(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)
My friends and I went to the junior officer’s club once in a while. We all belonged. If you were too old you couldn’t belong. That is if you were too far along in the hierarchy of officers, you couldn’t belong. So it was just for the like the ensign and the junior-grade lieutenant and the senior-grade lieutenant in the Navy. My rank was a junior-grade lieutenant and Vernon was an ensign. I outranked him always simply because of the timing. It was all based on when you joined and how long you’d been in and all that kind of business.
It is of note that this club was in a very rickety place. It was sort of made out of sticks and barrels. A bunch of nice women were behind it like General Marshall’s wife. Someone who did absolutely nothing and was a rather vapid woman as was Mrs. Eisenhower. She spent the war in Colorado. I don’t think she was skiing. She was just sort of like the Bush family, hiding out.
In April, my friends and I were at the club and Vernon and Carl Muehlhause came over to our table. Vernon asked me to dance and Carl asked my very dear friend Tet Barris to dance. They would’ve made a good pair, I think. Carl and Carolyn Lyon were going together too. He was crazy for her ‘cause she was very beautiful. That was nice. They were married.
The junior officer’s club had a little music and I remember that nobody ever knew how to drink anything. Vernon was brought up in a household where there wasn’t a molecule of any kind of C2H5OH. But that’s okay. He caught on in a hurry. I always ordered something called a Claret Lemonade. It was lemonade with a dash, and I mean just a dash, of Claret wine in it. Made it look very pretty, besides tasting pretty good too. So that was the way it was.
People went to Rock Creek Park for dates and walked around, rode bicycles or rented canoes at the Canoe Club. That’s the kind of thing you did. Nobody had money and there was no place in war time to go. But everybody had a good time anyhow.
Vernon and I were engaged in the fall sometime.
Filed under: Buchheit, Myers, World War 2 | Tagged: Betty Perkins Buchheit, Carl Muehlhause, Navy, Tet Barris, Vernon Work Myers, World War Two
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