My brother highly recommended that I read Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, by Liza Mundy. He suggested this as a must-read shortly after it was published in 2017. I'm finally listening to it now, in 2021. It's a good thing that books wait for me.
This historical account is at times enthralling and at times tedious. We're talking about codes, and the details are difficult to absorb on the fly. But the real point of the book for my brother and now for me is that our mother volunteered for service during WWII, and she revealed many years later that she was part of a group that cracked the Japanese weather code. Whaaa? She suddenly announced this sometime in the 1960s, a good twenty years after the fact. We knew she had joined the WAVES during the early part of the war, and gone to basic training in Cedar Falls, Iowa, before taking a post in Norfolk, Virginia.
My memories of my mom are clouded by time and by the disability brought on by her stroke. She loved to bake bread and wild blackberry pies, lived each week by a strict schedule (Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, etc.), enjoyed writing letters, and had a positive outlook on life. Not very exciting, right? Except she was also a college graduate who decided to take the opportunity to get away from home by joining the Navy. Wild!
I wish that I had asked her to tell me all about her wartime experiences. Our dad didn't want to talk about his time in the Army, and maybe this made me assume that Mom didn't want to talk about her history. But, wow, if we could have read this book together, and looked at her old photos... or pondered which club she visited on this public transit route:
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| Mom's notes, written on envelope from a Tacoma photo shop |
Well, the opportunity to talk with her is long past, but this book (and others) is right here. As always, Polo is listening with me. He didn't care much about sniffing these photos, but it always warms my heart to see Mom when she was young and happy.
Polo's review: Many people moved away from homes. Very crowded dormitories. They could have used the love of a few good dogs back there.
4 comments:
Thanks for posting this, Katharine. Your Mom must have been quite a woman. Wish I'd been able to meet her.
Thanks for reading, "Unknown" commenter. My mom was not one to draw attention to herself, and she had some interesting quirks (as we all do), but there she was pretty cool.
Our mother was an Aerographer’s Mate, Second Class, whatever that means. She lived her life in her own, inimitable fashion. She would say, when something good happened, that it was “swell-elegant” From her I learned to never take myself too seriously.
Hey, that's funny, Jim -- I learned the same thing! Mom was able to laugh at herself... and not a day goes by that I don't follow her example.
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