They Also Served: Women's Stories from the World War Ii Era

By Jeanie Sutton Lambright

They Also Served is a collection of memories, bringing to life the experiences of women during World War II. None of the women profiled achieved great renownthese were the neighbors next door, the townspeople encountered at the post office or market, the ladies sharing the pews at worship services.

Unwilling to be mere bystanders to the war effort, they did their parts in every way imaginableand some not so easily imagined. Laughter, shock, joy, tears, and outrage are shared in recollections of women from all walks of life. Traditional and daring, they kept the home fires burning and joined the fight. They waited for their men and made lasting changes for women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 15, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469105048

Jeanie Sutton Lambright

A child of the era, Jeanie Lambright has had a lifelong interest in World War II. That interest intensified early in her career with the federal government when she worked with a number of World War II veterans, and grew even stronger after her marriage to a decorated fighter pilot. Visits to various historical military sites in Europe and Asia have increased her knowledge of the subject. Jeanie is a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, and is previously published in women’s fiction. Now widowed, with adult children and young grandchildren, she resides in Addison, Texas.

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Copyright © 2003, 2005 by Jeanie Sutton Lambright.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Setting the Stage

Chapter Two

The Bride in a Box

Chapter Three

December 7,, 1941

Chapter Four

Waiting and Wondering

Chapter Five

When I Was Seventeen

Chapter Six

The Seeds of Feminism

Chapter Seven

WACs, WAVES, WASP and More

Chapter Eight

The Caregivers

Chapter Nine

Prisoners of War

Chapter Ten

Love and Marriage

Chapter Eleven

The Last Full Measure of Devotion

Chapter Twelve

January 13, 1997

Chapter Thirteen

Tributes

Chapter Fourteen

As Time Goes By

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Dedicated to

the women of the World War II generation,

and especially to the fifty-three

who shared their memories

for this book.

Introduction

They also serve who only stand and wait.

—John Milton

MILTON’S WORDS ARE an apt tribute to the women of the World War II generation who provided tremendous moral support for the men in uniform. Yet these wives, sweethearts, sisters and friends did so much more than stand and wait. Not willing to be mere bystanders to the war effort, they did their parts in every way imaginable, as well as a few that before the war had not been so easy to imagine.

The fifty-three women in this book represent a fraction of the multitude that responded to the call of their time—a country in crisis. While the men in their lives went off to war, they tended to the home front. In unprecedented numbers they joined the military themselves. They became working women, filling the void in offices and factories, many managing families as well as jobs. They planted victory gardens, saved scrap metal, bought savings bonds and ran bond drives. They did any and everything they could to help the war effort.

Similar threads run through the tapestries of their lives, yet there were also vast differences. In their youth, the division between North and South in the United States was still pronounced, and the West, which to many simply meant California, was the place of dreams. There is no stereotype that describes the women of this generation. They were both traditional and daring. They relied on divine providence—and themselves. They waited for their men, and made lasting changes for women.

This is a collection of memories, the past seen from the perspective of more than half a century later. None of the women herein achieved great renown. Instead, these women were the neighbors next door, the townspeople encountered at the post office or market, the ladies who shared the pews at worship services. They are our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, cherished aunts, and dear friends.

Capturing these experiences was an adventure that took more than two years of my life, days that will live in my memory forever. Near the beginning, there was one snowy September weekend in northern Colorado, with Yvonne Goppert and her husband Jean at their summer home in Virginia Dale. I sipped tea, watched the birds and animals frolic in the snow, and listened to Yvonne describe wartime England and how she and Jean met and married. Although Jean let his wife do most of the talking, the twinkle in his eyes as he watched her brought its own message.

There were other trips in my search to come to know the women of this era. Two were especially memorable. One was a sunny November day, not long after Veterans’ Day. With my then eight-year-old granddaughter, Madeleine, I walked through rows of white markers at the American Cemetery in Normandy, overlooking Omaha Beach. Our quest was to discover whether any women were interred there and we learned that there are four. My visits with PFC Mary J. Barlow, PFC Mary H. Bankston, Sgt. Dolores M. Browne, and Elizabeth Richardson, American Red Cross, were silent. Sometimes silence says so much.

In late August 2001, I was in New York City. One morning I met with Lillian Smith at her church, Convent Avenue Baptist, in Harlem. After our interview, Lillian gave me a personal tour of Harlem. What a special time that was, like a private history lesson served up by a favorite teacher.

Later that same day, I met with Eleanor Krauss at my hotel. By the time we finished talking it was late afternoon and pouring rain, but Eleanor insisted we brave the elements so she could show me Rockefeller Center. A cherished memento of that day is a photograph of Eleanor posed, umbrella in hand, by one of the giant spider sculptures exhibited in the plaza.

September 11 changed my approach of doing the interviews in person, and I began conducting most of them by telephone. This was partially because of the difficulty of air travel, but also due to a concern for the amount of time required by the visits. Actually it surprised me when the telephone interviews worked so well. I’ve become friends with a group of remarkable women that I’ve yet to meet face-to-face.

From the moment that this idea sparked, and over the course of these two plus years, I’ve felt guided by Spirit. Each time I felt downhearted, certain that I simply couldn’t do this, there would be an article in a newspaper or a magazine, something on television, or a telephone call that would boost my confidence. I still feel guided by Spirit.

With the exception of only a few, I didn’t know any of these women when I began this journey. Yet through the kindness of friends and strangers, we came together. I pray I have done them justice.

Jeanie Sutton Lambright

Chapter One

Setting the Stage

THE WOMEN REACHING their majorities during the World War II era were unique. They were born around the dawn of women’s suffrage. Young children or infants in the generally affluent 1920s, they became teenagers as the twenties gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to imagine their lives: outdoor toilets, Model A Fords, the reign of radio. Even more difficult to imagine are the deprivations of the Depression and the repercussions of world war. Yet these women prevailed.

They are the only women in U.S. history to have had their lives impacted by four major conflicts. Many of their fathers were part of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Their sweethearts, husbands and brothers served in the Second World War, and many were recalled during Korea. For their sons, it was Vietnam.

Three women provide a microcosm of the years leading up to World War II. One experienced an upper crust education in urban Michigan, another was from a poor family in rural Oklahoma, and the third grew up in segregated Georgia. Their stories set the stage for how varied real life was for American women in the years before America entered the war.

Gloria Hutchinson Ryba

In the mid-to late-1930s, I was a student in Dearborn, Michigan, the youngest child of three being raised by a single parent. My father had died in a car-train accident when I was three years old. He’d been corporate attorney for the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. At first, the pension left to our family provided a fairly comfortable financial existence. Then in October 1929, the stock market crashed. I’m not sure how that affected our income, but our finances soon changed to where every penny mattered.

However, another event that occurred in 1929 had a much larger effect on my life. Henry Ford had established an American museum village in Dearborn named Greenfield Village. One of the structures Ford relocated to the village was the school he’d attended as a boy. He wanted to activate his Scotch Settlement School and needed thirty-two pupils, its seating capacity. Since we lived in the area, a representative of Mr. Ford contacted my mother asking that my sister Betty and I be allowed to go there. As a result, during the depths of the Depression, Betty and I were educated as wealthy children, and Henry Ford picked up the tab. Over the years, we were furnished with pencils, paper, books, lunches, social activities, field trips, travel, dancing lessons, horseback riding lessons, medical and dental care, and more—at no expense to us.

My education was as different from what I would have received in a public school as can be imagined. For twelve years, we had daily exposure to Mr. Ford. We were introduced to nationally known personalities. We were surrounded by America’s past, using historical buildings for classrooms and having the entire museum village as a playground as well as resource material for the classroom. Mrs. Ford often said the students wouldn’t realize what Mr. Ford had done for them until we were much older. I thought she was wrong since my mother let Betty and me know daily how fortunate we were. But Mrs. Ford was right. We had no idea how unusual this experience was.

Our high-school chemistry lab was better equipped than those at the University of Michigan and that was true of facilities throughout the school. Field trips were a lesson in themselves.

We visited the Ford Motor Company Rouge plant so often that we knew the order in which a Ford was put together. We sat with the Detroit Symphony as they performed for the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio program. We were also taken to downtown Detroit theaters to see big band performances. Rather than having to stand in line for hours, we were ushered to the stage door and put in the front row before the doors were opened to the public.

The first year we attended school, we didn’t go to chapel each morning because the sidewalks had not been laid and they thought the students would track in too much mud. For the next eleven of my school years, however, the day started with chapel. If Mr. Ford happened to be in town, he would be sitting up in the balcony. He was never alone, but always had someone with him, visitors such as Will Rogers, Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, and, of course, Thomas Edison.

Edison’s former laboratory, Menlo Park, was one of the reconstructed buildings in the village. About the time I began school, Mr. Ford gave a huge party celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric light. Ford and Edison, two geniuses, were close friends. Ford had tremendous respect and admiration for Edison. During a lunch held as part of the celebration, Mr. Ford sent a message to our teacher saying that he wanted the students to meet Mr. Edison. The only preparation we had for the meeting was an instruction that Mr. Edison was deaf so we shouldn’t talk to him, as he wouldn’t hear us. Thirty-one students filed by; I was at the tail end. When I got to the front I didn’t follow instructions, but smiled and said, Hi, Mr. Edison. He shook my hand. To my right was Henry Ford and to my left was the president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. As I stood there Marie Curie came up and patted me on the head. The punch line I’ve always used in telling this story is I have been touched by genius and can truthfully say that none rubbed off on me.

I particularly remember George Washington Carver. He was a white-haired modest man. Even though I was young, I knew he had done wonderful work with the peanut and in doing so helped the southern farmers who had been so dependent on a single crop, cotton. Mr. Ford wanted Mr. Carver to stay in a suite of rooms at the Dearborn Inn during his visit, but he refused. These were the days before integration. He chose to stay in the slave cabins in the village which were next to the Logan County Courthouse where Lincoln had practiced law. After being relocated there the cabins were equipped very well, but the statement Mr. Carver made by staying in the slave cabins made an impact on all of us.

One day in high school, the teacher in charge of the school newspaper, The Herald, told me that Spencer Tracy was headed to Menlo Park. I was to go down and interview this famous movie star. When I arrived I met Mr. Ford, who told me Mr. Tracy was running a little late. We sat down on the steps of the front porch to wait for him and Mr. Ford coached me on what I should and should not ask Spencer Tracy. One of the things he stressed was that I was to ask him no personal questions, just questions about the movies he had made.

A few days after this, Mickey Rooney came to our dancing class. Several of the girls danced with him, me included. He was shorter than I was, and frankly I wasn’t all that impressed with him, although he was certainly a heartthrob to most young women back then.

Fred Waring was a famous bandleader and had a radio program sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. On a visit to the school, he acted as our choral director, teaching us to sing The Old Spinning Wheel. The results were amazing. Mr. Waring turned a group of students into near-professionals. When I married, we spent part of our honeymoon at Fred Waring’s Shawnee Inn in the Pocono Mountains. Mr. Waring remembered the incident when I reminded him about it.

Henry Ford was supportive of the students in so many different ways. One day we were planning a party and everyone wanted something different than we’d done before. I suggested a roller-skating party. The other planners immediately let me know what a dumb idea it was—all the streets in the village resembled country lanes and the sidewalks were brick. The next morning after chapel, Mr. Ford came up to me and said he’d heard that I wanted a skating party. I explained the reaction I’d gotten when I suggested it. He said, Gloria, if you want a skating party, we’ll close down the airport and let you have the runway to skate on. So we had our skating party there and ice cream and cake were served afterwards in the airport terminal. The airport was originally built as a landing place for the Ford-designed Tri-Motor plane, and was later used as the Ford proving ground for new cars.

Tea parties were another part of our school years. I remember a tea held for our mothers. It was not long after detergents had come on the market, and all the ladies were discussing the value of detergents versus soap. I kept thinking if that conversation was what being grownup was all about, I didn’t want any part of it. I hoped when I got to be their age I would discuss something more world-shaking than soap.

We had a tea for Mrs. Ford once, and she told us about going to Hudson’s, a Detroit department store, to buy a hat. She said she simply had to leave the store though, because the clerk had red fingernail polish. She felt as if a lobster was waiting on her. I’m pretty sure this was a subtle message for us girls to stay away from red fingernail polish.

I also remember one summer party with Mrs. Ford. She had invited all the girls over to swim at Fair Lane, the Ford estate. In the pool there was a white swan made of rubber to ride on. Mrs. Ford warned us not to drown since she didn’t know how to swim. There were marble benches by the side of the pool. Now one might think that a wet bathing suit and marble in a Michigan summer would be cold. Not at Fair Lane—their benches were electrically heated. We had tomato juice and a cracker on the terrace after swimming, then were taken to the library where girls who’d won achievements were allowed to pick out a book as a reward.

Of the many educational advantages I was given, among the most memorable were the travel opportunities. In 1933 and 1934 the World’s Fair was held in Chicago. The Ford Motor Company had built a huge rotunda at the fair. Some of the students and their families were given trips to the fair, including my family. We left on the New York Central’s Twilight Limited train and had a delightful dinner on the train and arrived in Chicago the next morning. We stayed at the Drake Hotel, which was very plush. We woke up looking out the window at Lake Michigan, then turned over in bed looking into a wall of mirrors and there was Lake Michigan again. The hotel was across the street from the beach and there was a connecting tunnel to get there. All along the inside of the tunnel were shops.

I remember three things in particular about the Drake. First, the child movie star Shirley Temple was staying there at the same time that we did. Second, the lobby restrooms had booths that took a dime to get in and they were so large that there was a dressing table and chair in the booths. Third, every morning we had waffles with maple syrup and pecans that were just luscious. We were really in the high-rent district.

But the trip to Chicago wasn’t the only memorable trip we were given. One day in January 1937, my brother Dall, who worked as a village guide, came home and told my mother that Mr. Ford wanted to send all of our family to Europe for the summer. To my surprise, Mother’s reaction was to tell Dall to thank Mr. Ford, but say that we were unable to accept. My brother was dumbfounded and wanted to know why. Mother told him that we didn’t have the clothes or the luggage for that type of trip. The next day when Mr. Ford asked Dall if Mother had given her permission, Dall told him no and explained why. Within the week steamer trucks and matching luggage arrived at our house and we were all given an allowance to buy new clothes.

I was only fourteen, yet Mother said I could go down to Hudson’s and select my clothes. I made a list and she approved. I got a suit, two evening gowns, three pair of culottes, an evening wrap and all the shoes and purses to go with the outfits. My brother was amazed at how much I’d managed to buy and determined that I had bought a cheap suit. I didn’t agree, but every time I had on that suit and it was raining, he teased, Hurry up and get Gloria inside before her cheap suit shrinks. Well, it never did shrink.

We left Detroit for New York on the Wolverine train. A chauffeur met us in a Lincoln Zephyr and we did a lot of sightseeing in one day, even driving over to New Jersey to see the Ford plant there. We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel overnight and boarded the Normandie luxury liner the next day.

The Normandie was known as the Ship of Light and it was overwhelmingly beautiful. We traveled first class and what an experience it was. I can remember dancing with my brother who didn’t think I had a good sense of rhythm. He kept me in a position where I could see the drummer and told me that every time the drummer hit the drum I was supposed to move. An elderly couple from some place in South America was also on board. Every time a tango came on people would clear the floor to watch them dance.

Our trip across the Atlantic took five and a half days. Another chauffeur, also in a Lincoln, met us when we arrived at Southampton, England. A station wagon with yet another driver was there too, for transporting our luggage. These escorts stayed with us for three full months, until we arrived at Cherbourgh, France, to begin our return home. We only had reservations in London and Paris, otherwise we were on our own to decide where we stayed. But when you arrive in two chauffeur-driven cars, you do get attention. Mr. Ford had provided traveler’s checks to cover all our expenses. Before we left, my brother spent an entire day in the Ford executive offices signing those checks. We visited England, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France. The trip was perfect except for two disappointments. We couldn’t go to Spain since they were in the middle of a civil war and in Germany, we didn’t go to Berlin.

Adolf Hitler had been in power about four years then, and by 1937 his plan for world domination was becoming evident. While we were in London, we’d bought the book Inside Europe by John Gunther. We thought it was a travel book, but we were mistaken. It was very political. Mother didn’t think the book would be very popular in the new German regime, so she suggested we keep it hidden. I sat on the book while we crossed the border and kept it out of sight all the time we were inside Germany.

Although we missed Berlin, we did drive along the Rhine which was beautiful, but there was an eerily frightening atmosphere in Germany. When we arrived in Heidelberg, we couldn’t get into our suite of rooms because Hitler was in them. We had to wait until he left. Once we were settled in, my brother was out on the balcony. He put a black comb under his nose like a mustache, pretending he was Hitler. My mother was very upset about this.

We ate on a terrace at the Frankfort airport. It was a small airport then, nothing like now, but there were lots of German military planes parked on the tarmac. Our waiter assured us the planes were nothing to be concerned about because they had no engines. We wondered how dumb the guy thought we were.

By the time we arrived in Paris, we were longing for some American food. We asked the French guide provided by Ford where we could get some hamburgers. He said, Oh yes, the Chick-a-go Inn, mispronouncing Chicago. Paris was one of our last stops before heading home. Before long we were back in Dearborn, and life was going on as before.

Both Henry Ford and his friend and mentor Thomas Edison strongly believed in learning by doing. Ford wanted to pass this along to the students. During our high school days, there were work programs at the village as well as in various departments of the Ford Motor Company. From the ninth grade on, we only went to classes four days a week. The fifth day was a workday. The girls actually had more job choices than the boys, who were generally assigned to a machine shop at Ford.

We girls could work in the stenographic department, the engineering library, or the photographic department, and could serve as teacher’s assistants at the school. As we got older, we also had summer jobs at Ford. Our wages were thirty-five cents an hour, and by the time I was eighteen I had tremendous work experience.

One summer day I had someplace to go after work. I rushed to the time clock to check out and discovered it wasn’t yet four-thirty, so I stood there waiting for the minutes to pass. Mr. Ford came by and said, Gloria, what are you doing? He pointed out to me that I had probably quit working at four-fifteen to clear up my desk. That billionaire docked me fifteen minutes from my thirty-five cent per hour wages.

On June 12, 1941, I graduated from high school. In my graduation ceremony picture, I am sitting next to Henry Ford. I can still remember what we talked about then. There was a gear on our diplomas and he was telling me how important a gear was to modern industry. It wasn’t a new lesson. It was impossible to have spent twelve years around the Ford Motor Company and not know that.

From the day I entered first grade to my last day of high-school graduation, Henry Ford was a part of my life. He enjoyed children, especially his students, and I think we were all comfortable with him. At least I know I was. These many years later, I thoroughly appreciate how fortunate and unusual my education was. It was certainly an excellent example of being in the right place at the right time.

Following high school, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life or the next few years of it anyway. One of the colleges my sister Betty had considered when she finished high school was Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. It seemed a great place to me so I enrolled there, staying for one miserable, very homesick year.

On December 7, 1941, I was a freshman at Miami. I was alone in my room listening to the radio when I heard the news about Pearl Harbor. It was overwhelming. My home of Dearborn was very near Windsor, Canada. The Canadians had been at war since 1939 and most of my family and friends knew we’d eventually get in the action too—but we didn’t know how. None of us suspected it would happen so dramatically.

I stayed at Miami until the term finished, then transferred to Michigan State Normal College at Ypsilanti, the school my sister Betty had chosen to attend. It’s now called Eastern Michigan University. Those school years were far different from the luxurious days at Greenfield Village. Mother’s observation that we were raised as rich kids, even though we had no money in the bank was quite vividly brought home as I now waited tables to help pay my way.

I was in school at Ypsilanti when Betty became interested in the WAVES. WAVES stood for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or as the first director, Capt. Mildred McAfee Horton, was quoted as saying, Women Are Very Essential Sometimes. Betty went to the recruiting office and brought home some material, but decided not to join. It looked good to me though. Since I was only twenty, my mother needed to sign the papers giving her permission. She refused. She told me that if I wanted to go, then I would have to be the one responsible for the decision. I turned twenty-one in June and in July I got on a bus, went to the federal building in downtown Detroit and enlisted for the duration and six months.

I left the federal building feeling very proud. I boarded the bus to go back to Dearborn to wait until I got called up. On the bus, I became overwhelmed by what I had done. I remembered how homesick I had been that year away at Miami, and now I had committed to being gone for an indefinite time period. I got off the bus in Dearborn and, fortunately, passed our church on the way home. The door to Christ Church was unlocked and I went in and prayed my heart out. As I walked out of the church I knew I’d made the right decision and that I would never be homesick. And I never was.

My naval service was one of the great experiences of my life. It was the first time I was in a place where I was not Betty’s sister or Dall’s sister, and I did surprisingly well just being me. At first I was at Hunter College in the Bronx, New York, for boot training. Since I was a home economics major in college, they sent me to Cook and Baker’s School at Hunter and I came out a baker.

While I was in New York, Mother and Betty came to visit me. We tried to have dinner at the Stork Club, but when Mother called for reservations, she was told they wouldn’t serve unescorted females. This really bothered her. She then phoned the Waldorf Astoria. They had a roof-garden dining room. We went there and were treated royally. My mother’s comments had always meant a lot to me. She said she enjoyed all the opportunities Betty and I had as we grew up, but for the first time she was truly jealous of me. She wished she were young enough to be in the Navy.

For the most part, New York was a wonderful liberty town. There were free theater tickets and invitations to wonderful parties. Our instructors at Hunter tried to prepare us for all eventualities. One warning was to remember not to salute doormen, even though they were in uniform!

During boot camp, we were scheduled for a weekend leave and one of the other WAVES had a brother at West Point, so we were planning to go up there. But before we could leave, we were to stand a presidential review—Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term. The review was scheduled to take place in the morning but it rained. Since the President was in an open touring car, he’d gotten wet and chilled and was delayed in arriving. We learned later that he’d stopped at the Roosevelt apartment for a hot bath. In the meantime, we were in the armory, waiting to have the review, and hoping we wouldn’t miss our train to West Point. The time for our train came and went, and we still stood there waiting. Finally, the doors opened and in came the President, accompanied by Eleanor, their dog Fala, and New York City Mayor LaGuardia. I was a steady reader of Eleanor Roosevelt’s column My Day, and admired her even more than her husband. After seeing the Roosevelts in person, I became an instant—and lifelong—Democrat.

My relationship with Henry Ford didn’t end when I left his school. I can’t remember the year that the birthday telegrams from Mr. Ford began to come, sometime when I was in grade school, I think. I know that I received these telegrams while I was away at college and especially remember receiving them while I was in the Navy.

Protocol was that if you received a telegram you had to go to the chaplain’s office or to the Red Cross to pick it up, because it usually meant a death in the family or other bad news and they didn’t want you to open it up alone. Well my birthday telegram came and following procedure, I was in the chaplain’s office to pick it up. When he saw my smile, he wanted to know what was in the telegram. I told him who it was from and what it was for. The next day I was called into the public relations office and asked how well I knew Henry Ford. When I told them, they asked if I thought he might visit me at the Navy yard. I assured them that his coming to see me was not a possibility. I wish I still had all those birthday telegrams but I seem to have saved only one.

After the war years, a neighbor, Mrs. Mullen, asked why I hadn’t found a man in the whole Navy that I could marry. I really believed at that time that I would never marry. Then I met Ed Ryba. I had started working for Kaiser-Fraser and the woman I was replacing told me I wouldn’t like it there. She said in the office of about fifty engineers, there were only two single men. One of the two was a mama’s boy and not husband material; the other was Ed Ryba, a confirmed bachelor.

Ed had been part of a B-24 crew that was shot down over the Brenner Pass. He parachuted safely and ended up confined in Switzerland. Although the Swiss were officially neutral, there was a lot of sympathy with the Germans. I’ve always teased Ed that his is the saddest war story I’ve ever heard. His internment in Switzerland was at a ski resort with maid service! He said he escaped out of sheer boredom. Once he got back to American lines, however, he was thrown into the brig because they thought he’d been AWOL. When it was confirmed he’d actually been a prisoner, he was sent for rehabilitation leave—to Miami Beach, Florida!

Our wedding was in August 1950, at Christ Church in Dearborn. We had our wedding reception at the Dearborn Inn, the site of my high school proms. Mr. Ford had built the inn in the 1930s. It was adjacent to Greenfield Village and right across the street from where the Ford Airport terminal stood. The airport is long gone, but the inn still stands, a wonderful reminder of some of the most extraordinary days of my life.

Mildred Potts Sutton

As I grew up, the harsh reality of war was all too familiar. My father, John Taylor Potts Jr., was a veteran of World War I. During the Chateau Thierry campaign, he was shot in the head and thought dead, but somehow survived. Along with the head injury, his lungs were damaged by poison gas. That, more than the head wound, affected his health for the rest of his life.

When Daddy arrived home from the war on an Army hospital ship, the Army didn’t want to discharge him immediately. It was clear to them he deserved a pension of some sort, but he didn’t want to wait for the necessary medical evaluations to qualify for compensation. He’d married my mother, Kate Denton Potts, only months before leaving for France and he was in love and anxious to be home with his wife. Besides, he didn’t think he’d ever need the money the government was offering.

In 1917, my father had left for war a successful and wealthy farmer. As a member of the Chickasaw tribe, he’d received his first farm as part of the allotments to tribe members when the Oklahoma territory was opened to white settlement. He later expanded his holdings, but by the early 1920s all this was gone.

His main crop had been cotton, and because of high cotton prices, he’d mortgaged his existing land to buy more acreage for planting. When cotton prices plummeted, he lost everything. For a few years after that Daddy was able to hold a full-time job, but his health kept deteriorating. By the time I was a teenager, Daddy was spending much of his time in the veterans’ hospital in Muskogee, Oklahoma, his working days over. The Depression gripping the country in the 1930s had a firm hold on my family.

I grew up in the small community of Stringtown, Oklahoma. Although my family was poor, there was always food on the table. We raised chickens for the eggs and meat. Some of the hens would be allowed to hatch their eggs so that we could replenish the flock. I recall once or twice ordering extra chicks through the mail. They’d come in a big crate of fifty or a hundred. We usually had a cow for milking and sometimes we’d raise hogs. We planted large gardens, and Mama also knew which wild plants were safe to harvest. We’d can a good bit of our fruits and vegetables—green beans, pickled beets, peaches and peach preserves, blackberry jelly. It was hard work, and generally done in the heat of summer, but Mama always managed to make it sort of fun too.

Our main meal was dinner, which was eaten midday. All the children would walk home from school, which was about a mile away, to eat. In the days when Daddy was working, he’d come home then too. During the week, the standard dinner menu was beans and potatoes with biscuits or cornbread. When she could, Mama would make chocolate pies for dessert. When she made pies, she never made less than four.

The evening meal, supper, would be leftovers, if there were any, or Mama would serve something simple like fried potatoes, with cornbread and glasses of milk. That was a meal I always enjoyed and I still like it. When we didn’t have a cow, one of us children would walk to Heard’s dairy farm and buy a gallon of milk for ten cents. Mrs. Heard would take fresh milk and separate the cream, then sell the milk. Essentially it was what is now skim milk.

On Sundays and for very special occasions, we’d have fried chicken or chicken and dressing or a roast, and once in a while, even steak. There were also different desserts. I remember a lemon and apple cake that was a favorite of mine. It was a regular yellow cake, but the icing was made of grated lemons and apples in a sugar glaze. Mama would serve the cake along with little molds of Jell-O. Jell-O was a fairly new product, especially for small-town Oklahoma, and was considered a big treat. Mama only made it when the weather was cold enough to put it outside to jell. We didn’t always have an icebox, and I’m not sure we’d even heard of refrigerators then. Another of Mama’s dessert specialties was banana cake. It was made much the same way as the lemon and apple one, but used bananas instead. She’d learned how to make it from her mother.

All of my life, even very recently, I’ve had people tell me how much they appreciated my mother and father. My parents always encouraged us to bring our friends home, and it never mattered if it was at mealtime. The food might be simple, but there was always enough to feed an extra mouth. Several people have said there were times during the Depression they’d have gone hungry if it hadn’t been for coming to our home to eat.

Education was important to Mama and Daddy. Dropping out of school simply wasn’t an option at our house. It’s a legacy that lives on through their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All of the seven Potts children graduated from high school, a rare accomplishment