These women became Navy officers in a different world
SAN ANTONIO — Like many of her classmates in officer candidate school, Ginny Hallager embraced the Navy for the opportunity to go overseas and its chance for adventure.
But it was September, 1964, which meant Navy Officer Candidate School-W — the “W” stood for women — offered limited options for service.
They couldn’t serve aboard ships, fly planes or fight in combat. Decades would pass before they could.
“We didn’t even get a ride on a ship during our class time in the fall of ’64. We were hoping to go out on a day cruise but no, there were absolutely no women on board,” said Hallager, 79, of San Antonio, who helped organized a reunion of the class this weekend.
The gender limits didn’t stop with duty rosters. If they got pregnant, the Navy unceremoniously tossed them out. That was the law, practice and custom — not just in the Navy but in America.
Women had to get their husbands to co-sign a loan, one graduate recalled. Another bought a house when she was single, but lost control of it under Virginia law when she got married — her husband became the owner the moment he put a ring on her finger.
A hardy band from the OCS-W class, which trained at Newport, R.I., is now in San Antonio — 10 classmates who last saw each other after graduating almost 57 years ago.
Forty-three officer candidates in all made it through the 16-week course. Some had done eight weeks as enlistees the previous year, and returned for the second half in 1964 after graduating from college.
They were well aware of the limitations on their service and in the wider civilian world. It was a time when women frequently went to college in search of a husband as well as a diploma.
Today, they say the barriers they faced in those days were no big deal. They were thrilled to be naval officers. They have no regrets.
“For me it was not a problem.
That was not my primary focus in being in the Navy,” Hallager said of her inability to board a ship. “My focus was to have assignments possibly around the world, to travel.”
Michaline Polakowski Larson, who would marry a young officer she met in the mess hall, hoped to learn something while in uniform and maybe serve eight or 10 years.
Like the other women, Katharine Laughton knew why they were at Newport — to backfill a variety of shore jobs held by men who would be reassigned to ships in the event of a major conflict.
The likeliest foe was the Soviet Union. Cold War tensions were high. The Cuban Missile Crisis had happened less than two years earlier and U.S. involvement in Vietnam was about to ramp up.
Public respect for anyone in uniform was high. The Navy struck the women as a pretty good deal.
“My first job was at Moffett Field and I was a communications officer,” said Laughton, who would eventually be one of two cadets in the class to retire as a rear admiral. “I went into the Navy because when I graduated from college there were not a whole lot of opportunities open and so two years of equal pay for equal work, that was not so bad.”
They didn’t dwell on career fields closed to them — command roles aboard ships, earning their wings as fighter pilots. Many left the service after marrying and having children. Some left because there was no way to be with their husbands. Some whose pregnancies got them boarded out of the Navy came back years later, when the rules changed.
But none of them stopped loving the Navy, several said.
“I just wish I had stayed in longer,” said Elizabeth Carmack, 79, of Sumter, S.C. “That’s the only regret I have. I don’t think anybody had a bad experience; I really don’t. Some people served abroad. It was just quite something that would not have happened … if people had stayed in their own little hometowns.”
Hallager’s dreams of joining the Navy went back to high school in Lincoln, Neb. Raised by a single mother years after her parents divorced, she wanted stability in her life. The Navy would mean a regular paycheck.
“I would have something worthwhile to be doing, I’d be serving my country and it just seemed a logical way of taking care of myself,” Hallager said. “And I didn’t have any plans to get married early on. I thought this would be a career for me and that would be great.”
Larson thought about joining the military as a teenager in Detroit, where she served in the Civil Air Patrol. Attending Marygrove College, she figured on joining the Air Force but a Marine Corps recruiter insisted that she belonged in the Navy.
Civil Air Patrol had given Larson a sense of structure and she found more of it in OCS, and a chance to do something different. The cadets marched to class, but there was no running or other strenuous physical activity. A good deal of emphasis was placed on academics.
“I have a feeling they didn’t know what to do with us in 1964,” said Larson, 79, who lives in a retirement community in Dearborn, Mich. “I did intend to stick around, but I married a very handsome young officer.”
That was Matthew Larson, who she met in the mess hall at Newport. They liked each other’s company and later crossed paths in Norfolk, where he served aboard the USS Guadalcanal and she was at the nearby naval air station.
A junior in college, Carmack got a letter on Valentines Day 1963 from the Navy asking if she wanted to go to officer candidate school. Summer in Newport, a major naval base, sounded like fun.
There wasn’t much going on in Tulsa, Okla., and job prospects for women — even academic fields leading to those jobs — were limited.
“In fact, one of my very good friends, her father was a noted oil geologist – Oklahoma was big in petroleum – she wanted to follow and work with her father. They would not allow her to take geology because she was a girl,” Carmack recalled, declining to identify the school.
“Nobody could go to Annapolis, nobody could go to the Air Force Academy. That wasn’t possible at that time,” Carmack said. “We were approaching the Vietnam War, it was a time to make a decision on what you wanted to do and this was the perfect thing.”
Laughton became assistant communications officer in her first assignment at Moffett Field in San Jose, Calif., a job that allowed her to sign on as a crew member aboard planes flying out to Hawaii. The Navy, she said, gave her the “freedom to use my brain.”
“When you would go into the officers club and you wore your insignia on your uniform you were treated as an equal,” she said. “At that period of time there were a lot of restrictions on women in terms of what they could do and the Navy gave me the freedom to be treated as an equal, and I loved it. I loved it.
“I only intended to stay in two years and I stayed for 34, so something must have clicked.”
Laughton led four different commands in 10 years. She encountered hostility, of course, she said — “but you run into hostility in life, don’t you?”
“And if you do your homework and you know what you’re about and you’re good at what you do, then that’s the best weapon against hostility.”
Once she was commissioned, Larson took charge of smaller tasks senior officers didn’t want to mess with, like blood drives, in addition to her principal job, which held both responsibility and the requirement of a security clearance.
She kept a .38-caliber handgun in her desk.
In time, Larson saw the Navy change. While in Pensacola, Fla., in the 1970s with her husband, she observed women learning how to fly cargo planes.
“I saw that enviously, in a way, that they had these opportunities. And of course when they put women on submarines I couldn’t believe it,” Larson said.
She was a lieutenant junior grade when she became pregnant and had to leave the Navy. She and her husband, who retired as a commander and died four years ago, had two sons, one of them a Navy lieutenant. Four of their grandchildren have also served in the military.
Carmack was in the Navy nearly three years when her husband wanted to go to graduate school.
“Then I left,” she said, “but I later wished I had stayed.”
Hallager calls herself “a real short-timer.” She met her husband, Donald Hallager — a career Air Force pilot who flew the B-47, B-52 and KC-135 tanker and retired as a colonel — even before she went to Newport. They had a son and daughter.
“I had to figure out how this marriage was going to work and for me, it was to have a very short career in the Navy. I got pregnant and got out and became an Air Force wife, and that was my service career,” she said.
“I had no idea that was going to happen because I thought I had chosen the Navy and that’s going to be my career, but love stepped in.”