Yukon veterans recall their days in the military

MOST RESIDENTS at Spanish Cove Retirement Center in Yukon know a lot about their neighbors. It's a familiar fact that of the 62 veterans who live there, nine are women.

They wore the uniforms of the United States of America during World War II. Their war was 60 years ago; they are in their 80s, but they don't forget.

They took different paths to their military careers, fought a war for different reasons.

Betty Zeaman worked in a postal operation in Mangum when the war began. It was a civil service job, stifling to a 20 year-old woman, but no one could resign during the war, she said. The only way to get out was to join the military. Besides, "it seemed like the patriotic thing to do at the time.

The Army put her in a postal job. But this time, she got to sort mail in San Francisco.

Mary Galloway was the oldest of eight children. She took care of her siblings and worked at Tinker Field.

"As soon as I got 21, I went right down and signed up, Galloway said.

She made $96 a month at Tinker, but only $50 a month in the Navy. The real reward was for her father, an oil-field worker near the Seminole fields who hadn't been old enough for World War I, but was too old and had too much family for the next one. Mary was the son who went to war for her father.

Hazel Mills' father hung a star in the window until his daughter came home. In basic training at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., she did a lot of KP. Not because she was a woman, she said, but because she was in basic. And one day, working in the kitchen and wearing an "old, greasy fatigue dress, she heard a parade pass by.

"I ran out to the street. She whipped out a big salute to the man riding by, President Roosevelt. "He saluted back and he smiled. I cried. I loved that president.

Louise Ward also represented her family's American dream. The daughter of Italian immigrants in Colorado said, "My mother was so proud of me when I joined the Navy.

That wasn't her first choice. Ward trained to be a nurse, a step to her goal of becoming an airline stewardess. Nevertheless, the airlines judged her too short, at just under 5 feet, to be a stewardess. The Navy thought she was just the right size to defend her country.

Her Navy assignment wasn't her first choice, either. She had in mind a hospital ship on an ocean; instead, she went to Idaho.

"I never saw water the whole time I was in the Navy, she said. "I liked it though. I liked nursing.

There was harassment before they knew what the term meant, although primarily, Vivian Bassler said, "We were treated like ladies.

There was hard work. Zeaman remembers: "You had to mop floors at 2 o'clock in the morning.

There was travel and fun. Galloway, from boot camp in the Bronx, learned to ski and play intramural sports in New York's mountains. Mills was stationed near Hollywood, Calif. With a private little smile, she remembers parties and dancing to the music of Harry James at the Palladium.

There was some glamour. Bassler remains nostalgic about the Navy's summer uniform, white sharkskin and beautiful, she said. And the Navy, she adds with a grin, had "some mighty good-looking boys.

When it came time to put on her dark dress uniform to go out for a good time, Ward said, she had no black hose to accessorize it. The Navy women dyed their white hose.

They received no pension unless they were wounded, but they got the GI Bill. Some became teachers. Bassler and her sailor husband lived in veterans' housing at Oklahoma State University while they finished their degrees.

Faye Freiberger, who, in 1942, left a job doing "office stuff to join the Army, missed the camaraderie when it was all over. Within a few weeks of her discharge, "I wished I was back in.

The World War II vets are respectful and supportive of today's female personnel, who place themselves on the line in combat and who have died for their mission.

They don't want to be in that place. In the 1940s, recruiters told them they would be assigned to non-combat jobs in order to relieve men for duty.

Zeaman said, "I wouldn't be brave enough for combat.

Galloway extended her arm to demonstrate the single lesson she received in firing an M 16.

"If they'd told me I had to aim at somebody and shoot, I would never have joined. I just wanted to do a job. I figured a lot of men were doing office work I could do as well or better.

Archive ID: 2779373