Anchors Aweigh

In an earlier blog, I promised I’d tell about my summer of 1945 in New York. It may take several installments, but here goes.

World War II was going on with my older brother in the Army Signal Corps stationed near the front lines somewhere in Europe. Other relatives were fighting the war in different locations. The two theaters of major activity were Europe and the Pacific, and the average citizen had no idea when the strife would be over. Being a patriotic soul, one day when my family thought I was just going to my job at Sears, I went to the U. S. Navy Recruiting Office and joined up. What may be interesting to you now, is that we WAVES signed up to serve for the duration of the war and six months afterwards. That could have been a very long time. It took the whole day to get all the papers read and signed, wait, get booklets to read, wait, have our eyes tested, wait, have a complete physical, and no doubt some closed-door checking on our credentials. We had to be at least 21 years of age and a high school graduate. (Not so with any other branch of the military for women.) My dream was that, because I had completed two years of college and also worked two years for Sears (the same two years), I would apply for Officer Candidate School (OCS) after boot training.

At the end of that day, I went home and told my parents I was in the Navy. I suppose they were shocked, and yet, perhaps not. If anyone in my family volunteered to do anything out of the ordinary, they knew it would certainly be I, that middle child I wrote about before.

So, I began a thirty-day wait for orders to arrive before heading for New York City, where I would spend two months in Basic Training. I didn’t know then I would spend a third month there in further training. To be continued.

♥