For First Waves, Quite A Splash Local Unit Of National Group Keeps Memory Of War Service Alive

Colville seemed especially quiet the afternoon Mary Ellen Harrison and Barbara Olsen decided to join the U.S. Navy.

Their boyfriends were gone, already training to fight World War II. The 20-year-old women were eating lunch, wondering - as many 20-year-olds do - what to make of their lives.

“We got this crazy idea,” recalls Olsen. “Why don’t we join the Navy and go where our boyfriends are?”

The timing was perfect. It was 1942. The Navy, desperate to move men from desk jobs to combat, was recruiting women to take their places - “preferably wholehearted bachelor girls,” the advertisements said.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed a law creating the WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. Civilians called them “sailorettes.” Grinning sailors called them “bathtub waves.”

Olsen and Harrison signed up that afternoon. They never were stationed near their boyfriends, but suddenly it didn’t matter much. Harrison was sent to boot camp in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Olsen landed at Hunter College’s Bronx campus in New York. They moved from base to base, working as secretaries, happily absorbing life outside Colville.

They befriended women who served as aviation mechanics, parachute riggers, telegraphers and secret-message decoders - doing everything but combat. They rose at sunrise, bounced quarters off bedsheets, marched in formation and ducked kitchen duty.

Politicians praised the Waves. Parents worried about them. Journalists photographed them like movie stars.

By 1945, there were 84,000 of them.

“It was cool, as the kids say nowadays,” said 75-year-old Olsen, who now lives in Spokane. “A cool thing to do.”

So, half a century later, her spirits take a tumble each time some puzzled young acquaintance says, “WAVES? What’s a Wave?”

Shortly after their three-year Navy stints, both Harrison and Olsen found most people had trouble relating to their wartime adventures. As decades passed, few even seemed interested. The women buried their memories like time capsules, occasionally pulling them from their minds’ back yard for solitary viewing.

Both married military men and eventually slipped into the more traditional roles of housekeeping and raising children.

It was three years ago, nearly a decade after her husband had had a fatal heart attack, that Harrison got wind of WAVES National, an association started by women veterans. By April 1995, she had organized a local charter - the Inland Northwest WAVES, Unit No. 140.

Some 25 women joined her, many of whom learned about the group by word of mouth. Most are World War II veterans, although some joined the military later when women were accepted as part of the regular Navy.

One day this spring, the women, wearing blue WAVES T-shirts, filed into a dining room at Frontier West Family Restaurant for their monthly meeting.

Few of them actually had met in the military, but it seems as if they’ve known one another for years.

“There’s a sistership immediately,” said Toni Turcek, the group’s vice president. “We were all in it together.”

“People forget that women were also in,” said Barbara Miller, a former Navy Teletype mechanic. “They talk about the men but forget about the women.”

As if on cue, a ponytailed waitress walked in, noticed their matching shirts and asked, “What is your group?”

“WAVES,” several answered in unison.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Navy.”

“How neat!” said the waitress, ducking out for their soup-and-sandwich combos.

The meeting officially began with a solemn pledge to two tiny American flags propped in a fat coffee mug. Then it quickly lapsed into a favorite pastime - telling war stories.

Pat Kingsbury, another Colville resident, described the singing platoon she had joined. Once, she said, she even sang on stage with Frank Sinatra.

Miller, the Teletype mechanic, shared one of her toughest Navy decisions. “I had orders to go to Hawaii. I was crazy; I got married instead.”

Noting a later divorce, she noted, “Should’ve gone to Hawaii.”

Florence Boutwell remembered the day 13 women in New Jersey applied for a dozen WAVE positions in Seattle. Her commander, realizing one would end up in Spokane, made a rule: He’d toss their transfer requests from a staircase. The one landing on the last step would name the woman to go to Spokane.

“Mine landed on the bottom step, and I’m still here,” Boutwell said.

Ellen Crawford, a Montana native who sang in a Navy choir, drew laughs telling about Waves from the East Coast who thought she lived in the “wild, wild West” and wanted full descriptions of cowboys.

Turcek reminisced about the rigid routine of rising at 5:30 a.m., prodded by officers so strict she still can’t bring herself to chew gum.

She joined a drill team to avoid kitchen duty. “After one Sunday in that kitchen, I decided that was it.”

A story that drew abundant chuckles belongs to a 70ish woman who won’t claim it publicly. She recalled a barracks inspector who went beyond the call of duty, checking and rechecking women’s luggage. Then suddenly, he stopped. Why? One morning the fed-up women had lined a suitcase with sanitary napkins, and the look on his face - hilarious!

When the women aren’t telling stories, they’re making trips to military sites. They’ve toured Fairchild Air Force Base, helped open Spokane’s Sea Services Museum and visited the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Some travel to national WAVES meetings, and a few attended the October dedication of the Women’s Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

They marvel at how women’s roles in the Navy have evolved since the WAVES began. At the time, a U.S. representative fought to ban women, saying, “This is no time to open the doors to butterflies.”

Big decisions included whether sailors should tip their hats to enlisted women (no). And how they should address women officers (“Aye, aye, Miss.”)

In those days, sexual harassment didn’t make headlines and women didn’t consider pushing the nocombat limit, said Olsen.

“It didn’t occur to us because it wasn’t done.”

“I was helping to free a man to do that,” agreed Harrison of the combat role. She paused, then said confidently, “I’m not going to say I couldn’t shoot someone.”

A crisp newspaper clip announcing her Navy enlistment backs up that claim: “Should occasion ever arise for the WAVES to step in to defensive action, she can handle a revolver or a rifle right along with the men. In the last two hunting seasons, she brought down her buck.” Without, the article noted, ruining an inch of meat.

Fifty-six years have passed since then, since the lazy afternoon Harrison decided to go after her boyfriend. Her child-rearing days are gone, along with a late career as a legal assistant at a bank and a 41-year marriage.

It’s been a long time coming, but Harrison has experienced a homecoming with the Inland Northwest WAVES - friends who unearth her time capsule and release its memories, one by one.

Those women know, even if the rest of the world sometimes forgets, the truth behind their T-shirt slogan:

“WAVES

“Still Something Special.”

SING ALONG The U.S. Navy’s 1942 “Song of the WAVES” lauded the women recruits while reminding them of their limits in the military:

“North and south and east and west, We’re marching as one; We are here to serve our country Till the war is done. Heads uplifted proudly For the Navy blue and gold; We cannot do the fighting, But tradition we uphold. As we swing along with our purpose strong, Bearing our ensign high, To oppressors now our challenge We have hurled: We will free our Navy’s men Who will free the world.”