Patriotic bookkeeper found the excitement that Spokane lacked

In 1944, Pauline Kask wanted more than the small town of Spokane could offer.

The 1939 North Central High School graduate, then known as Pauline Christian, had secured a good job as a bookkeeper for a metal supplier while World War II played out overseas. Against her parents’ wishes, she enlisted and became one of the 22,000 officers and enlisted women in the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.

Some called them Women Leathernecks.

“I wanted to be where there was some action,” Kask said, now 86. “I didn’t like Spokane. There wasn’t much here to do.”

She was 22 when she entered boot camp in Camp Lejeune, N.C. She worked both in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco and had the adventure of her life.

“I just loved everything about it. I was patriotic,” Kask said. “You just knew it was something you had to do for your country.”

Kask, the second child of four, was always a shy perfectionist. Her experiences in boot camp, which included pulling night guard duty, helped her real self emerge.

“I came out of my shell,” she said.

She did payroll and bookkeeping work. At times her job required her to sort through and organize the last possessions of fallen soldiers, which arrived in burlap sacks. Sometimes there was blood on the final items, like letters that were carefully cataloged and prepared to return to surviving family members.

“(Those possessions) belonged to someone that lived and was now dead,” Kask said.

That was her closest exposure to the death toll of the war. Survivors of the Bataan Death March came through her base. She had no interest in seeing combat.

She said today’s women in the military make good soldiers. “I think they know what they’re getting into.”

After the war, the Marines began shrinking the Women’s Reserve. Kask had the option of being transferred to Hawaii to continue duties, but she returned home to Spokane because her mother was ill.

“I stayed too long and met my husband and never left,” Kask said. Her marriage to Paul Kask has lasted 57 years. They live in Spokane Valley.

Two of their three children died from muscular dystrophy. She thinks the discipline she learned in military training helped her handle that sorrow.

Kask wonders sometimes, though, how her life might have turned out had she gone on to Hawaii.