing business town here, doesn’t it?”
And I said, “The farming of corn, hey, that’s good. That’s pretty good.”22
He says, “The population’s increasing a lot too, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, okay.”
He said, “Well, that’s not a bad layout. They might want to move there.” But he said, “I have one question for you here.” He said, “Now, pigs eat corn and people eat corn,” he said, “and that will effect what they can make in product before they can get the product.” And he says—an important moment—he says, “I hate to tell you, but you’ve got the pigs eating the people.” [laughter]
BK: Oops. [laughter]
SW: He said, “You’ll have to do that little part over again, because I don’t think it works that way.” See, if the people eat the pigs, then that cuts down on the pigs eating the corn.
BK: Right. Exactly.
SW: And all this is very logical and all dumb and stupid, you know, everything else.
I said “Okay.” So I went back and I got the people eating the pigs instead of the pigs eating the people.
Took it back and he said, “That’s good. Good job.”
Well, I was also in charge of several companies that I had to go to. And I had to go to annual meetings for their stock and all that other stuff. They were nice. Of course, you got samples of everything they sold and stuff like that.
But I thought, “Yeah, pigs eating people.” That spreadsheet was an awful big spreadsheet. I said, “I don’t think I like this job. I think I’d better quit.” [laughs]
BK: Wow.
SW: While I’m ahead, at least. So that convinced me, when I started doing that and I thought, “I don’t think you’re that—The math of that is simple, but your mind might be somewhere else.” [chuckles] So, that’s why I quit the brokerage firm—one of the reasons why I did—because I couldn’t keep the pigs and the people separate the right way.
BK: It’s a good story.
SW: I think it’s a good one. [laughs] I’m stuck with it. Oh, dear. But then I found a job with the Girl Scouts. There was a notice in the paper, in the New York Times. And it said, “We need a financial advisor for local councils,” and what the qualifications were. Well, by the time I took it to my—incidentally, Theresa Colley[?], who was the head of that whole kit and caboodle down there, she had got—she had the contact with Edie & Company—with Dr. Edie. She was living in Stuyvesant Town [New York]. You know, Metropolitan Life [Insurance Company] built that Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper [Village] with all those apartments on the river. They did that for—you had to be personnel. You had to be discharged, ex-[U.S.] Army, [U.S.] Navy or Coast Guard or whatever it happen to be, in order to get an apartment there.
She got a nice big apartment. And she also had the Kerry—another Kerry Blue [Terrier]. And she said, “If you’ll come to New York, you can get the job with Edie.” 23
And she said, “Come on to New York.” She said, “I’ve got a gal who will share her room—her apartment with you for a while until you can find something if you want, and take care of it.” And she said, “Incidentally, I have another Kerry Blue. It’s name is Imp. It’s a little girl.”
“Okay!” So she’s the one that got me to New York. And I had another—and she was in Peter Cooper. I lasted with the other gal, who was a little weird. I lived in the [Greenwich] Village for quite a long while. Well, it was almost—It was almost two years.
BK: So, it was like late forties, early fifties.
SW: It was—It was ’50. Because I graduated in ’50, and I went right up. So it was ’50, ’51 when I went to New York.
[chuckles] I called in when I had arrived and they wanted to—I said, “I don’t know how to get to Wall Street.”
They said, “Well, where are you?”
I said, “I’m in the Village.” No, I didn’t say the Village, I said I was in [pause]—What in the hell is the lady’s name? Excuse me. Is that on the tape? I’m sorry.
BK: Yeah. It’s okay.
SW: I’m sorry. They call it by the same name that they do up north, Westchester and all that area.
BK: Soho?
SW: No, no, no. Greenwich.
BK: Oh, Greenwich Village! Okay, yeah.
SW: I said, “I’m in Greenwich.”
And they said, “Oh well, then you take the train,” and they told me the train to take and all this other stuff, “and then you get on the subway and that’ll take you down here and here and here.”
I said, “I’m not up in Greenwich Town, I’m down in Greenwich Village.”
And there was a bit of a pause at that sentence. “Oh, well then just get on the subway and come on down.” [laughs]
BK: Right. Excellent.
SW: I know. Oh, dear. But Terry became—she became—Dorothy Stratton became the head of the Girl Scouts when she got out of service, because they needed a new—
BK: And Stratton was SPARS?24
SW: She was the head of the whole kit and caboodle of SPARS. She was the big captain. Captains in the navy are the captains of the boat, and not a captain like the army has. Terry was a commander, but she was below the captain. It’s different.
Anyway, Dorothy Stratton was there, and she brought her assistant with her for that staff. And she found out about Terry there, so she dragged her in. Terry was put in charge of—not personnel, but in training, because she did a pretty good job of training. Then other people would come in. There were some navy gals in. We didn’t have any army that I can remember. It was mostly Coast Guard and [U.S.] Navy.
Terry said, “There’s a job open.”
I said, “I’ve already applied for it.”
She said, “Oh, come on! You have to pay a fee. She said I could have—.” She said, “I could’ve gotten—You didn’t have to pay a fee if you’d gone through me.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
And they took me up there. They said, “You have an interesting background.”
And I said, “Yeah.”
So we were loaded down with these women. I keep saying, these women were highly trained. The other advantage of the Girl Scouts—that was the national executive—That was the national executive staff there in New York, and they were responsible only for the keeping of the book and the handbook and the rules and regulations. But they—and they still are. The Girl Scouts are completely run by volunteers. The staff is the staff. And you see, all of us knew all about staff and line, and we knew we weren’t the line, and we didn’t have any problem one way or the other. We all worked for those fancy ladies. [chuckles] And they came in to their board meetings and all this other good stuff, you know? Ran all the meetings and did all that other stuff. We were their staff. So, that was one thing that worked out beautifully, and I think is probably still working out that way, in many ways. And they used these women up to their eyeballs, because we had a big staff and we also had a field staff. Within that field staff they also hired people locally in their areas. The field staff was divided up like the twelve—what are the—reserve— Federal Reserve—
BK: Branches?
SM: —branches that we have in the country. We have twelve of those. They’re all like that. But anyway, it was organized like that. But they swapped up all those people to their advantage.
BK: Well, that’s good.
SM: Good advantage, yeah. That should’ve happened elsewhere, but that’s okay.
BK: We’ve skipped six years, so let’s go back to—
SW: Oh, so six years.
BK: We’re back in May ’44. Were your parents kind of okay with you joining by—two years later, both of them?25
SW: Oh, yes. That was no question. That was no question.
BK: So, they were supportive of you then.
SW: Oh, completely.
BK: What about your friends at home? What did they think?
SW: Well, most of them were working in the factories. I was—I think there was one of the notices in there that I’d joined or something, in one of those books maybe. No, it wasn’t a big deal. Everybody—see, everybody was in one way or the other, and I was—not very many—I don’t know of anybody else from Fort Wayne at that point that joined the Coast Guard. But, you know, we just joined up.
BK: Okay. So, you’re up to Chicago. You came back. You started a few months later, I guess?
SW: Right away. They sent me the orders of what I could take, what I couldn’t take. And every female had to either have a short haircut that could not touch your collar cut—and this—my hair is getting a bit too long—or she had to have a permanent.
BK: What’d you choose?
SW: I chose the permanent and I’ll never do it again.
BK: Got it.
SW: Oh, lord. What I have is what I have, and I don’t mess with it. It has a mind of its own anyway. What we had to take and how to pack our bags and what you do not bring, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you have any ideas about this that and the other thing—then they would send orders for—our transportation orders and tell us—It would be a troop train. It would start in Chicago and stop at various places and pick up people. That ended down in Cincinnati [Ohio], I think, for that first trip down to Florida. And it was a troop train.
BK: So, how long—So, you went from Chicago to Cincinnati, and then from Cincinnati down to Palm Beach.
SW: Yeah, the next day. It took two days to go down there.
BK: Do you remember anything about the train ride? Was this like your first time away from home that long?
SW: Yes, this was the first break from—yes, alone. The bag was—although they recommended these canvas bags, which we bought, but the bags were awful heavy to lug and all that. We had absolutely no help one way or the other. We had to wait in 26
Cincinnati for several hours for the next batch to come in to consolidate to make one trip down to Palm Beach. We spent the afternoon—I forget how we spent the afternoon, some of us. We didn’t wander very far out of the train station. [laughs] None of us did.
BK: You didn’t have your uniforms. Did you have your uniforms?
SW: Oh, heavens no.
BK: You’re all just in civvies [civilian clothing]?
SW: We were all in civvies all over the place. This is a funny array of civvies. We were fed oatmeal for breakfast. And I can’t remember anything else about the food, one way or the other, going down on the train. But I remember the oatmeal for breakfast.
BK: Was this late summer, maybe?
SW: No, spring.
BK: Spring, okay.
SW: No, it was spring.
BK: Okay. So you’re—May, okay. So you got down—
SW: Ate navy food, I guess.
BK: All right. So, you got down—
SW: Palm Beach.
BK: —to Palm Beach, got off the train, what happened?
SW: There were some busses there, and they took us over to the Biltmore Hotel. And it was, as I say, in—it was open. [chuckles] And we were the first company. Those of us who were coming in were the first company to be formed, and we were sent up to the sixth deck, and—
BK: The first company of SPARS—
SW: Yeah.
BK: —or the first company of SPARS at all?
SW: Oh, yeah.
BK: Okay.27
SW: This was the beginning of the Biltmore. And that was the only training station they had in the country.
BK: So you were the very first class of SPARS?
SW: Yeah, yeah.
BK: Wow.
SW: They marched us up to the sixth floor where the booties would be, and three bunks with six kids in it, and gave us orders as to how to—what we had to do, what we could—shove your cases under the beds and all this other stuff. “And someone will tell you what to do next.” And there was a mate at the end of the desks, of some sort. I forget. I guess there was a small core of these kids that had come earlier. But anyway, we all had—there was a mate on the desk, and she would yell and scream at us regularly as to what we were supposed to do. “Two and three muster!” I remember that, and we didn’t know what that meant except that we all got the other—
BK: How many people were in your platoon?
SW: Oh, I would imagine maybe twenty—twelve or twenty—something between twelve and twenty, I’m not sure.
BK: And that first group was a few hundred, would you say?
SW: Yeah, yeah.
BK: Took up two floors?
SW: No—
BK: Just the one?
SW: Just the sixth floor. I think we had to put our beds together and stuff like that when we first got in there, because I think the stuff had been dumped. And I think, if I remember right, you get the mattresses and the sheets and the pillowcases and all that other stuff organized. And “Your [unclear] will go there and this will go there,” and everybody kept yelling at us. “This’ll happen here and this’ll happen there.”
“Okay,” you know. [chuckles] It was pretty riotous for a while, until we settled down and found out what our platoon number—
“And when you hear that, you assemble!”
And, “Okay.”
Then they finally got us by height so we looked halfway decent and a few other things. But it was a rag-tag—Everybody had something different on, of course, and this sort of thing. I think some of the girls who were—came first decided they wanted to be 28
SPARS instead of WAVES, because I think some of those. I think some of them came from the WAVE department—from the WAVE group, somewhere along the line, and were assigned down there to the training station. And they were our enlisted company commanders. And that’s what a coxswain [boat leader] and bosun [crew member] does: They’re in charge of those groups of people.
We had one roomie. We had a strange roomie that first batch of six. One roomie was Liz Orison[?] from California. Elizabeth Orison. And she had arrived in front of the Biltmore Hotel in a white or cream colored—cream colored convertible.
BK: Wow. She drove from California.
SW: Yes. And the seats were all red leather, and all of her luggage. And she had luggage. She had luggage; it was red leather. Well, she carted that upstairs. I don’t know what happened to the car. It ended up—whoops! It was gone at some point. I’m sure it went to a garage somewhere, and I don’t know if Daddy ever sent for it or whatever happened to the darn thing. Oh, boy. And she was allowed to keep, I think, the big case, and everything else had to go somewhere. I don’t know what happened to it, but it had to go because we didn’t have that kind of space.
By fall, she was screaming and yelling all over the place. She said, “My suitcase is completely moldy!” [laughter] She had closed the darn thing up down there, and we were right on the edge of the ocean and the lake—between the two, the ocean and the lake. It was. It was humid down there. And her beautiful, beautiful red—We just laughed. [laughs] She ruined her big case because it all got moldy and she’d sealed it up and so she had to junk it anyway.
But, yeah, it was that kind of a beginning. And we’d just get started—They’d say, “Platoon three, muster!” and we’d go to class, march us around to class, and then in the middle of the class they’d haul us out to do something else and back and forth, because we had to fill up that whole hotel. And there were nine decks and the two towers. And the two towers had the two important people in them. Terry was in one of them and I think her two sisters were in the other. And the ninth deck was for officers. The eighth deck was for the—what I became. I became a member of ship’s company. Now, these were the teachers and all the classes that they—heads of company, and—
BK: Would this be like the equivalent of NCOs [noncommissioned officer] or—
SW: Yeah, yeah. And that was the eighth deck, and then seven, six—and I’m not sure how far down it went. I forget. But I went from six to eight, and from six kids to four kids. But there was something that had to be done almost—for those first—at least four out of the six weeks that we were supposed to be getting a certain kind of training.
BK: Just putting stuff together, you mean?
SW: Just putting things together and sorting things out and getting clothes lockers set up and all that other good stuff that had to happen.
BK: How long till you got your uniforms?29
SW: Well, we got those awful seersucker jobbies first. It was a jacket and a skirt. And then they had these little jumpsuit type of things, shorts—all one piece shorts and a skirt that you could button up and down the front and you had a dress and a top. That was a little bit easier to wear and—But that first uniform of seersucker was ugh. It was a while. It was a while before the uniforms came in. And they had cotton ones for a while, and they were not that good-looking. And if you saw some of those pictures, we didn’t have jackets on at some point, but that didn’t last very long. We were in wool suits, shirts, ties, gloves, cotton hose, long cotton hose. You had to have a belt or something.
BK: Sounds steamy.
SW: Very steamy. And legal shoes and a hat.
BK: No air conditioning, huh?
SW: [laughs] Oh, there was a lot of air out there, but we were not conditioned for it.
BK: That’s true.
SW: So, it took a little while and finally when we got all—when we got the good uniforms and so on. But we only had one. Anything after that: If you wanted a white one, you could have it, but you had to go to a tailor and get it made. And if you wanted another ordinary wool, you had to get it made and find out about it and that sort of thing.
BK: So, how did you get the position of drum major? How did that happen?
SW: Just the fact that I was the tallest of the clarinet players.
BK: But how did you get into the band? I mean, that was—You’re sitting there and they assign you like, “You’re going to be in the band?”
SW: Oh, yeah. They had meetings every day, and evidently the order came down from somewhere that the training station needed a band. So, they just called at the usual meeting, they said, “Okay. Everybody who’s ever played an instrument, make yourself known!” And when only a couple of them got up, they said, “All right.” So, they got out the paperwork [laughter] and found out any of them that had been blowing any kind of a thing or twiddling any kind of a thing in school or anywhere else. Okay! And then they’d yell our names out and we—I didn’t want to do that particularly. I was tired—I was in the band for four years, and I loved it—high school band. But I was tired of it, and I didn’t want to be a performer and do that.
And they kept telling me, “Yeah, but you go from seaman to musician third. What’s the matter with you?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know.”
Anyway, so they just pulled it out of the audience from the paper they had.30
BK: Wow. So, how many women were in the band?
SW: Oh, geez. What’d we have? Three or four across. Three—I think we had three across and maybe six or eight down. I think just six back. Square of—
BK: So, about eighteen.
SW: About eighteen, finally. It turned out. And the director was Reddick, and she was a music teacher and she was a lieutenant.
BK: R-e-d-d-i-c-k?
SW: Yes, yes. And I think she was named Martha. Martha Reddick? I think it was Martha. And she had an assistant. And I think I had something about “Pretty Girl” or something about in there about “Fancy Pants” or something? She was her assistant. She also had a music background.
And we did have people who—the other clarinet—I think there were three clarinet players. One of them had been a teacher of music in clarinet. She was a funny little old lady. Oh, lord. She was a funny one. She didn’t look like us kids. But anyway, she knew her music and she was hauled in in a hurry. Penny—Pennifold[?]. Penny had the tuba, and she also had the job at the Sun and Surf Club, [chuckles] both of them. It was kind of hard to know when you were going to have one or the other.
And the drummer, snare, and bass were from Boston—Waters and I forget who the other one was. And we had a couple of saxophones, and one of them’s—her name was Jenny and I forget what the other one was. And I think we had a trombone and coronet—may have had two cornets. I can’t think who their names were.
BK: No trumpets, just cornets?
SW: Well, just cornets. Trumpets are kind of light. The cornet has a—well, I don’t know. That’s about it.
BK: No French Horn or—
SW: No. I don’t think we had a French Horn. I don’t think so.
BK: So, you—
SW: We had the basics of it, and it sounded pretty good. Reddick brought it together. She was the teacher, and she would get—Of course, a lot of us were familiar with a lot of these marches, or at least I was. Good night, I’d been playing them at every basketball game in the world and knew them inside—didn’t even have to look at them.
BK: You played clarinet in high school?
SW: Yeah. I have a fine picture of myself doing that. [chuckles]31
BK: Oh, yeah.
SW: Uniform and all.
BK: Very dignified.
SW: Oh yeah, all my pictures are dignified. They—It sounded good. It sounded good. And then they had to get trained to look military and training and playing at the same time and all this other good stuff, you know. I was no drum major. Good lord, come on. [chuckles] I didn’t like it. I didn’t want it, the strutting around and—at least they told me I didn’t have to twirl it, but I had to make signals and things like this, you know, and whatever. Oh god. And they—I had—I was schooled in how to walk because I had a funny walk supposedly. I don’t know what it was. I don’t think it was. I don’t know. But they’d march me up and down the streets with the—
BK: How long were you trained for this?
SW: Oh, maybe a week, two weeks.
BK: Okay.
SW: See, the other time, when you’re a musician, instead of doing these other jobs, you were pulled off and you were supposed to be practicing. See that was—
BK: Other jobs like what, like KP [kitchen patrol] or—
SW: Yeah. Well, no. We didn’t have things like that. We had cooks and that was their job. But while we were still building the thing up and—
BK: Okay. So, instead of making a bunk, you’d be practicing.
SW: We were supposed to do that. And [pause] then when the new kids came, of course it would start all over again. But it sounded good. It was an okay thing. I—But I was not that happy being out there strutting around, which I did not think I was doing well and I didn’t want to do it anyway.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the tallest.”
I was five [feet] seven [inches]—five seven—seven—
BK: Five eight?
SW: No, five six.
BK: Five six and you were the tallest! Wow.32
SW: Yeah, five six or five seven. I don’t know whether I was seven or not. I was five six probably.
BK: So, out of the six weeks at boot camp, you were practicing for two weeks?
SW: Couple weeks.
BK: Couple weeks and—
SW: And then you saw us going down field with kids, marching. We had to march them from the hotel over to the field. And that was about three or four blocks away through town that we had to go, down streets and whatnot, and get everybody over there. The companies were behind us and—
BK: That was every day?
SW: Every day we had to do it and—No, there was a review every Saturday. Every Saturday morning there was an official review, and we had to go by the officers and all that stuff. It was a regular military review every week.
BK: So, what was a typical day like for you? Was it always the band practice or—?
SW: Early on, yes. You got up at six. The bugler got you up and you went down and had breakfast. Although the band, after a while, played at breakfast time a little bit, once in a while, trying to get kids up and out or something I guess. But no, you assembled for all of these things at this point because this was training. You assembled and you went down as a platoon to get your meal, and you went through the line and sat together. And then your coxswain or your bosun—we didn’t—I think we only had a bosun or two among those companies, but there were some that were coxswains. They would get their kids together and march them off to the next class or whatever else they had to do or whatever duty they had and keep them together. They were in charge of that group, to push them around the area.
We were busy all the time, one way or the other. And then back to the mess and back again, back and forth and back and forth, and then up into bed. You had to get your clothes washed and hung up and [chuckles] et cetera. Now, it was—there was nothing—It was good. It was—you knew—you sensed responsibility. And you [unclear] not only to yourself but to your bunkmates and people in your group. And a sense of [sigh] not just being a part of it, but being—but being of help and assistance, and that’s what you were there for, to do a job. And if that was a strange new idea to you, why, you learned it in a hurry. It wasn’t that, as far as we were concerned. I knew what I was there for, so that didn’t bother me one bit.
That’s why I think we ought to have a draft. You learn in a hurry, and it doesn’t hurt a bit. It really doesn’t. And it puts a lot of stamina and guts and a new sense and a new look at people and what your job is and what the world is all about.33
BK: So, after boot camp was over in six weeks, then what happened? Then what happened to you?
SW: I was made ship’s company. And I told Terry—I told the commander, Commander Crowley[?], I said, “I don’t like this.”
And she said “Okay.”
BK: You didn’t like being drum major?
SW: Yeah.
BK: So you went up to—
SW: I went up to her and I said, “I want a change of rate.”
BK: Okay.
SW: And she said, “Talk to me.” I did, and she said, “Okay.” She said, “We can move you to coxswain.” She said, “I don’t think you’d have to take the test.”
I said, “Okay. I’ll be glad to if I need to.”
She says, “No, I don’t think you’ll have to take that test.” So, she said, “Now, you’re sure about this?”
I said, “Oh, yes, sir.” Now, we called everybody “sir” for the simple reason that we were paying respect to the rank and not to the gender. It was never, “Yes, ma’am.” It was always, “Yes, sir,” in this organization.
BK: Was that different in the WAVES? Do you know?
SW: I don’t know about—I think it was in the WAVES too, but I know the army did it the other way.
BK: Okay. So, “Yes, sir.”
SW: “Yes, sir,” no matter what. It’s the captain, it’s the sergeant, it’s the—whoever’s in charge, you know. “Yes sir,” and don’t worry about the gender.
BK: So, then you moved up? You were a part of the line?
SW: So, then she moved that and then—well I had a company. I had a platoon, so they put me out of the—I had it, and it was one of those things. I took my thing off and put on the funny little coxswain one over here.
BK: So you were now a line.
SW: You betcha. 34
BK: Okay.
SW: And I had a platoon and—because I had become a drill instructor by then.
BK: Oh.
SW: I had to for the band. So, that was one advantage and one plus that I had that got me into the coxswain thing without too much trouble, because I had that instruction and had been doing it. So, I had a platoon and about pretty soon—wasn’t very long—Let’s see. I don’t think the—I don’t know when the exams came up. Exams came up in another year, I think, or something like that. I tried for bosun, bosun second, and they said, “Okay. You can take it.” And I did, and I had that at the time that we—that Alaska broke loose and that they were going to close—this was a good, what, two or three years now? Something like that. I don’t know. Maybe it was three. And they were going to close the training station and—
BK: So, you were in charge of different—
SW: I was in charge of a platoon, which is just like we used to—like the others were. The booties and whatnot, taking them in and out.
BK: So, training them and then they would be—Where would they be sent off to after?
SW: Many—I think that for a while you had a little bit of a choice where you wanted to go or what station you wanted or what part of the country or anything like that. Openings were listed and I think it was up to the officers to figure out, you know, that kind of a business. But they often—you had a choice, anyhow, but I was—I was on base. That’s what—
BK: So, you were kind of a drill instructor?
SW: Only for the band.
BK: Only for the band.
SW: Only for the band. And I became a member of ship’s company at that point, moved up to the eighth deck, and had my own boot.
BK: What classes did you have?
SW: I didn’t do any teaching. I was—
BK: I just meant how many groups did you—and then they would go off.
SW: Oh, I—[pause]. I don’t remember.35
BK: Okay. So, you’re there from like from May ’44 till whenever they closed it, essentially? That we can look up.
SW: Yes, yes. And the thing about the Alaska deal was we were—both WAVES and SPARS were to—had the choice of Hawaii or Alaska, when we found out the training station was closing and everybody had to go to Manhattan Beach [Coast Guard Training Station] to get training from now on. And the girls could either go to one of the Coast Guard offices across the country and cities and all around about—captain of the port, Coast Guard manned those places, caps of the port. And that was semi-civilian, you know, watching the boats and all the rules and regulations and that sort of thing, plus the military part that went with it. But there were captains of the port all over the country, and they needed some help, and if they would get a SPAR in there where they could get the guy off on that darn boat. [laughs] And we can call some of the little fellows boats. We can’t call the ships boats, but we can call some of the little fellows boats.
So, the disbursement was—were listed, and the places that needed help were listed, and the gals could sign up for what they wanted. We were going to Hawaii at first, and then the orders came down from on high that only WAVES were going to go to Hawaii.
BK: So this was ’45? This was mid-’45?
SW: I guess so. Something like that.
BK: Yeah. I don’t think they were allowed to go there until mid ’45.
SW: Something like that. And Alaska was the only one that was open. Of course, Sally[?] knew all about this because she was the yeoman in that office, and she said, “Well, Terry’s going to go to—Miss Crowley[?]’s going to go to Alaska, in charge of that base up there, and will take the crew of SPARS up there.” And she said, “Of course, I’m going to go too.”
BK: Now, was that just a SPARS base or was that a Coast Guard base?
SW: Oh, yeah. It was a Coast Guard—a basic Coast Guard base. You know, munitions and oil and the whole kit and caboodle. You know, repair and—It was a regular base.
She said, “I’ll talk to her about it.”
And I said, “Well, I don’t want to go to—.” My other choice was Manhattan Beach, and I said, “I don’t want to go there and get back into training and that sort of stuff.”
She said, “Okay.”
So, they talked it over, and so she got me into the office and she said, “I hear you want to go to Alaska.” [laughs]
I said, “Yes, sir. I don’t want to go to Manhattan Beach, thank you very much, if I can help it.”36
She said, “Well, I think we can make that. Let me look at the roster so far.” She looked at it and she said, “Well, I think we can manage that.” But she said, “Something else will have to happen.”
And I said, “What’s that?”
She said, “I see that there is another bosun mate, second grade, on the list.” She says, “I’m afraid we’ll have to make you a first class.”
BK: Wow.
SW: I said, “Okay, thanks.”
She said, “I think you should be in charge of it.”
I said—See I was in charge of the barracks and cleaning all that—all of that mess. I guess that’s a personnel chairman or something; I’m not too sure. But anyway, I was in charge of all that mess.
And she said, “I think we’ll have to make you first class.”
I said, “Okay.” I said, “When do I take the test?”
She says, “I don’t think we have time.” [laughs]
BK: Oh, I like her.
SW: Oh, I did too. She became a very good friend of mine after I got out, and even at this point. So, that’s the way I got up to Alaska, anyway, and got my next rating, was because she preferred to have me in charge than the other little girl she didn’t know anything about down on the list. There were about thirty of us, I think, that went up on that crew from all around about. They weren’t all—not all of them by any means were from Palm Beach. I don’t know how many of them were, if any.
BK: So, in Palm Beach you said there were like maybe fifteen, twenty men that were there and everybody else was female.
SW: Just about, I guess.
BK: Right. And so how was your relationship with them? What was that like?
SW: Wasn’t bad. The boys were on guard duty a lot, you know. They had regular guard duty. Of course, we had regular guard duty too, down on the quarter deck. You couldn’t get out without going by the OD [officer of the day] on the quarter deck. And then they were in the—only place that I am aware of is that they were in the kitchen, and I don’t know that I ever saw any of those fellows. But we did see the others because they were our drill instructors, and they were coming in and out off the quarter deck at night and that sort of thing, when they were on duty. I hated that night shift, and—We got to take quarter deck duty. And it was 8[p.m.] to 4[a.m.], 4[a.m.] to 8[a.m.], and 8 to 4 again, you know. And I hated that—by midnight, I’d been 8 to 4 and then—8 to 4 I guess, 4 to 8—8 to 4—
BK: Probably 8 to 4 to 12 and then 12 to 8.37
SW: 12 to 8 again. And oh boy, when four o’clock hit and you’d been down there—and I couldn’t get up and do anything at that point. I wasn’t hungry. By the time—eight o’clock I didn’t want breakfast. I didn’t want any. Oh, I hated that kind of thing.
BK: Guard duty.
SW: Yeah.
BK: Did you enjoy the work generally, down in Palm Beach?
SW: Oh, yeah.
BK: The coxswain and boatswain—?
SW: Well, and the little brief business with the band, I thought that was a little bit outrageous, but then—
BK: So, you were there like ’43, ’44—You were there like three years.
SW: Just about, I think.
BK: I think the math’s working out that way.
SW: Something like that.
BK: So, they were closing it down. How did you feel when you found out they were closing the—?
SW: Well we all wanted to know what’s going to happen to us. And that’s when we were anxious to see where the possibilities were and they published the list of openings. They were darn good about, you know, letting people go where they wanted to go, because they would be better people if they went where they wanted to go. Some of them wanted to go up to Manhattan Beach and some of them—had quite a few that were going to go to Hawaii, but I’m not sure any of those wanted to go to Alaska.
But this was, you know, throughout the organization. And there were some people still on—there were some people on duty in these outposts even. So, the training post wasn’t the only place that you found SPARS at this point. They had moved on because we had several companies and they were at the port authorities and places like that. They were around the country.
And that is the—That quarter deck is the place where I learned the thing that I think is one of the more important things in my life. You could not get out without checking in at the quartermaster’s desk to see if you had liberty, and then you had to do a sharp about-face and there was the duty officer. And you had to salute the duty officer and say, “Permission to go ashore, sir.”
And, “Granted.” And then she made this little speech. She said, “Remember who you are and what you represent. It only takes one.”38
And, “Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
And then you had to do another about-face, and then you had to march out of the front door. That has stuck with me. As a matter of fact, Mills College had a very similar one like that, that—And they were right, because this was the first time the country saw women in uniform, en masse sometimes, because when you went you usually went with buddies and pals. We were not allowed to date officers. And Palm Beach was real sticky, awfully sticky.
BK: Oh, that kind of nose-in-the-air sticky. Sorry, I didn’t know what you meant.
SW: Yeah.
BK: How did the locals deal with you?
SW: [sighs] They didn’t have much to do with us, really, because we were separated and we did have—We had not that much liberty. First thing we did was to go someplace else and get some different food, probably. Go into town, into West Palm, and look around a little bit and see if there was anything that we might spend our—what we had left out of twenty-one dollars, not much—if we wanted to or not, that sort of thing.
We—there was the one thing that was nice was Worth Avenue, down the island just a little way at the other end, not too far down. The Breakers was that huge, gorgeous hotel on the beach, on the shore. It was very, very, very fancy. It had gardens and paths and all sorts of chairs and benches and things. And it was an air force hospital. We would go over there once in a while and talk to folks, and the nurses were there, you know, wheeling the guys around in their wheelchairs and that sort of thing. It was a pretty place. It was quiet and a pretty place to go at times. They had some good—very good eating places between there and Worth Avenue. Worth Avenue had at least one of every one of the better New York City stores.
BK: Got it.
SW: And they’d see one of us coming in, you know, “Can we be of any assistance?” sort of attitude. I bought some Christmas presents there for my folks. That was good. But they were very, very reluctant to be chummy or anything of that sort. They had their own ways of doing things anyway. And Whitehall was the other hotel down there, smaller one, very exclusive. It was between the two of us, and the third one was Whitehall down here. That’s where the celebrities all stayed when they came.
They—That’s where I saw Jeanette MacDonald. Jeanette MacDonald was another one of my favorites, and the whole family loved the MacDonald-[Nelson] Eddy pictures, those musicals. And I had seen her in Fort Wayne. She had come for a concert in Fort Wayne before—while I was in high school, and mother paid the—She said, “I’ll let you go hear her there.” And I did. I got to see her down there.
Then we heard she was going to be giving a program over at Breakers for the guys and people who were wounded over there. It was the big hotel, pretty one. So, we found out when her car was coming in and we walked over. Pretty good walk, but we 39
were in shape. Waited and waited and waited, and finally she came out and she was in a big black car that dropped her off. And all I can remember of seeing of her was a great swath of pink foam, you know. Like it wasn’t a shawl, but it was. It was supposed to be sort of a shawl—kind of swathed in that and whatnot. She was very friendly. She waved and said hello and whatnot, “Glad to see you,” and was rushed into Whitehall. So, that was my only thing that I remember too much about that. [chuckles] I was never in Whitehall.
BK: Got it.
SW: No, we went—[laughs]. When we did get out and we had to eat, we went to the B&W in West Palm. They had good food.
BK: The K&W [Cafeteria]?
SW: It was K&W. The K&W.
BK: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
SW: Yeah, they had good food. And we would go there and eat. We wouldn’t go to these fancy places. Except there was one on the beach, and it was a hamburger—It was a big steak place. And they had this big pit in the middle of it, and that’s where they cooked all the stuff on here, in this funnel going up. That’s where the officers all went for their thing. And you could go, but you couldn’t go with an officer, of course. They would let you in, and you could go and get a good steak there and behave yourself.
BK: But you couldn’t go with an—Did you ever go out with anyone while you were down there?
SW: No, not really. MacEntire[?] and I were real good friends—
BK: That’s the guy in the photos in the scrapbook.
SW: Yeah, yeah.
BK: That trained you for—
SW: Yes. He was a nice boy from Oklahoma, and we—This was an innocent time. It really was an innocent time throughout my experience. I’m so pleased with it. We went on picnics and things like that. I can remember a couple of nights we’d grab a blanket, and since he was on duty, he could go into the kitchen. Any time of the day and night, the guys who were on guard duty could go in the kitchen any day and night and fix all the sandwiches or anything they wanted. And it was a spread of all the stuff that you’d seen in the grocery store at that point in our world. All this meat, you know, stuff like that, and tomatoes—End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.