In the Navy

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

It was a different time then. It was complete mobilization in the great country of the USA and Canada. I was working in Chicago at the DuPont paint factory and I wanted to broaden my life a little. So I decided I would join the military.

The first day they accepted women I went to enlist and got turned down because I wore glasses. So I waited about 10 days and then they gave waivers out for glass-wearing folks. I remember I had a long, tan purse which was usually full of junk. And the man said, “Well, you don’t quite weigh enough. You weigh about 110 pounds.” I don’t know in those days what the bottom limit was. He said, “Just take your purse and step on the scale.” So I did and that made it. Yes.

I was in the Navy and it was marvelous. We all lined up at Northwestern Station, marched in, got on the train and went to Smith College. Smith College is in North Hampton, Massachusetts. That became the midshipman’s school. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen or ever been. When I was in the Berkshire Mountains, I just wondered, how did anybody ever return to Park Ridge? They wouldn’t want to leave that beautiful place. They even had crew at Smith College and I thought, wasn’t that wonderful? I’d have joined the crew if I had the chance. It was quite an experience.

Grace Coolidge, Calvin Coolidge’s wife, lived in North Hampton and she was a very good friend of my mother’s friend. So she entertained us all at afternoon tea and that was pretty neat too. Wow, there you go. You know, you do different things.

When I was a kid, I was very active in Girl Scouts. I joined at 10. It meant a lot to me. I was an only child and I made a lot of friends there. We had a really good Girl Scout troop and did a lot of things and I learned a lot about nature and the stars and all that stuff. I was one of two who went all the way through. I became a Golden Eaglette. I have it in my safe deposit box.

So when I got to midshipman’s school, I knew about lining up and right dress and all that business. And before you knew it, I got to be Company Commander so that was alright. It was kind of fun because there was a lot of snow all over the New England states at that time and we had boots and marched along in the streets. You had to be sure that the kids that you were directing weren’t marching into automobiles, among other things. You had to use a lot of crazy commands like left oblique march, oblique. Now that’s a good one, isn’t it?

We did a lot of neat things. The head of the midshipman’s school, which there was only one in the country, was a man, a commander. He was mad as a wet hen at having to parade a lot of women around. He didn’t like it at all and he was very, very strict. He used to come by for inspection. And there were four of us in a room and we’d all line up, you know, all in our best. We had to make our beds so tight that a quarter would bounce on ‘em.

I remember one day we all lined up and he came by for inspection. He always wore a white Navy suit, naturally, so any dust would show up on him. He got down on the floor, amazingly enough, and rolled around a little bit to be sure there wasn’t any dirt on the floor. We all stood there of course. And then down came a dust bunny. This one very cute girl in our group, Peg, just opened her mouth and caught it so he never saw it!

But we had a lot of fun. Among other things, they had to make up a lot of stuff to do in case we were accosted by pirates. They had a lot of rope nettings on the side of the ship. They threw one over the balcony in the auditorium and you had to climb up and down that silly thing. But you had to jump out and that took quite a lot of courage to jump out of the balcony and hopefully you would grab onto this thing on the way down and then climb back up and board the ship, being the balcony. People do a lot of crazy things, you know. Especially if it’s cheap. See nobody had any money in those days for arming all this business.

We all graduated on time. People that were “bilged out” as we said, who quit or left, or were asked to leave, were people who really couldn’t do the physical end of it. I remember I played my last basketball game there and it was so strenuous that during the intermission I just lay down on the floor and panted.

We were all sent to various stations. Every single person in the communications end of the Navy, and I’ve forgotten how many ships we had exactly at sea but we’ll say something like 2,000, were manned by WAVES. The women knew where every ship and every person was in the Navy at any given time, which was quite a feat when you think of it. You had to know every kind of a ship and every kind of plane. And what’s more, I still do. Communications was very, very important. They used to say, it may never have won a battle but it certainly lost a lot of ‘em. We met a lot of nice, young people and we learned a lot.

I ended up in the ONI which is the Office of Naval Intelligence. I think the CIO, the one that’s running around today, is the dumbest outfit I’ve ever heard of. We’d have lost for sure if they’d had people like that in our Naval intelligence. But anyhow, it was a real eye opener and we met a lot of interesting people.

There was no place to live in Washington, not even a chicken coop. We had to live in the barracks for a while but then you had to live on your own. They kicked you out of the barracks. It was unbelievable, you know. The showers were for like 10 people but they did have hot water. Betty Brook, Betty Cowie and I lived in the basement of a house up in the northeast part of Washington. That was kind of funny because every time we’d come home the landlady was, of course, trying to make a million off the rentals.

So that was my experience. I got out in 1946. The war was over in 1945 and I met Vernon in 1945 and all of that.