LIFE AFTER EAST HIGH, PART 2 

Soon, my time in New York was over and I was asked where I would like to be stationed. I said the West Coast and got it. I was one of several in charge of two cars of the train, with a Chief Petty Officer WAVE over us all. The two cars parted at Barstow and mine went on to Oakland. The Oakland Wave Barracks were close to a Sears store. When Christmas came, I did all my shopping there, for the Sears in Nashville had sent me coupons to use like cash in any Sears store, a few hundred dollars’ worth.

In Oakland I had charge of barracks and the WAVES who worked elsewhere.  Navy busses transported them everyday to Treasure Island and other places. While here, I received my first chevron on my sleeve and became Petty Officer, Third Class.  When the Oakland WAVE Barracks closed down, I transferred to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, again in personnel. This was a more interesting post, for thousands of men were stationed there. In chow line one day, I actually met a friend from my home church in Nashville. Many were invalided from the war, of course, and now my WAVE charges were hospital corpsmen. (We weren’t politically correct in those days.) Just a few weeks before I left the service, I got another chevron for my sleeve.   

I was in military service only fourteen months and left it as a Petty Officer, second class, the same rank as Staff Sergeant in the Army. It wasn’t nearly so easy for the men to rise in rank. My brother got to be only a corporal during his four-year stretch in the Signal Corps and he was on the front lines. But he had enlisted right after high school while I had two years of college behind me. Except for the Naval Nursing Corps, women in the Navy did not serve aboard ship and never overseas. Otherwise, I would not have enlisted.

In those days the women’s services were not permanently organized. Just think of Boots in the WAVES ousting several hundred families from their apartments to house the recruits. Just think of the need for putting in a new floor in the lobby on the main floor because WAVES had swabbed the hardwood to destruction when working off demerits. (I swabbed it once for two hours when someone’s hankie was found on the floor under my laundry bag. My laundry bag was labeled, remember, and one didn’t talk back and say the hankie was not hers. Besides, it was mine.)   

After discharge from the Navy, I traveled to southern California to visit an uncle whom I had never met except when I was just a baby. He had palomino horses and orange groves and was a captain in the sheriff’s posse that led the Rose Bowl Parade each year. The back of his olive drab shirt, expertly creased to the hilt, was embroidered in satin stitch with a huge pink rose. These men would not think of leaning those shirts back against anything before they rode out in parade.  

Since Uncle Hal’s wife was a complete invalid, whom I never really got to know and whose name I can’t now remember, he took me to dinner at Mike Lyman’s, where he ordered for me my first entree of really rare roast beef, from which time I have always preferred it. I must add that Uncle Hal did take his wife in her wheelchair out to dinner at the finest restaurants once a week and helped her eat. He was Monrovia’s City Manager and everyone knew him. 

My train traveling from Los Angeles to New Orleans and then on to Nashville that August was almost empty, apparently allowing the one young male in the car to think it would be hospitable if he conversed with the lone young female. We did converse and before long sat side by side with our feet propped up on the seat in front of us, which he had adjusted to face us. He was a nice man, having just had a short vacation in the west from his job in Ohio, a job of running the family’s company which for several years had been manufacturing war materiel. I asked him what they manufactured in peacetime. He said, “Little things, like metal closures for salt and pepper shakers.” I thought at the time, “This is something to remember, to put later in a story.”

When we got to New Orleans, I thought I would die from the humidity. Nashville and New York had been humid enough but this was unbearable and we had nearly three hours to kill before we would reboard the train for Nashville. The coolest place we could think of was a movie theater; so, we saw “Northwest Mounted Police.” They were Canadian, I think, in red jackets. Once outside again, I could hardly wait to get back on the cool train. But we walked around a while, doing a little sight-seeing. We would eat dinner on the train.

Several towns before we pulled into the vast breadth of tracks at Nashville’s Union Station, this nice young man from Ohio, this mogul of industry who was probably already a millionaire (though he didn’t say so, didn’t brag at all), asked me to marry him. Of course I told him no. Today I don’t even recall his name. The situation reminds me of Lady Bird Johnson, who said yes to Lyndon right after she met him. A whole different situation. I wasn’t in love. 

After another short stint of work in Nashville, with National Life and Accident Insurance Company, I came west again and with only eight dollars and fifty cents in my purse. But now I had the G. I. Bill. I arrived in Nampa by train on a January night and found two girls waiting up for me. I slept in the guest room at Morrison Hall on the NNC campus and to the surprise of Miss Helen Wilson, the Dean of Women, was up by six o’clock, looking for breakfast.  

By arriving there at the beginning of the second semester, I was a stranger among students who, for the most part, already knew each other. My southern accent stood out like the proverbial sore thumb but it was a modulated accent, tempered by time away from the south. 

I was assigned to the Lamda Sigma Phi Literary Society and when it came time for us to present our drama “Harriet,” for competition with the other three societies, I tried out for the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe. I learned after the fact that Professor Finkbeiner wanted me to have that role, but the powers that be decided only I could talk like a southern Negro! (This would really have been a laugh in the south.) So, in Act One I was the Negro mammy; in Act Three, years later, I was a Negro maid. I was five feet, six inches tall, weighed less than one hundred and twenty pounds. They blackened my skin and stuffed my clothes with pillows and I became a big, fat, waddling Negro mammy. I recall the line, “Yo hush yo mouf!” That’s all I had to read at the tryouts and the hoorays resounded. Afterwards I was glad I had not got the role of Harriet, for she had over three hundred lines, most of them without cues from other actors. And Petey Montgomery did an excellent Harriet and we won the trophy.         

I finished college with a major in English and minors in German and social sciences at Northwest Nazarene College (now University). I helped pay my way by being Assistant Dean of Women because of my training in the Navy, and by grading papers for the German professor after I’d had a year of German One in eight weeks of  summer school. My boot and specialist naval training of three months had earned me several college credits in physical education, health, sociology and psychology.   

My original plan for college was to get a Ph. D. in literature. However, soon after I got to Idaho, I met John, an Idaho man who had shortly before I met him graduated from the School of Forestry at the University of Idaho. For one of my few science classes, I had a botany textbook just off the press, which he had waited for while he was studying botany. I told him if he would help me get an “A” in the class, I would give him the book. But I got a “B” and he had to marry me to get the book. 

The church wedding was one semester before I finished college. He lived in Emmett at the time and I in Morrison Hall in Nampa. I went “home” to Emmett on the weekends and John came to Nampa on Wednesday nights for a date. I finished college in January, two years from the time I had arrived in Nampa, and graduated in May.  Then we went where my husband’s work took us.