"In WWII, my father’s two brothers, Henry and John B, also served in the Army. My mother’s three brothers served in the Army, Navy, and the Marines. They were Perry Hugh, Elmer, and Emmet Joe who was in Iwo Jima."

"My dad entered the war in President Roosevelt’s first peacetime military draft. The family appealed to the draft board because he was the breadwinner of a family he cared for since age ten, but he shipped out. Dan was gone for…

"I am not sure how Mother was recruited.  She may have seen a poster or heard an advertisement on the radio. The WAVES primarily used newspapers, radio, and personal contact to recruit. Mother wanted to be a flight attendant, but…

“Well, you live in the barracks. A lot of people. And basic training means you learn all army. You have the drilling — everything. You dress for army dress and what you would be doing in the army. And it’s just a lot of stuff you’re not used to. But…

“Well — I heard a lot of talk about it and I saw a lot of it in the movies, and I was too dissatisfied with my job in the defense plants — it was a dirty job and we had several bosses that I didn’t care for at all — to me they didn’t know any more…

“Sometimes it was just — in the middle of the day they shut everything down. And then at night a lot of the times it would be no lights at all. And that was the bad part, at night when there was no lights, ‘cause everything was dark.”“When I went to…

“We made piston rings…some of them went to companies that made ship motors and some of them was just like a finger ring.”“You just had a certain time to come in. And you had a certain time for lunch, and to leave, and you didn’t have no spare time.…

“When I got older, I found a job in restaurants ‘cause I was cooking at home and they knew, so I got a job as a pie baker in a city restaurant.”“I met Miss Cline and her husband, who worked in some kind of a factory in Baltimore.”“They gave me room…

“Well, I was in the recruiting duty when I was in the Wac’s. I did public relations; I tried to recruit other Wacs. And I think perhaps there that it was an asset, being able to speak easily like I do. I suppose that might have had something to do…

“Oh man, the people were really pleased that it was finally over. And also around the same time, the Red Cross got permission to start dropping food while we were still officially occupied, but people were dying on the street. The situation was…