Oral history interview with Valeria F. Hilgart, 2000

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Valeria F. Hilgart
INTERVIEWER: Eric Elliott
DATE: March 1, 2000
[Begin Interview]
EE: My name is Eric Elliott. I’m with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is an interview for the Women Veterans Historical Project at the university.
Today I’m in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the home of, and looking at the garden of, Valeria Hilgart. She is going to graciously sit down and do an interview with me today.
Ms. Hilgart, the first question I ask everybody is kind of a simple one, and that is, where were you born and where did you grow up?
VH: I was born in a very small town called Grafton, Wisconsin. I was born in this town, and I lived in the same house that I was born in my entire life until my parents died. There were ten of us in the family.
EE: Where were you, somewhere in the middle?
VH: No. I have a brother and twin sisters older than I am. Then I have a brother and a sister and a brother and a brother that died when he was three and then two sisters. The rest of us are all still living.
EE: What did your folks do for a living?
VH: My dad was in the trucking and excavating business.
EE: Does that mean he’s traveling around a lot?
VH: No, no. Right in this town and in the county. My mother was strictly a housewife, and I don’t mean to belittle that because when you’ve got ten kids— [Laughs]
EE: That’s like being a CEO, I think, when you’ve got ten kids.
VH: We had a wonderful time growing up because I think we had exceptional parents. 2
EE: Were you living there in the city?
VH: No, it’s a small town. It’s still a town, except that it’s grown. I mean, there were less than a thousand people when I left there in 1949. Now there’s probably ten thousand or twelve thousand living there.
EE: That’s a big jump. When you were young, did you like school? Were you somebody who liked school?
VH: Well, I don’t think I disliked it. I’m sure, you know, any of us did, but I’m sure some of them would sooner go than others. I didn’t mind going to school. I went to a Catholic school, as did my brothers and sisters. I don’t recall anything unusual about that, except when I went to school the first day—and I always heard this from my mother—the nun wanted to send me home because I was so small, and she insisted I didn’t belong there, that I had just followed my brother and two sisters to school.
EE: You tried to go in too early, I guess.
VH: And I kept insisting I wasn’t going home because I belonged there. And this nun said, “Well, I’ll check with your mother.”
EE: Didn’t trust you.
VH: “Tomorrow, you bring a note from your mother to make sure that you’re old enough to be here,” but she let me stay that day, and I was old enough. I was just very tiny.
Anyway, so that’s how I started. I went through eight grades of school there and never had any problems. I don’t think my brothers and sisters did either.
Now, I had a brother who wasn’t too fond of school when he got older, but he still did all right there. My other brother, the younger one, not the youngest one but the one right after me, he wasn’t too fond of school either, but he was a different kind of person. He’s a [unclear], loved civics, loved things that most people don’t like and schoolboys don’t like especially, but he was so talented in so many other ways as he grew up that it’s hard to look back and then say he’s the same guy.
They worked for my dad. You know, when they first invented the big steam shovels and the road excavators and all these big heavy pieces of equipment, when my dad started digging basements with heavy pieces of equipment, why Fred had such a good eye that the people always said that he could make the corners of this basement perfect without having somebody there and straighten them out. He was good at all that. He was good at doing things as a carpenter. My mother’s family had cabinetmakers in it.
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EE: So maybe a little craftsman tradition coming in.
VH: Yes. Sure. He was very good at what he did. He was a hard worker, and you have to admire him for that. He’s still alive and very sick, but he’s—
EE: Does he live in Wisconsin still?
VH: Still lives in Grafton. Most of my family lives in Grafton.
EE: That’s a common characteristic. Most women that I meet who have been in the service, they’re the ones that go out to see the world.
VH: Yes, and come right back home. [Laughter]
EE: Well, let me ask you, where did you graduate from high school?
VH: Right in Grafton.
EE: Was it a public school?
VH: It was a public school.
EE: Was it Grafton High School?
VH: Grafton High School.
EE: What year did you graduate?
VH: 1942.
EE: Was Wisconsin an eleven-year or twelve years for high school?
VH: Twelve years.
EE: Okay.
VH: Four years of high school, eight years of grade school. There weren’t any middle schools like they have now, but when I went there, you went through eight grades and then you went to—and there was no preschool or anything like that.
EE: Did you have a favorite subject in school?
VH: Well, I don’t think I thought about favorite subjects when I was in grade school. When I was in high school, I liked the commercial course. The commercial course had actually just started maybe a year or two before I got there. Before that, they 4
didn’t teach that kind of thing. But they put in this commercial course, and I probably liked that the best. I was good at shorthand. I was good at typing and good at accounting.
EE: So is that where you thought you might be headed when you got out of school?
VH: No. I just never thought much about it because not too many kids went to college in those days, but we had a wonderful school principal who later became superintendent of schools. He had his doctorate in law and a doctorate in American history. He lived in that small town. My dad and he had been in World War I together, and they were good friends. He was just a wonderful school principal. I admired him and so did everybody in school. When that man died years later—
EE: Sounds like somebody who just was the heart of the community.
VH: Oh, and he had this beautiful voice so that every Friday afternoon, the last hour, we had singing in school. One of the girls played the piano, and we sang for that last hour.
EE: That’s a nice way to start the weekend.
VH: It was wonderful, and he was just great.
EE: What was his name?
VH: Long, John Long.
EE: You say he and your dad were in World War I together. What branch of the service?
VH: Army.
EE: Did you hear a lot about that when you were growing up?
VH: Well, my dad used to tell us stories if there was something we didn’t like to eat. We always had meals together. There wasn’t any of this business of you were going here, you were going—not like there is today. We all sat around the table, and we could tell stories there.
My mother was a good cook and so was my dad. He was a cook in the army. When we would complain about something, he would say, “Well, you should have been with me when I was in the army,” he said. “They used to cook up old shoes and make soup out of them.” [Laughs] Everything got better. [Laughter]
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EE: I guess you figured he probably knew the recipes.
VH: Never thought much about it, but he would tell us some story like that.
EE: Was he overseas?
VH: He was in France when the war ended.
EE: You had an interesting senior year. You graduated in ’42.
VH: I did. I did.
EE: Do you remember Pearl Harbor Day?
VH: I do.
EE: Where were you?
VH: It was a Sunday, as I remember. I was right there in Grafton at home. In ’41, I was seventeen when I graduated from high school, but a lot of the boys—most kids were eighteen, and a lot of the boys went in the service. My brother went in right after that. He went in the Marine Corps.
Then when they allowed women reserves in, my sister went in; one of the twins went in. World War II, I wasn’t old enough, and then I became the oldest one in the family home.
Times were hard because, first of all, we just went through a depression—not for us, though. We never really recognized it because we lived in this big, big house that was my dad’s family’s. My dad had bought it when his stepmother died. His mother died when he was only two, but his father remarried. His youngest brother was only fourteen years old or thirteen, and he became a ward of my father.
When my father married my mother, she went to that house, and there were still four older men living there, his brothers—or three of them. So she kept house for those people, a brand-new bride. [Laughs]
EE: That would be a hard thing to do these days, to find a woman who would do that.
VH: I think it would. My dad went to work. In those days, you had to go to work because you just got pulled out of school. You didn’t get much education. I’m not positive about this, but it seems to me he only had a second grade education, but he was smart beyond his education. Those people learned a lot of things from doing.
During the Depression, we never felt it because our whole front yard was in potatoes. My dad’s uncle, who was living with us from Germany, he kept that. 6
We all had to help pick those potato bugs and all that stuff. We had a big yard in back. We grew everything.
My mother made all our clothes, some from hand-me-downs, some from purchased material. We were well-kept, well-dressed, ate good because we grew it all. We had some chickens then. [Laughs]
EE: You were seventeen and you graduated in ’42. When you got back to school, do you remember what the attitude was like that Monday after Pearl Harbor Day? It was a surprise, and in some ways it wasn’t a surprise that we were going into the war, with things happening in Europe, was it?
VH: No, I guess not. But by the same token, I don’t think as a youngster, when you’re going to school, you don’t think much about war. Your parents might be thinking about it, but you don’t think about it. But the minute Pearl Harbor happened, all those boys were anxious to get in.
EE: They wanted to go get in.
VH: Well, yes. It was their fight. I remember my brother joined the Marine Corps with another boy from town, in fact, my dad’s god child. They went in together and came home together. They had six weeks of training in San Diego and right overseas to Guadalcanal.
He came back two years later, almost two years later, never even told us that he was coming. They were going to surprise us. They thought it would be a wonderful surprise. They came in the wee hours of the night because they had to take a cab out of Milwaukee. They got to Milwaukee but couldn’t get any further. Gene’s dad had died some time before that, and his mother lived alone in their house in Grafton.
You talk about kids doing pranks and stuff. Billy knocked on the door because all of us slept upstairs in that big house. There were five big rooms up there, and we had a bathroom, and then a bathroom downstairs, and then there were five rooms downstairs and a huge kitchen and a porch around it. We had a telephone, which most people didn’t have.
My dad was the fire chief, [unclear] the fire department. So we had a telephone, and other people just came and used it. In those days, you didn’t worry about locking anything up. Neighbors were real friendly. They took care of one another.
That still happens a lot, but it doesn’t happen as often as it should, I’m afraid. But that’s the way we grew up. Anyway, a lot of the kids from high school, my grade, as soon as they got out of high school, most of them went off to work. That was the most important thing right then and there.
Let’s see, the Women Marines, I think the thirteenth of March—no, February was their birthday, thirteenth of February.
EE: Forty-three. 7
VH: Yes. She went in the Marine Corps in March, I think it was. I can’t remember that exactly.
EE: So right when it first started.
VH: Yes. [Unclear]. I think it was March. I’m not sure. Anyway, she went to boot camp at Camp Lejeune, [North Carolina,] and then went to Washington and worked in a company up there.
EE: D.C.?
VH: D.C., Headquarters Marine Corps. Then she went to Hawaii, first ones to go over there. That was very exciting, I remember, for her because when she told me about it, they got on a ship and went over there on one of those luxury liners that had been—
EE: That’s right, converted.
VH: [Laughs] At any rate, so she was in Hawaii during the war, pretty much.
EE: You had to be twenty to join.
VH: Yes, you had to be twenty to join. I don’t even know what it is now. Is it eighteen now for women? I don’t know, but anyway, it was twenty when I went in, and I think it was that when Lynn, my sister Lynn, went in.
EE: So was it because of your sister? Had the war gone on, would you have joined earlier? You ended up joining in ’49, right?
VH: Yes. Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I wanted to, but the school principal talked to me about that. He said, “You’re the only one at home that’s old enough to help out.” He said, “I don’t think you ought to go right now,” and I didn’t go. I thought I was going to join the WAVES because I thought two Marines in the family is enough.
EE: Share the wealth. Dad’s an army guy.
VH: But anyway, so I didn’t go. I always wanted to, but I didn’t go until they opened the Marine Corps. I found out about that by reading a county newspaper. They had an ad in there that the president had signed that women could—
EE: This is in ’48 he signed.
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VH: Yes, toward the end of the year, in ’48, that they would be allowed to join the regulars, not as a reserve. Then they opened up a class of recruits down at Parris Island, [South Carolina,] I forget, after the first of the year. In ’48, the end of the year, they swore in some of the women who had been previously Marines.
In ’49, they opened a class, I think in January or February. I don’t remember the exact date. I went down to enlist. In those days, they couldn’t enlist you until you went through, you took some tests—
EE: Did you go down to Milwaukee?
VH: I went to Milwaukee. We took some tests, and then the recruiter sent all this stuff to Headquarters [unclear] all your papers, sent it to Headquarters Marine Corps. Now, I was working then. I had been working for seven years. I worked as a clerk in a gray iron foundry.
EE: Was it there in Grafton?
VH: Yes, right in Grafton. Lot of industry in that little town. I worked there for seven years, but I was getting just a little bored.
EE: Were you doing payroll and things like that in the office?
VH: I was doing payroll, and I was doing accounting.
EE: Had you gone to business school afterwards?
VH: Well, I was the only woman who had ever worked in that office. There was a seventy-five-year-old man there with some interest in the company, and he did the book work and stuff, but he needed some help.
While I was down there, I went to school. They let me go in the morning. Another friend of mine, we were going to Milwaukee Business Institute. She had someone she drove with so I drove along with them.
Then when we got home about four o’clock in the afternoon—the woman who was working down there brought us back home—I would go straight to work, and my mother—we didn’t live too far from there, maybe about two blocks, and my mother would send my dinner down. One of my brothers or sisters, someone, would bring my dinner down so I could eat and keep on working till I got the day’s work done.
EE: That’s great.
VH: It was great that the company let me do that. I’m not sure you could just do that today.
EE: No, but that says they needed help and they were willing to make some— 9
VH: So I took that executive secretarial course, is what I took at the business college. Then I stayed there, and I was there seven years, but I just was restless. Then when I found out they were going to allow people to go to the service, why I went and enlisted.
EE: At that time, you were still living at the house and you were taking care of, I guess, your folks?
VH: Well, my family—my folks were in good health, basically. My dad died when he was eighty-one, and my mother was almost ninety when she died.
EE: So when you joined in ’49, what was the youngest child who was still at home, because with ten, it’s probably spread out pretty good?
VH: Well, I would think Mickey, who’s thirteen years younger than I am. She was the youngest.
Because when Billy went in service in ’42, right after the war started in ’41, he used to—he had a nickname for her. He’s the one who gave her the name Mickey. Her name is Marilyn, but he called her Mickey Mouse all the time because Mickey Mouse was pretty popular in those days.
She was the youngest one at home, and I was the only one of working age. So I went down and enlisted, and when I told them at the foundry I was going to leave, they just couldn’t believe it. But I told them that I was going to join the Marine Corps.
EE: When you signed up in ’49, was it a three-year tour? What did you sign up for?
VH: Yes, three-year enlistment. That was the 21st of July, 1949, when I went in, actually when I got sworn in, because a couple of days before, the recruiters came out and visited your home and came to talk to your parents as if they were like spies.
EE: Now, see, they didn’t have the luxury of time to do that earlier, so now, they’re being a little more selective for you.
VH: And you had to take these tests and stuff, and then they sent it all to Washington. There was some kind of a board up there that went back to the recruiting station and said, “You can try to enlist this individual now.”
EE: But you had to get approval from Washington. It wasn’t a local—
VH: Yes. Well, then, you know, we were at a substation. Milwaukee was a substation then, and you had to go to Chicago to be enlisted. 10
When I went down there—and this is interesting because I’m sure other people who went in had the same experience I did. I had never really been away from home, and I went down there, and the recruiters took you down there. We went to Chicago. They set you up in some hotel in downtown Chicago. Me, I was scared, as old as I was—I was twenty-four.
EE: But it’s a lot different in the big city.
VH: You just don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, I—I shouldn’t call it a flea bag hotel, but that’s what I thought it was because it was downtown in [unclear] Chicago. The recruiters were very nice. They saw that I was okay, but I was scared to death to stay there by myself because I was the only woman Marine in the group.
So after two days, my sister, who had been in the Marine Corps, called a friend of hers who was living in a women’s hotel in Chicago and said, “She’s down there. Will you look after her?” They just took me right out of that place and took me up there where they lived. [Laughs]
EE: Confirming your suspicions.
VH: Anyway, I stayed with them until I got okayed. Then I had to go in, and I had to get a complete physical in Chicago. Then they decided I didn’t weigh enough. I only weighed ninety-two pounds. They had certain—for your height, you had to be a certain weight. I was sitting there. I said, “You’re not sending me home. I’ve been sitting here for three days. I quit my job.” I said, “I am not going back home.” This was a recruiting officer. I said, “So you’d better do something about it.”
He said, “Well, we can get you a waiver probably.”
Anyway, they went to Washington, and I sat in that recruiting station until four o’clock in the afternoon before a response came back from Washington, “Waiver of fifteen pounds.”
EE: Good gracious. But if you had not stood up for it, you might—
VH: Well, I mean, I wasn’t a child any more. I was twenty-four years old.
EE: Yes. You’d learned not to put up with that stuff.
VH: So I just waited. Everybody else had their orders and everything, so I was put on a separate set of orders. They could get me on a train going from Chicago with the rest of the troops to Washington, D.C., but I didn’t have a ticket to go to Parris Island.
EE: You say the recruiter had to come out to your house to interview your folks, were they asking basically if you had permission to join? 11
VH: No, because I was twenty-four. No, they were just looking around; see what kind of a home you came from. That’s what I think. That was my impression. The guy just kept looking around. My mother was one of these neatniks anyway, so I didn’t have to worry about it.
EE: Your dad was in service, and your folks already had children who served. Did they give you any counsel about you joining?
VH: Oh, yes, lots of advice from my sister. [Laughs]
EE: What, that you were doing the right thing or to beware?
VH: No, she didn’t have any objection. She said, “I just want to give you some advice.” It wasn’t long. She just said, “You’re going to meet all kinds of people in the Marine Corps. Pick your friends wisely,” and not much more. She told me what it was like.
I wear a broad shoe, and she said, “They’ll never be able to fit you in shoes down there because they just don’t have those kind of sizes.” So she goes with me, and we go up and buy a pair of shoes and dye and shine them at Marine Corps [unclear]. It was black in those days, and we dye and shine them. So I got to Parris Island with a pair of dyed and shined shoes because Lynn was convinced they’d never be able to fit me there.
You go through boot camp; they don’t care whether your feet are [unclear]. They put their shoes on me, and we all referred to them as granny shoes because they were the same ones they wore in World War II. My feet would always fall asleep in them, but they would not let me wear those other shoes when I stood inspection, when I was doing anything. I had to wear those other shoes.
Then there was a day I could put on my own shoes. But I think it upset them a little that I came there dyed and shined and everybody else—they were going to make sure I dyed and shined those shoes. I can’t blame them. You know, that would be— [Laughs]
EE: Well, did you have any other friends who were either in the service, or what did your friends think of you being in the service?
VH: I don’t know what they thought. They never said much. Anyway, when I was on the train going from Chicago to Washington, D.C., we picked up a girl in Pittsburgh who didn’t have a ticket down to Parris Island. The advice she got and I got from the recruiting officer was, “Go to the ticket office, and they’ll get you on the train.” So we did, the two of us. That’s where I met the first one. Well, there were some girls from Chicago, too, going in at the same time.
Anyway, we went to the ticket office, and she said, “Well, come back at six o’clock. There’s two boys who haven’t shown up yet. If they don’t show up, then you’ll get their seats. If they do show up, then we’ll put you in a 12
compartment.” So we wait and wait, and they didn’t show up, so we get tickets in the troop train with the guys [unclear]. [Laughs]
EE: Sacrificing for your country right from the start. I’m impressed.
VH: And we barely walked away from that ticket place when these two guys come in, and they get the compartment. Anyway, I didn’t know what a compartment was.
At any rate, we both got upper bunks. She was on one end, and I was halfway up the row.
My sister had also given me some advice. “Now,” she said, “you want to look neat when you get there.” She said, “What you wear on the train, you want to be able to, when you get down there, change your clothes.” She said, “So take this, and it won’t wrinkle too much, and hang it up in the train when you’re there. Hang it up so that the wrinkles come out.”
Well, that was a mistake in the troops’ train. Hung it outside, this [unclear] dress. Hung it outside, and all of a sudden, the dress is going that way, and I’m screaming and hollering. I’m in an upper bunk. She’s down the end of the way in an upper bunk. And the guy at the bottom of me is kicking on the thing. I didn’t know whether that would fold up or what. I’d never been on one before.
I kept saying, “Stop that. Stop that. Give me my dress. Give me my dress.” I’m yelling.
It was a big thing for them, so they were half shot, you know. Some of them had a little party before they left. It was a long night. Believe me, I didn’t sleep.
In those days—I probably shouldn’t say this, but if a woman reads this, she’ll find it very funny. You had to wear a girdle whether you needed one or not. You had to wear that, and you had to bring them along because they weren’t—I was in the third class of recruits to go through training, and they weren’t geared yet at Parris Island to issue underwear and stuff. I don’t know if they ever did, not while I was down there. At any rate, you had to bring certain things along. Me, I’d never had a girdle on in my life, but I had to wear it. My sister said, “Now, you put that on when you get there.”
Here I am in this upper bunk trying to get dressed. I’m laying flat on my back, and I’m trying to get into a girdle. [Laughter] That was an experience. And stockings, you know, and everything else that goes with it.
Well, anyway, I managed that, and I managed to get my clothes back. Next morning—I’m an early riser, always have been all my life. I get up as early as I could and go down to the bathroom so that I’m sure I can get a chance to wash up at least. So that’s what I did. I snuck down there. I was all dressed in my bunk. [Laughs]
EE: And safe from the men around you. What a start. Well now, when you get down there, how many women are in your—
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VH: There were twenty-two in my recruit class, only twenty-two. They only had one class. When they started out, I think they only had one class at a time going through. There was only one class going through. There just happened to be only twenty-two in my class, and we had all kinds of attention. Two women platoon sergeants, two male platoon sergeants, another DI, senior DI, and a lieutenant in charge, a woman lieutenant from World War II.
I’ll tell you, getting down there, what was even funnier, there was a weigh station there where you had to stop, and there was a little shack there that had Marines in there. They were picking up the [unclear] and stuff and they were there.
My sister said, “You’re going to pack very light because you’ll have to carry all this stuff.” So I put my clothes in that little suitcase. She said, “You’ll have to carry it.”
We get off the train, and these Marines who were there who met us, they said to all the men up on the train, “Pick up those girls’ bags and help them.” These women started to giggle, and they said, “You think it’s so funny, carry them yourself.” [Laughs]
EE: Do you want special treatment or not?
VH: So we went in. On this train, they backed into Beaufort, [South Carolina]. There was no way for it to turn around. So it went back out the way it backed in there. No, it wasn’t Beaufort—well, anyway, wherever it was that we landed there. Then they ran out to Parris Island from there after we got off the train.
That’s kind of a shock in itself, but everything else was kind of a shock to me. So at that point, I was tired and so was everybody else. We got down there, and you learn in a hurry. I grew up getting along with people. I never had any problems. When you grow up with nine other brothers and sisters, you get along.
EE: You kind of have a limited concept of what privacy is right from the start, yes.
VH: Anyway, we got down there, and I don’t remember too much about it. You went in, and you had to fill out all these papers. I think we got in early in the morning, because I think that train ride was all night. Yes, it was, now that I think about it. I remember.
Then they were going to start you off right away to give you some uniforms and give you different things and tell you what you’ve got to do. Then they ask you all kinds of questions and you have to write the Marine Corps Hymn.
EE: [Unclear]
VH: I think I was the only one who knew it.
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EE: I’m curious, because when they first started all these branches of service for women, they didn’t quite know what to do with them. They just had, “Okay. We’ll let them be cooks and bakers and parachute riggers.”
Did they give you a set of like, “Here are the jobs that would be available to you. Do you have an interest in that kind of job?” Did you have a selection?
VH: Oh no, they didn’t talk to you about that. They gave you a GCT test, general classification test. When you filled out those forms, you know, they knew what you had done. Like there were a couple of older ones of us there. They weren’t all just twenty-one.
So they had people there who had skills, had worked. It wasn’t just me. It was some other people, too. One girl was a Swedish girl, and she—I forget what her background was. It was very good.
Then there was another one. She was the oldest one there, and she had been an accountant somewhere in Chicago, a smart girl but very nervous, nice girl, though.
They gave you these tests and stuff, and then you got your GCT. Then they interviewed you, but they pretty much—they might ask you if you’d like to do something, but there were so few things open. There was the 01 field, the administrative field. There was, at that time, supply, I think. Pretty much, that’s what you did if you were a woman.
Because of my background, I was a 01 right away, and that’s what I’ve been my career in the Marine Corps.
EE: Did you have a chance to express an option on where you’d like to be stationed, close to the Midwest or someplace else?
VH: No, not at that time. Well maybe they do now, but when you get up in grade a little bit, you always do on your fitness report. In those days, you just got competent proficiency marks from whoever you worked for.
EE: How long was basic for you?
VH: Six weeks.
EE: If it’s a class at a time and twenty-two is in your group from Chicago, how many were in this—
VH: That twenty-two was the total class.
EE: That was the total.
VH: That’s from everywhere.
EE: From everywhere. 15
VH: There were only about four of us, I think, out of the Chicago office and the girl from Pennsylvania.
EE: So you got the sense that you were very exclusive. Did they tell you how many women had applied for those positions?
VH: No, you didn’t get much information about that. But they had your background. It had been sent to Washington, and I think Parris Island knew when you were coming, what type of background you had, where you had worked.
Because when we got out of boot camp, the women were pretty much 01s. Those who couldn’t type were sent to clerk typist school. Those of us who could type or had some background, working background in administration, we were sent to the personnel administration school, which was a little bit higher up.
In that class were other people, because at the time that we went in, the Marine Corps, they were just changing from the old unit diary to the new—I want to say computerized. It wasn’t quite that far yet, but that kind of stuff was just starting.
[Phone rings. Tape recorder turned off.]
EE: —because you have a career that’s a lot longer than most women I talk to. That’s a problem I ran into with the brigadier general who started in World War II and went to sea.
VH: Oh, yes. How do you get down all this [unclear]?
EE: Well, for most folks that talk about where they were stationed, it’s one or two stops. So what I want to do, if you could take a few minutes and talk with me about, in kind of a resume form, where you were stationed. Then I’m going to go back and ask you questions that will sort of be highlighting, just general questions about your military experience, which for you is a thirty-year career.
VH: Thirty-five years.
EE: Thirty-five year career. As you go through and tell me where you were stationed, I’ll also go back and pitch some questions off that—but just general questions about your experiences as a woman and the changes that occurred during the total course of your career.
So you were six weeks at Parris Island.
VH: And six weeks longer in the personnel administration school.
16
EE: Was that personnel administration school at Parris Island?
VH: Right, at Parris Island.
EE: So then, after that, where did you go?
VH: We went to Headquarters Marine Corps. All women Marines from Parris Island up to that time went to Headquarters Marine Corps.
EE: You were at Henderson Hall?
VH: Henderson Hall. I was a clerk over in the records service section, take orders. From there, I was working with all these civilians—
EE: That would have been fall of ’49, I guess.
VH: Yes. I went there in December of ’49. No, not December. It was earlier than that, because I went through boot camp in July. August, September, it must have September when we went up there.
Anyway, I was there, and I worked in records service section. Then I got moved up to the decorations and medals because I was the only Marine in that whole division. They had put me in a civilian GS-5 billet, and the civilians complained because, you know, I was stopping them from getting a promotion.
I think it was because of my work experience on the outside that they wanted to put me in there. So I had to be moved that day. Someone came up from the civilian personnel office and said, “Hilgart will be moved today,” and I went up to decorations and medals.
EE: Your first one was what at Henderson Hall?
VH: Records service section.
EE: And most of the people that you were working with there were civilians?
VH: They were all civilians up there.
EE: Decorations and medals was more—
VH: No. It was still all civilian. It was all civilians. In fact, the lady in charge was a woman Marine from World War I, Mrs. Blakely. She’s dead now, but the nicest lady. She had been a Marine in World War I. That’s who I worked for.
With that, I did—I was typing. I was a good typist. I was typing decorations and citations for all the people who were getting decorations, wherever they were. That had to go to the Pentagon to be signed by the Secretary. 17
Then I would carry them over there. I remember the first instructions I got because I’d never been in that place. Mrs. Blakely said, “Now, when you go there, head for the center of the building so you can get the shortest way around.” [Laughter]
When I looked at that thing when I went in, I thought, “Oh, my God, if I’d walked around all the outside—”
EE: It would take forever.
VH: Can you imagine? Anyway, that was an experience, and it was a nice one because I met a lot of nice people that way.
Then I was there until I went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, in ’51. That summer I went down to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, [unclear] at that time, along with some others from Headquarters Marine Corps, boys, I mean men.
I went down there and completed Officer Candidate School. Then we got commissioned. That Officer Candidate School was six weeks. It was sort of like boot camp all over. Most of the kids came from college, but there were a few enlisted women who were [unclear].
EE: And this was all women? Your training was separate.
VH: It was all women. The training was separate. Then when you got through Officer Candidate School, then we went to basic school. Again, that was strictly the women’s course.
Now, we did get some classes—like naval justice we got with some majors. The junior school was getting this course in naval justice, so we went to school at the same time they did.
EE: What was your rank when you got out of OCS?
VH: Lieutenant, second lieutenant. They made us sergeants, even though none of us were to begin with. They promoted us to sergeant when we went into OCS. Then you—
EE: So you spent six weeks as a sergeant. [Laughter]
VH: Then we got commissioned on November 7 of 1951. Then we went to basic school. Then from basic school, you got transferred to a base. I went out to Camp Pendleton, California, as the Executive Officer of the Women Marine Company. Captain, who was then Captain Jeanette Susted [?], was the CO. I went out there, and I was her exec.
I’m going to tell you this story simply because it’s interesting. The exec, you know, always has to see the kids who’ve been coming in late or made a few 18
errors or done something wrong. So I saw this girl, my first experience. She came in.
I said, “I understand that this is what happened.” She was late for duty or didn’t get in and make her duty or something. I said, “What happened?”
She gave me some story about—it wasn’t that she forgot. I forget what it was.
Of course, you know, I have no reason not to believe it. But they can tell you anything and you have to believe them. So I chewed her out a little bit about her responsibilities.
I said, “You may go,” and she left.
The next morning, about nine o’clock, she came in to see me, my first sergeant. This gal was one of my drill instructors when I was down at Parris Island, the first sergeant was, who could say I worked for her yesterday. [Laughs]
EE: That’s right.
VH: Anyway, she said, “So-and-so wants to see you.” I don’t remember the girl’s name. “So-and-so wants to see you.”
I said, “Oh? What for?”
She said, “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me. She said she had to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said, “send her in.”
She comes in, and she said, “Lieutenant, I came back to tell you that I lied to you yesterday.”
I said, “Oh, you did?”
She said, “Yes, ma’am. I feel terrible about it,” or something like that.
I said, “Well, just so you remember this. Next time I don’t have to believe you. You may go.”
She thought I’d chew her out for lying. But that took a lot of guts for her to come back, because I would have never known.
EE: That’s right. She’d already punished herself, probably, thinking about telling you.
VH: And so the first sergeant is always in there when you see one of these people. So she rushes in to tell Captain Susted. Captain Susted says to me when I got out of there, she said, “You know, I’ve been in the Marine Corps a long time, and I’ve had several companies.” And she said, “I know a lot of them lied to me, but no one ever came back and told me they lied.”
I said, “That’s my innocent face.” I was so green. Anyway, that was an interesting experience.
EE: You’re not only a good CO; you’re now converting people and making them honest.
19
VH: I don’t know. I was only a lieutenant. I wasn’t the CO. I was only the executive officer.
EE: So how long were you at Camp Pendleton?
VH: I was at Camp Pendleton—well, Captain Susted left and went to Europe. So I got assigned as—
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
VH: I went to San Francisco and got the flying boat Mars and went to Hawaii in one of those sea planes. It was interesting because I’d never been on anything like that.
I got there the day before Christmas, two days before Christmas, on my birthday. I didn’t know a soul, except that I did know the first sergeant. The woman who was going to be my first sergeant flew over there the same time I did. She was new, too, but she wasn’t new to the Marine Corps. She had been in World War II, and I had known her because she was also at [unclear] training when I was there.
We went to Pearl Harbor, and we were met, of course. I was going assigned as the CO of the Women Marine Company at Pearl Harbor. I was there until January of ’55. So that was a little better than two years. I came back to the states the end of January.
I went on leave, and then I was assigned to the company at battalion Headquarters Marine Corps, as the commanding officer. But I was told that they didn’t usually assign women COs, to have so many—to have commands in a row, but they didn’t have anybody to send in there who had experience, so I would be there until they got someone else.
A year later, I was reassigned over to the 6th Marine Corps Reserve District right there on the base. They had their Headquarters there.
EE: So you were CO at Marine Corps Headquarters back in D.C.?
VH: Yes.
EE: How many women were in your group?
VH: Well, gosh, I don’t honestly remember any of those details. I know Pendleton was a big command. But Headquarters, that’s an entirely different command. They all work over at the Annex or at the Pentagon. It’s just an entirely different group of people. I don’t remember how many were there at all.
EE: But it’s a different kind of management because of the nature of the work and the fact that the women are just scattered everywhere in those buildings. 20
VH: Well, yes, and one of the things that you find when you go to a command like that, especially like the Headquarters Marine Corps, was that everybody they worked for over at each of these places, they thought they owned this person, that you shouldn’t be able to tell them anything.
You know it doesn’t work like that. Otherwise, they’d get no guidance at all. So they got a little upset if you did something they didn’t like, like sit on a board that didn’t promote their girl. [Laughs]
EE: Yes. [Unclear]
VH: Anyway, then they—I just held the phone out here when they called me. [Laughter] Then I was there until I went to the district. Then I was at the district, and from there—that was 1956 I went to the district. I was only there a year and then I went to the district, which was right there, just a few doors away. Where did I go from there? I was there about a year, I guess.
[Tape recorder turned off]
EE: As you were looking for that information, you said you made captain in Hawaii. The other thing you must have done, you must have reenlisted.
VH: No, no. When you’re an officer, you serve—
EE: But you originally signed up in ’49 for three years.
VH: Yes. Well, they discharge you from that status. The minute you get commissioned, that is over and those three years have nothing to do with it. When you become an officer, then you have a different kind of a requirement to stay.
But I became a regular officer right away. I was commissioned—we all were commissioned in the reserves on the seventh. On the twenty-third, those of us who became regular officers were discharged and got a discharge certificate, although they forgot to give it to us until 1968, but that’s neither here nor there. We got then commissioned in the regular Marine Corps. Then you have a different kind of obligation, a couple of years it is.
When I left Headquarters, the 6th district, I went to El Toro as commanding officer of the Women Marine Detachment.
EE: See, my father-in-law would have left by then. Otherwise, he would have been giving grief to your women. [Laughter]
VH: Oh, most of them didn’t give grief to the women. They only gave the grief to the CO. No, they were pretty good. 21
EE: How long were you at El Toro?
VH: I was at El Toro from ’58 to ’60, a little better than two years. I can’t remember the months there.
EE: The thing that I’ve heard in reading around about the—the general level of women, the number of women, stayed low comparatively in the fifties. There just wasn’t a lot of effort to recruit a lot of women in the services.
VH: Well, they were limited in how many they could—I forget. I think it was two percent.
EE: Yes. There was a cap.
VH: Yes, two percent. You could not have more than two percent women in the Marine Corps, and two percent isn’t a heck of a lot. So they were limited for quite some time, and I don’t recall when that cap was taken off.
They were limited for a long time. You could only have so many officers. You could only have so many enlisted.
EE: I would think, for someone who’s looking at making it a career, as you are after this number of years—does that make you anxious about getting a promotion and about being able to—
VH: No. Initially, the women were promoted among their own people, too. Eventually, that changed, too, and that had to change because it didn’t make sense not to do it that way.
But you competed, and there was a separate promotion board for the women. For instance, when I went from captain major, I think it was, your board is comprised of a general officer and so many other officers, all senior to the group being promoted. I was at El Toro when I got promoted to major. When these boards met and they were considering women enlisted or women officers, whatever board we were sitting on, they had to have a woman officer sitting on that board if they were going to consider women.
What they usually did was consider the women first then because they were still tied to their own allowances. They considered the women first, and then that woman officer was relieved from the board, and then they considered the man. But I think in later years, you just sat there on the board with everybody, and that’s the way it should have been.
I made major at El Toro and went back to Headquarters Marine Corps. Then I worked in the—I was going to say not recruiting section but it’s the branch that is responsible for all the recruiting, whether man, woman, or whatever it is. I can’t remember the name. I worked there as the head of the candidate accounting unit and accounted for the PLCs, the aviation PLCs. Oh, there were how many 22
different groups of men’s programs that were on there and whether they were going to—
EE: PLC stands for—
VH: Platoon Leaders Class. Anyway, all those groups that were—people in college would go to summer training. We kept all their records in there, the section I worked in.
I had some interesting things happen while I was there. They were putting out a new recruiting booklet on Women Marines, and the artist they chose was from New York. I just can’t think of his name. He took me along on some of these places where they went to see Women Marines, you know, take pictures of them, because they were going to use Women Marines to actually be the model, which is what they did.
So I got to travel with him. When he had his whole thing put together, they invited us, along with the other people, the male Marines who were from Headquarters who were involved in that, he invited us up to New York to see what he had done, put this booklet together.
It was very interesting for me because I had never been there before to begin with, and I didn’t know much about that kind of—how they put those things together. It was very interesting for me.
Then, from there, I went to—that was ’58 to ’60 [that] I was at El Toro. Sixty to ’63 I was at Headquarters. I went down to Parris Island as the executive officer of the recruit training battalion, one that was a recruit training battalion. That was from ’63 to ’65. I made lieutenant colonel down there. No. I don’t have my whole record here where I can tell what year I’m in. No. This is my [unclear] records.
EE: When you were working at the recruiting area, or you’re putting together these materials, was it difficult meeting your two percent quota? Was there trouble getting that many?
VH: Well, I wasn’t really responsible for the recruiting of them per se. I was involved in looking at records, the men’s and well as women’s. Mine was kind of an administrative job there, although I saw all the Women Marine records that came in.
EE: You’re doing mostly executive officer, CO positions for the previous ten years. That work has a paperwork component to it, but it’s also much more interactive with your personnel, which is a different kind of thing than your background in Grafton and coming back in. So when your sister says you’re going to meet a lot of people, you didn’t know how right she was. You were going to have to be responsible for a lot of people, is what it came out.
23
VH: Yes, through the years. But see, I was older than most of the kids in my OCS class, and I had lived a little bit longer.
EE: So it served you well. You knew a little bit about the world.
VH: Yes, a little bit. I’m still a little older [unclear].
EE: After you were at Parris Island in ’65, where did you go?
VH: The recruit training battalion. I went back to Headquarters.
EE: Are you playing freeze tag, running back and forth to D.C.?
VH: Well, you know, I said to my boss one time when I was [unclear], I said to him—oh, this was the time when it happened. I was assigned to the assignment classification branch, and that’s where I saw the women’s records and where they were going to go and had comments to make on whether these guys were sending them to the right place or not because I knew most of the women by then.
I didn’t have any say-so in it, but I could comment on it if I thought it was not good or something. Anyway, I said to my boss, whom I’d worked for when I was a PFC up there or a corporal—I had done some work for a volunteer group after hours because he was in that—that job was so hectic, trying to get these people in and clearing all their records and stuff, and I had done some typing for them after work one night, and I said to him, I said, “You know, there’s a policy here in the assignment classification branch that nobody gets back-to-back tours at Headquarters Marine Corps. Now, how many have I had?”
EE: Could we just like combine them together where [unclear]?
VH: He said to me, “Val, don’t talk to me about that.” Anyway, he was the head of that assignment section. But at any rate, I never had a bad job in the Marine Corps. They were all good.
EE: That’s nice to say.
VH: From there, I went to Quantico, Virginia, as the commanding officer of the Women’s Officers’ School.
EE: How long were you at Headquarters before then, two years?
VH: Now wait. What year am I in?
EE: Sixty-five when you went up there.
24
VH: Sixty-four to ’65 at Parris Island. I went up there in ’65. Sixty-seven, sometime late ’67 I believe it was. Then I was the CO of the Women’s Officers’ School at Quantico, and then we had the Women’s Officers’ School.
The women officers’ basic course was still separate from the men. It isn’t now and hasn’t been for quite some time. Not only that, but that year we had to teach two sets coming in. The recruiter was good, and they had brought in extra people so we had to teach a double course.
We didn’t have much help. Initially, when they opened OCS to the women, they brought—a lot of the people who trained, they only had recruit training at Parris Island during the summer months, and those people were sent up to Quantico to help with the OCs, training OCs. So you did kind of double duty.
They didn’t have enough to get us because at that point they were bringing more people into the Marine Corps. You know, all this had changed a lot. So we didn’t have much help up there so everybody had to—I taught the leadership courses there for the women.
Then I taught something new. They wanted to start a women officers’ command leadership course to train commanding officers, Women Marine commanding officers. In those days, the Women Marine companies were still separate. So I had to put a syllabus together and to write the training on that.
We had a training section there, and they did all the typing and stuff. I gave those courses. They brought Women Marine officers who they thought were suitable to be Women Marine commanders. I mean, they had the—you know, because it’s kind of a rough job. You do spend a lot of time at a command, and you do have a lot of responsibility. So they brought these women in to Washington, and we taught a course.
EE: It was probably during that stay there that Congress approved the law that said that women could get the rank of brigadier general, I would guess.
VH: Well, that wasn’t yet. When I went to Quantico—let’s see, 7 September 1970, I made colonel. I was out in Okinawa. So from Quantico, I went to Okinawa. I was the G-1 [personnel staff officer] out there, at the Marine Corps base out in Okinawa, Camp Butler.
Then I made colonel out there. Then I was out in Okinawa until ’70, 1970—from ’68 to ’70. Then I came back and went to Camp Lejeune as the assistant chief of staff for manpower. I was there six years.
EE: Which is when? When was integration, ’76, something like that?
VH: When they started training women with the men?
EE: Yes.
25
VH: No, not quite yet, because I went from there—after six years at Lejeune—in ’72 I came back from Okinawa. ’68 to ’70 I was at Quantico. ’72 I came back from Okinawa. I was there from ’72 to ’78.
They were starting then to sort of merge women into the male companies and the training and all that. Then I went to Marine Corps logistics base at Albany, Georgia, and I was director of personnel and administration. That was the title.
A year and a half later—let’s see, that was ’78 to ’80. In ’79, I became the chief of staff of the base sometime that summer. I don’t know exactly. Then I was there, and I retired in 1981 the first time.
I had thirty-two years service, thirty years commissioned service. You’re only entitled to thirty years commissioned service, and I had those twenty-seven months enlisted. So I retired, but nine months later I had a call from Headquarters, “Can you come out?”
I didn’t tell you about this. When I was at Lejeune and again when I was at Albany, because of my job—the civilian personnel offices came under the director of personnel and the manpower chief down there, and I negotiated, as the chief negotiator, a labor contract for the civilian personnel, who were union members of the AFGE [American Federation of Government Employees]. They didn’t have to belong, but if they were in that group of people, under the law, the union has to represent them.
So I negotiated a contract at Lejeune. Then when I went to Albany, I negotiated a contract down there. And that’s how I got called back to active duty. I retired in ’81, and in January of ’82, they called me from Headquarters.
The union had made a bid to consolidate all the AFGE units in the Marine Corps. They wanted a consolidated contract that covered all the units that had AFGE unions. So I got a call from Headquarters Marine Corps.
I was retired, and I was down at Albany learning to play golf. I loved Albany. It was a wonderful base. I got this call, and the guy from Headquarters who called me said that General Barel [?] asked him to call me to see if I was working. Somebody said, “Well, she’s retired.” He said, “Well, see if she’s working, if she’s doing anything.”
So he called me, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to come back. Now, you see, when you come back like that, you serve at the request of the commandant. You don’t get any promotions. You don’t get any—you’re just on active duty until you don’t have to be there anymore.
So I went back on active duty in April of ’82, and I went to Washington, D.C., and then set up an office there to prepare for negotiations, hired some people. When I had the people hired, then we had to work on putting a contract together. You know, the union is supposed to put one on and give proposals and then you put one together and give proposals.
I was very fortunate in the people that I had working for me. I hired a guy who was in the civilian personnel at the Headquarters of the civilian personnel offices in Washington, a guy by the name of McKay [?]. He was smart as could be. He had his doctorate in labor economics and labor relations, a brilliant man, 26
beautiful command of the English language, knew what every word meant and knew how to write it so that it was clearly understood what you were talking about.
Then I had two Marine officers that they had sent out to be trained in labor relations, three majors. Then I had a navy guy who was out of the navy, a lieutenant who got out of the navy. I don’t know what—I think it was [unclear]. It doesn’t matter. He was working in the civilian personnel office when I hired him. And then we got a clerk, and we put that clerk in—
EE: Kind of like you were shooting bear there.
VH: Well, you know, it was the first time that anybody had done that. The air force had negotiated a consolidated contract for their logistics command, but see, this was to cover all the bases, regardless of what they were.
There were twenty-two bases that the Marine Corps had. Twenty of them had AFGE units. So we had to talk to all these people to see—whatever we were doing, we would send out to these people and get their comments on it because each base is enough different that you can’t negotiate something like that that’s going to step on somebody’s toes and destroy something that they’ve got going there.
Then I went to visit these commands in the United States and talk to these people about what we were proposing to do and what we had to do in accordance with the labor relations board and all those people. But this guy was just brilliant. We put together a contract, and that was no easy job.
First of all—I’m not going to say this on tape. At any rate—
EE: Hold on a second.
[Tape recorder turned off]
EE: In other words, it was a successful negotiation.
VH: It was.
EE: How long did that take? You started this in April of ’82?
VH: Yes. We started putting it together. I came on active duty. Then we had to set up a board. Then the union members from all these AFGE units had to vote on it, see if they wanted it.
So the Marine Corps had to pay for all of this. We had to buy a post office box. We had to pay for everything. The union had so much time to bad mouth us all they wanted, and you couldn’t say anything. 27
You could write to all these employees, to the bases, and write to them, but you had to be very careful what you put down, and we were, and because we had no reason to. I never was one of these people who believe that you’ve got to fight with the union. I think there shouldn’t be any, and we never had it. I never did, anyway, because I just think that’s just stupid. Where do you get from there?
When that was all through, I mean, after this all happened—I chewed the living daylights out of this kid. I was so mad. [Laughs] The union was very fair to us in that they did put that in the paper, much as to say, “We’re going to get a fair shake from the Marine Corps.”
So anyway, we started negotiating, but you have to find some neutral ground on which to negotiate. So we had some office in the same—we were in a building over there that didn’t belong to the military. I never can think of the name of that town up in Washington. I’ll think of it.
At any rate, we had to find a place and we moved over there. Then we negotiated in a separate place. At any rate, we went to negotiations, started it. When we needed to call in an arbitrator, we negotiated downtown Washington, the arbitrator set the place where we would go.
EE: How long a process did this take to get it finally resolved?
VH: It took until early December, I think it was, the end of November or early December. When we went to arbitration, we worked—this is no lie—from early in the morning. The arbitrator came in at nine, and we worked until ten or eleven o’clock every night.
He said, “We are going to get this negotiation completed by this weekend.” That’s just what he told us. We didn’t really have much trouble. There were certain points that are sticklers with the union, and I understand why, but you’ve got to be able to explain it to them, you know, and we had really done our homework, looked up the regulations. If it’s a regulation put out by DOD [Department of Defense], you don’t have to worry.
EE: How much free hand were you given to be the point of negotiation, or did you have to report back to the—
VH: No. We had free rein to do this. We just kept them informed.
I assigned Ray McKay to be the chief negotiator. Now, they all knew I was a—he said, “Well, you know, Val, I don’t know that much about the Marine Corps.”
I said, “Let me take care of that, and you take care of this because you’re the brain behind this.”
And he did. I saw everything. It came in. If I didn’t like what I saw, if I would interpret it some other way, I’d say, “Do you really mean to say this?” It was that kind of—
28
EE: That sounds like you know how to use your experts, since you let him do the part that he knows the best, and then where it’s affecting the things that you know the best, you’d—
VH: And they always would—you know, if it had something to do with—it was strictly something that was military, they would just—we sat right next to him at the table. It was just that we had no trouble.
And we had these other guys, not necessarily at the negotiating table. They would be looking up the background if we ran into a snag or something. We had tried to make sure that everything was going to go, with the regulations right and everything else, and the guys at Headquarters were informed.
A guy there, Fete Lilly [?], he lives here in town now, he’s retired. He looked something up in the communications manual, a DOD manual, that we were hoping would be somewhere but we couldn’t find it. He got it for us and called us and sent the book over, and we got it. It was that kind of cooperation from [unclear].
EE: That’s great.
VH: It really was. So we finally, on Saturday night—Sunday morning—we stayed all night on Saturday. Sunday morning at ten o’clock, we signed off on that. The big stickler then had to do with that communications.
The union wanted to be able to use the base telephones wherever we had it to call someone out on the other post, you know, their man out there. DOD says those are military lines, they have to remain open, we cannot have—and that was in the regulations. When I showed the guy the regulation, he said, “That’s all I need.” And it was, and we really did get along very well.
Now, there was a woman negotiating for the union at the AFL-CIO [The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations]. She was the—you know, and I don’t remember what her name was, but shortly after she was there, when we met there, she said to me—I don’t even know what the conversation was, and she said to me—mind you, I’m now close to sixty years old, or I was sixty—she said to me, “You got a lot to learn, kid.”
I said, “Oh, really?” and walked the other way. [Laughs] And I [unclear].
EE: [Unclear].
VH: But at any rate, we did get a good contract, and everybody from the Marine Corps was happy with it. And the [U.S.] Air Force—
EE: Boy, nothing like sowing a final seed of doubt in your mind as you go. That’s like a negotiator tactic.
VH: Yes. So anyway, we got along fine. And there were people from several of the commands sitting on their negotiating table, people I had known or met at one 29
base or another because it’s my job. They were just—you know? I mean, they knew me. They knew I was going to give them a fair shake.
EE: Sounds like a nice way to tie together a lot of your whole career just because of the people you know, your experience dealing with those folks for however long you were there.
VH: And they were all nice. I never had any trouble with the union, because I really believe that, a lot of times, supervisors are responsible for some of the problems you have.
EE: But the problems are not institutional. They are personality.
VH: Well, I understand the frustrations of—sometimes you get a worker who’s late all the time, or he’s this or he’s that, and you always want to be a nice guy so you excuse him with just a little slap on the wrist. All of a sudden, one day he comes in, and he’s continued, and you’re just fed up to here with it.
I understand that position. Then the thing he did may not be as bad as any of the others, but they want to slap a fine on him of some kind. And that’s the worst thing you can do as a supervisor because there’s a regulation that says you must keep track of the things that they do. You must have a good record of it. You must do this.
EE: So that you can document that you’re not overreacting.
VH: When I was at Albany as the chief of staff, the general turned all that stuff over to me to handle. That was before I was even called to go up there and do it. I wasn’t retired yet. I was still on active duty.
He said, “You handle these civilian personnel matters. If they come up here, you handle them for me.”
I would tell the general what I did. I don’t mean to blow my own horn, but if something happened that I felt really they should have taken care of down there, I would just call the director of the division and say, “Hey, look, I’m just going to send this thing back. I’m not going to ask the General to sign something that we’re not going to win on, even with the labor board.”
EE: You finished this in late ’82. Did you retire again after that?
VH: I went back into the retired list. That’s what you do. See, you don’t get promotions. You don’t get any of that stuff. Now, you might get a pay raise if there was one due at that time.
EE: You went to the retired list, but yet I have that you served through ’85.
VH: I did. 30
EE: So how did you get two more years in there?
VH: I was on three years of active duty in Washington, D.C. So I went off the retired list when I got called back to active duty, or requested to come back on active. Because if you have thirty years commissioned service, you’re not supposed to be able to serve any more unless you have one of these things that happened to me.
If you have less than that, they can call you back. But if they don’t, you have to be willing to come back. So then when I went back, I got credit for those three years.
EE: And what was your job after this negotiating stint where you went back?
VH: When I finished that, I told them I was going to go back to retirement. I said to the commanding general here at Headquarters—because we were working for Headquarters then—I suggested to my boss—who was not the commanding general, he was the director of personnel—that they should give him the job to head that labor relations thing at the Headquarters. He should have the top job in there because he had all the brains that you needed.
I was going to go back into retirement, which is what I did. On the 31st of December—it was December when we finished that negotiations. I don’t remember—I remember it was a Sunday morning. I went to church on my way home and went back and slept all day.
EE: Sounds like you deserved it, yes.
VH: Oh, so did everybody else. They were just bushed. But so did the rest. They were all there at the same time.
Then I had nineteen days, or twenty-some days, that I was going to lose if I didn’t take it. So I took the rest of December, and I retired while I was home. They filled out all the paperwork and stuff.
EE: So you went up in April of ’82 and finished this December of ’85.
VH: We actually had a lot of work to do before we actually went on vacation. They finished that in ’85, and it was a wonderful experience for me.
EE: When you finished in ’85 —I want to get through how you got to here, this in Jacksonville. Then I want to go back and ask you a few questions earlier about your—
VH: Okay. I had a lot of friends who retired out here. I bought some property while I was here. I was here so long, six years.
I thought, “Do I want to go back to Grafton? No. Do I want to stay somewhere else where I’ve got a lot of friends?” You sort of lose touch. Even 31
though I went home a couple times a year, it was for my family, not for anything else.
I had this property so I built a house. When I was going to start building, when I thought about it, I knew I had this property. I built this house, actually, while I was still on active duty up there. I negotiated a contract, and I never got to see it.
The worst mistake you can make is to build a house and let the builder do what he darned well pleases. That was a mistake. However, it all worked out all right, and I got things straightened up when I got back down.
EE: So you came back here. You had thirty-five years. What was the toughest thing you ever had to do in the service?
VH: When you say tough, are you talking about physical?
EE: Physically or emotionally. For some folks, the toughest is physical. For some it’s emotional.
VH: Well you see, when I was in there, we had to take—the regulations for women’s physicals was entirely different than the men. Once they integrated them, they both went through the same thing. We did not.
We had so many miles we had to run and so many laps around the—we had all those things. You had to stay physically fit. That was up to the commander at the base you were at to see that you were. Then when the IG came around, a lot of people were tested on that.
Physically, I don’t know that there was anything ever physically tiring. It was probably the contract. But I’ve been an early riser all my life and I like to work. I liked the people I worked with. They were good to me, and I think I did my job.
The most fun work is being a commanding officer, especially when you’re young and they’re young. Because I don’t care, kids—when I say kids, I’m talking about these kids sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old—they may get in some trouble, but they’re just very human and very real.
EE: Very open to a lot of things.
VH: Yes. And they do get in trouble once in a while. But I didn’t find the Women Marines got in terribly serious trouble like a lot of the men did, simply because it was still a—we lived in a different world in those days. They don’t anymore.
I was young enough, and yet I was quite a bit older than those kids, but I was young enough to appreciate that they were having a good time, and I enjoyed them. They always had sports that they competed with other women’s organizations. I just enjoyed it. I liked the people, and I like people. They were fun to be with, and for the most part—there are things that happened, yes. 32
When I was ordered back to Headquarters Marine Corps to take over the company at Headquarters Marine Corps, a girl—why she did it, I don’t know. She was smarter than that, had been a drill instructor. She went out and robbed a store out in town, in Arlington.
She had a gun. Where she got it from, who knows, because we didn’t have rifle practice or any of those, weapons practice. She goes to the store and she says—I don’t really think this should be on there because she ended up in jail. But this girl, she goes to that store, and she told them exactly how much money she wanted, the amount of change, what denomination.
It was quite a way from Henderson Hall. She told them exactly what she wanted. Then she comes back, throws the gun in some pond someplace, goes to a restaurant, drops the change and some bills into—you know, one of the feeders with napkins, drops it in there, and then goes back to the barracks, climbs the fence at Henderson Hall, and goes back to the barracks.
Then she takes a couple of PFCs and tells them about it. They didn't believe her. They thought she’s just full of smoke. “She’s trying to scare us.” These two kids. And the two of them weren’t geniuses. They thought, “She’s just pulling our leg.”
So they don’t think anything of it. They go to the movies. All of a sudden, one girl says to the other, “You don’t suppose she really did that, do you?
This girl was a sergeant. She said, “I don’t know. She sure sounded like she did.”
So she said, “Do you think we should have gone to the MPs?”
They’re just youngsters themselves. So they get up out of the movie and go over and talk to the MPs. The MPs call—she was in uniform and everything when she did it. The MPs called the police. I guess that’s how, I’m not sure, and they find out that one was robbed. [Laughs]
EE: I’ll bet they were spooked when they heard that.
VH: I felt kind of sorry for them at the same time. The two of them were just bug eyed. [Laughs]
EE: Although that first night going down to Parris Island sounded pretty harrowing, it doesn’t sound like the kind of work you were in ever put you in physical danger. But were you ever afraid, going to so many different places, or did you learn to get over fear of new places and new things?
VH: I wasn’t really afraid. When I was in Hawaii I had an interesting experience. It was my second command. Chief of Police Doddard in Hawaii was responsible for the juvenile court and the juvenile problems in Honolulu. One day she called me, and she said, “Would you like to see where some of the women hang around in town?”
I said, “Sure.” 33
She said, “Well now, I’ll tell you.” She said, “I want you to wear a pair of bobby socks and some tennis shoes and a skirt and just a sweater or something, and,” she said, “I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go looking around,” she said, “because I have to go looking for the juveniles who are out who aren’t supposed to be out, because there’s a curfew in Hawaii.”
So I went with her, and she took me to some dives. I never saw anyone there, and I would have recognized them. I never saw anyone there.
She said, “These are haunts, certain hang-outs for a lot of people who are new.”
So we did pick up some juveniles. The first thing she did was call their parents. She’d take them to a place, and she would say, “Now call your parents and tell them where you are, and then I’ll talk to them.”
They were just kids, you know, twelve or thirteen years old. I don’t know that any of them were doing anything so seriously wrong except breaking curfew, but who knew? Who knew? It was a very interesting night. Then she brought me back home.
We never had any trouble while I was up there in Hawaii with any [unclear] picked up for anything in town, but she wanted me to see what the possibilities were.
EE: Sure. It was informative for you to hear scuttlebutt about what people were doing.
VH: It was for me. Sure.
EE: And, you know, from the beginning—I think the WAC was started in ’42, when even folks within the army were intentionally spreading the rumors about the character of women who had joined to kind of downplay their influence.
VH: Oh, yeah.
EE: Is that a constant that women in the service have had to face throughout your career, that kind of smear campaign, or could you tell things changed over time?
VH: Well, I’ll tell you, I learned a long time ago that you can go around spreading rumors, and I think when you’re a commanding officer, they’d better darned well be accurate, because there’s enough ways to check them out. I think that one of the problems always has been—and I don’t know if it’s still prevalent, but in those days it was because of the reputation they gave these gals in World War II when they joined.
If you joined, you were considered a prostitute, fair game for anybody, which really wasn’t true. I mean, there may have been one or two gals who went out and did something, but for the most part, that was not true. As long as you have this knowledge, I think you can cope with it. You know, the truth is going to come out no matter what. 34
I think kids—when I say kids, I’m talking about these kids who are teenagers and who are in their early twenties, who’ve never been away from home—yes, someone can lure them into a place and get them in trouble. But in those days, you know, in Hawaii, you were not allowed to go off base in a pair of slacks or shorts in those days.
Appearance in the Women Marines was everything. Everybody knew you expect it from a Woman Marine, and I think they told the men the same thing, they didn’t expect you look less.
EE: Did the women Marines feel that they held themselves to a higher standard than other women in the military?
VH: I don’t think I ever thought about it. I would like to think that they all told theirs the same thing. I don’t know if they had the same regulations we did.
EE: Well, maybe it’s because of familial ties and everybody I know who’ve been in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps has always considered themselves the elite of the services.
VH: Well, I think we are. [Laughs]
EE: I’m biased. I’ve got some connections there.
VH: I think we have been stricter about what we hold our people accountable for.
EE: Right, from the beginning. And the Marine Corps also, the time that you were in, I guess it was in the early fifties, when Revlon made that Marine Corps red lipstick, and you had to be color coordinated from head to toe, same as the cord.
[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]
EE: Because we were talking about the—so the cords changed color one time? There was a batch that was almost orange rather than red, and that got—what happened?
VH: Well, you know, you still had to wear that red—and that was good. I think they just got rid of the cords.
EE: You were talking about that it was something that you’ve enjoyed. When you signed up in ’49, most people in their mid-twenties don’t have a conception of what a life’s career is, so I’m sure you didn’t sign on—
VH: I only intended to stay for three years. I intended to complete that and go back home. 35
EE: When was it, do you think, that it hit you that, “I think I want to make a career out of this”?
VH: Well, I never thought about it till I got commissioned, but remember, I was—let’s see, I had served—I got my commission—I went in ’50, I got commissioned in ’51. So I went to OCS that year. So that would have been ’51, ’49 to ’51.
I didn’t even complete my enlistment. So I never thought about making it a career until I was in the officer ranks, and I don’t remember any specific day. I just kept on going. As long as you like it, why change?
EE: Playing off the idea of, I guess, what would now be called harassment. You sound like you were in a supportive environment from the very beginning.
VH: Well, yes. I don’t know. If you’ve talked to other Women Marines that were in World War II, they probably told you. I remember my sister telling me this. She said, “You know, you used to walk down the street, and the guys would be yelling out the windows, ‘Beautiful American Marines’ and they’d always yell back. But if they really got to them, they’d say ‘Ham, Ham.’”
She said, “You know, there’s all kinds of ways. You can either get excited about that or you can forget about it. We always decided to say, ‘Oh, thanks. Beautiful American Marines.’” So I knew that. We heard it, but it wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it was in World War II.
They were the first ones they had to harass. And though we got some of that stuff, sometimes you would go to an enlisted club when you were enlisted, and some guy was half shot, and he might make some crack to you or something. Well, I was in a situation like that one day, and the male Marines, we were on dates. A bunch of us [unclear] down at Quantico. This one guy, he was bombed, came over to ask me to dance.
I said, “I’m sorry. I’m here with someone.”
He said, “What are you, a goddamned queer?”
Well, I thought the guys were going to take him on right there, the fellows we were with, all nice people. I just sat down and said, “Forget it.”
EE: See, that’s a sense of being—it’s almost like brothers and sisters. You watch out for each other.
VH: Sure you do.
EE: And once they get to know you, as opposed to just being a woman, but they get to know you, then they take umbrage when somebody offends them.
VH: Well, let me tell you, sometime after that, a friend of mine had been in an automobile accident in Virginia, and she was in the hospital down at Quantico, 36
and they didn’t expect her to live. Her parents were coming in from Ohio, and I had known them.
We were bunkmates in boot camp. In fact she was the girl who rode with me on the train. She was in this terrible accident, and in OCS they wouldn’t ordinarily do this, but the CO of the [unclear] school asked me if I would go up and meet her parents and go up and see this girl periodically and talk to her parents and stuff. That’s very unusual because it was an officer candidate, and you’re not supposed to—so I did.
Well, I was walking home from the hospital one day, and this guy came behind me, and he was walking on crutches. He said, “Ma’am, ma’am,” and I turned around, and I looked at him. He said, “I want to apologize for what I said to you.” That was weeks before that that had happened. He said, “I want to apologize for what I said to you.”
I thought, “Did those guys beat him up anyway?” [Laughs]
EE: When he comes limping, that’s not a good sign. [Laughs]
VH: Anyway, I thought, “Well, that was pretty nice of him.”
EE: Now you’ve confessed to having two people apologize to you. You must have been successful with people if you can get people to—
VH: Well, no. I used to say, “God, I must have been really dumb that I don’t see through those things,” but I just [unclear].
EE: When you expect the best in people, usually you get it. And if you expect the best, well, you’re pretty keen on finding out who’s not going to give it to you.
VH: But those people don’t last long with anybody else either.
EE: No, no. You’ve led the social life, and I guess that changes, too. I guess as an officer, you can go to the officers club.
VH: Yes. This was enlisted. I was still enlisted, because you don’t get to be commissioned until you’re through that.
EE: Most of your time when you were in these different stations, were you socializing with other Women Marines? Did the women hang out together?
VH: Yes, pretty much. Yes. And because—well—
EE: There is a sense of—it’s hard for other folks to understand what’s going on.
VH: When I was stationed at Headquarters Marine Corps, when we first went up there, we lived on the economy because there weren’t any barracks for us up there. They 37
were renovating the barracks at Henderson Hall, and we lived in the WAVE quarters down in Potomac Park, where they lived for about six weeks. Then we went out on the economy because there wasn’t—and there were five of us roomed together. Five of us were in the same recruit class.
We rented a house in Arlington, and you got subs and quarters. We just pooled all our money, and we made a go of it. Interestingly enough, we had an Arlington policeman living on one side of us and another policeman from—I forget where it was, living on the other.
EE: Pretty nice [unclear].
VH: Yes. And we enjoyed it. We lived on the economy for [unclear] years before the barracks was ready for us and we moved in there. But I get along basically with people. It’s just stupid not to.
EE: I’ve wondered why this question is in my little pack. But you’ve had thirty-five years. I’m sure you’ve got one or two stories you could tell me. This question says, what was your most embarrassing moment?
VH: Oh, I’m not going to tell you.
EE: Okay. Back off the most.
VH: [Unclear] General Wasser, and he talked about it at my retirement the second time he was a commandant. I don’t want that on tape, but I’ll tell you about it.
EE: Okay. Tell me afterwards.
VH: Yes. And he got up there, and oh, I just about died. [Laughs]
EE: Yes. You can always count on your friends to put you in your place.
VH: Oh, yes. But he laughed about it. When he got through, he said, “Well, we all had a few toddies.”
EE: Who were your heroes or heroines?
VH: Well, I’ll tell you, I think Colonel [J. E.] Hamblet, who was the second director of the Women Marines, she was the director of the reserves. Colonel [Katerine A.] Towle was the first one, and she was a wonderful woman, tall, stately, looked the part, acted the part. So was Colonel Hamblet.
Colonel Hamblet was tall, and she could look any of those guys who were [unclear] in the eye and tell them off. She was a wonderful lady, had been schooled in London—I mean, just Washington, D.C., lived in Washington, D.C., 38
all her life. Her family was well known, but the nicest lady you ever wanted to find.
She was the director of the Marine reserves in the interim between when the first ones got out and when they brought them back in. Then she became the director of the Marines. And she, as far as I’m concerned, is just top notch in my book, because she was a wonderful person. She was good to everybody, and she didn’t let those guys walk on her, you know, when she was the director of the Marines.
She fought for a lot of the things the Women Marines got [unclear]. I admire her greatly because she was one of these people—when I went to Parris Island, she was the CO when I was the XO, and she had asked for me to come down there. I went down there, and I really enjoyed working for her and learned a lot. And I lived just two doors down.
We lived on the economy. There weren’t any quarters for women officers then. The lieutenants then had a BOQ [Base Officers’ Quarters], but we didn’t. We lived in town, and she only lived two doors up from us. So we used to do a lot of—she was a good cook, and I was a good cook. So we used to cook and change places, you know, and have a good time. She was a wonderful lady to work for.
EE: She must be, to put you at ease with the difference in rank, just to say, “Come on, we’ll do something.”
VH: Yes, that’s exactly right. And she said that to me more than once.
EE: Because not everybody does that. Some people, rank goes right to their head and that’s it.
VH: Yes, yes. It was wonderful working for her, and we had a good relationship. Then when she left, she retired, in those days, she had to revert to lieutenant colonel because she didn’t have enough time in to retire. That’s what they treated the women Marines with.
When [President Lyndon B.] Johnson signed the bill that allowed women to go to colonel regular, I mean any woman who was eligible for it, that changed the whole thing. But there is a woman who went through that. They gave her back her rank finally. But here she was, you know?
Oh, she was just such a lady. And she schooled that into the kids. You heard that all the time. “You are a Marine first and last. You are always a lady.” She used to tell the kids that all the time, and she was the epitome of one.
EE: That is something that, when I’ve talked to people who’ve had a long career, they regret that in the course of fully being integrated, that women did lose something in that sense of their femininity, and that you could be professional and yet distinctive.
39
VH: It was very obvious. I think it’s sad, because I have been to a party here in Jacksonville one time, and there were some Women Marines there, and I just cringed.
Mary Sadler [?] came in and said something, and I said, “Mary, my God, I never heard such language. I can’t believe it.” I said, “Did you think to say something to that—?” She was a master sergeant. If Colonel Hamlet would have heard that—she’s still alive, but boy, she’d be turning over in her grave.
I just couldn’t believe it, and I didn’t stick around very long. I thought, “If this is what I came here to hear, I don’t need to be a part of this.”
EE: It’s not peculiar to the military. I think in many professions, there is a [unclear] that says you have to out-macho the men, in a sense.
VH: Yes. Yes. But I had some wonderful people working for me. I had this master sergeant who worked for me, and he used to tell the guys down at Albany, he used to say, “That woman works harder than any male officer I’ve ever worked for. She only gets half the credit.”
But, you know, that’s a thing you live with. You can either complain about it, and then you’re just—I mean, that’s worse. The worst thing you can do is to gripe about that.
EE: Well, in life you can either wait for the credit or you can just go do the work.
VH: And I didn’t have any trouble. It’s just that he noticed it, you know. But I saw a lot of guys work hard there, and there are some people who get by with things, but what are you going to do? I mean, it’s not up to you to do something about it, and secondly, what are you going to get out of it? Nothing.
EE: In relation to the way that the roles have changed for women—you were talking about that when you went in it was basically 01 or supply—what was it? Just two years ago, the United States sent its first woman into combat as a fighter pilot over Iraq. You spent a career in the service. How are you about the evolving nature of—do you think there’s still some jobs that should be off limits to women, or do you think we should kind of go [unclear].
VH: Well, you know, I’ve been out now for fifteen years, but there is a girl that I [unclear]. She had a secret. She was a brilliant girl, and she and her husband, he went into the Marines, and they both went into a PLC-like program while they were at college.
In her last year of college, when she was supposed to go down to her last training commute down at Quantico—he was a year ahead of her—she ruptured her Achilles tendon. She wasn’t happy. She ruptured her Achilles tendon, and she couldn’t go.
The doctor said, “If you even attempt it, you’ll never walk again. That training is too hard. Stay out of it. Take it next year when you complete college. 40
Get your last year. You won’t get commissioned any sooner than anybody else. You’ll get commissioned with the class.”
So the honor graduation, she didn’t get commissioned. She got commissioned after she got through OCS. But she was a fine—and came from a wonderful family. The nun who was one of my good friends here in Jacksonville was her aunt, and she was just very fond of this sister who just came from Ireland, as we had a number over here from Ireland, and Bridgette was her niece.
Bridgette’s father was Sister’s nephew, and she wanted to go in the Marine Corps, and I gave her my uniforms when I got out, my dress blues. That’s one thing I shouldn’t have done, but that’s neither here nor there. She was a go-getter and a mover, and she was in some kind of communications field, so you can tell she’s doing something here that’s—at any rate, I saw her last year, and I forget what she says on here. Oh, “We’ve Come a Long Way, Semper Fi.”
Her parents didn’t know half the time where she was. She had some very high job that was classified. I don’t know what she did, and [unclear] she told me, but I haven’t seen her now since she’s [unclear] in the reserves. She was married, you know, and that’s kind of hard.
He got out of the Marine Corps when his time was up. He went, and he ran a school for children who were in trouble all the time up in Massachusetts somewhere. He was heading that school, trying to train good Marines, I guess. He ran that school for quite some time.
She was off, all over half the time. So she got out this year, out of the regulars, and joined the reserves. That was wise, because if you want to have a marriage and any kind of a life, with the job she had, you couldn’t. So I think she’s very happy. I haven’t talked to her since then. Her mother says that she is and that the marriage is back on track.
I had a letter from her, and it seems to be. I had talked to her mother. I had given her very good advice. I said, “Bridgette, you got to do what you got to do.” I said, “A marriage you don’t take lightly. Do you love the guy?”
“Oh, yes. He’s my best friend besides.”
I said, “Bridgette, you know what you’ve got to do.”
But you see she can have it both ways. She can go to a reserve unit and get some summertime jobs and stuff and have her marriage and if they want to have children have a child, and she can still get out as a colonel. She has to be sixty before she can get promoted—I mean, she could get promoted to colonel but before she could retire as a colonel.
I think she did the right thing because, to me, marriage is sacred. Being a Catholic, you know a lot of this. They went to Germany, the last I heard. She and her husband went to Germany on vacation, and I talk to her parents once in a while. They live in Tulsa now. Sister Regis is gone from here. She’s in Tulsa now at a convent up there. She’s eighty-seven years old.
But, I mean, that’s how I got to know Bridgette, and she invited me to her graduation from OCS. She was the platoon commander, which means she came out at the top of her class.
41
EE: So it is a question for you to have a personal balance. It’s nice that women have the option to make those choices, and that doesn’t bother you so much as just maybe individual women need to make choices, not just assume they can go be gung-ho as the men.
VH: Well, that’s the truth. There’s no doubt that she could compete with a man. This gal was—you know. And though she never said anything offensive in front of me, why, I think she was capable of keeping it up because she’s that kind of gal. She was an athlete. She was the athlete of the year for the women in the services for a long time while she was on active duty.
Besides that, she’s a very pretty girl at her wedding, and she’s a character and so is he. They have a good time together, and they are suited. But at her wedding, she had kids from her college class who were bridesmaids, and she told me what she was going to do. I couldn’t believe it.
You know when they put the garter on? Well, these girls had helped her. She was out in the hallway for a while. And when she comes in and they put the garter on her, she’s got her boondockers [boots] on, and everyone just screamed. She had told me what they were going to do. I thought he was going to choke, and there were a lot of Marines there. They just howled. They pulled up that skirt, and there were these boondockers. But she has that kind of humor.
EE: Well, it sounds like they might do well together, then.
A lot of the women I interview, they have only been in service for a year or two, and they can look back and get something from it, say, “My life is different because of this.” In your case, the service was your life.
VH: It was my life, yes. Although I worked for seven years before I went in.
EE: How do you think it changed you the most?
VH: I think I was—I was basically a little bit shy. I think that it made me more able to speak to people that I didn’t know. It gave me a sense of—I don’t know.
EE: Self-confidence, it sounds like.
VH: Self-confidence, I guess. Yes, that’s it. I’m not sure I would have gotten that had I not been here and placed in the positions I was in.
EE: You were given the leadership responsibilities; it sounded like to me, a lot more varied and a lot quicker than you would have done in the private sector.
VH: Oh, yes. Well, let me tell you something. When I went to Albany, Georgia, and I was director of personnel and administration there, and then I was appointed the chief of staff, and that I couldn’t believe because the chief of staff was transferring 42
to Virginia. One night he stayed late, and I was working late, and he said to me, “Val, the general’s going to ask you tomorrow to be the chief of staff of the base.”
I said, “What did you say?”
He said, “The general’s going to ask you tomorrow to be the chief of staff of the base.”
I said, “Me? I’m not a logistics officer or a supply officer. I’m an administrator.”
I told him that, and he said, “I’ve got all kinds of logistics and supply officers around.” He said, “I’m a supply specialist.” He said, “What I need is someone who knows something about people, and she is the one who does.” And that’s how I got to be chief of staff.
So the next morning, when the general called me in, I still couldn’t believe it. When he called me in, that’s just exactly—and I said to him, “General, you know—I know you know that I’m not a supply officer and I don’t know much about it.”
He said, “That isn’t what I need.” He said, “I need someone who knows something about people, and you do.” That’s how that happened. [Laughs]
EE: It served you well.
I have gone through my thirty plus a few more in the course of our conversation.
VH: I talk too much.
EE: No, no. I think you’ve been a model of brevity for thirty-five years. But is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to share with folks, looking back over your career, that’s important for people to know about?
VH: Well, I think I was fortunate in that my sister was there to tell me. Then when I was on active duty and Korea came along, my brother Bill, who had been a Marine in World War II, got called back to active duty, and he got stationed at Lejeune. I was up in Washington at the time, and I was enlisted yet.
He got called back to active duty, and he was out—I forget how old—he wasn’t too old, twenty-nine or something, but they thought that was an old man then.
He said, “They as much as told us we’re too old for this stuff.” You know, there’s a guy who worked in a gravel pit. He worked for my dad using that heavy equipment and all that stuff, worked hard all his life, and he says, “These guys come along and tell me at twenty-nine I’m too old. I could outdo most of those kids.” [Laughs]
But anyway, he was in then until they let those reservists they had called back go and sent them home. I don’t know how long that was.
In the meantime, my brother Jim—well, my brother Fred had been in the navy in World War II—but he got a medical discharge, had something wrong with his arm—but my brother Jim was old enough, and he was in Korea, but he was in 43
Germany. He was in the air force in Germany. But Bill used to come up and see me when he’d get a ride to Washington.
He said, “Let me tell you something.” He said to me, “I never tell anybody where I’m going. I ride up to Washington with those guys, and then I leave them. They always want to know where I’ve been. I never tell them.” He said, “Because if I told them that I have a sister in the Marine Corps, they would never stop harassing me.” [Laughs] And I believe it. I mean, that’s the way guys are.
EE: Yes, yes. And I think that might be the case today as much as fifty or sixty years ago. That’s just the nature of guys, speaking as one. [Laughs]
VH: So they would come and meet him somewhere and go home.
EE: Well, on behalf of the school, thank you for doing this. This has been [unclear].
[End of interview]