Veteran was among Navy’s first female officers of WWII
SAN ANTONIO — Like millions of Americans, Doe Hollimon’s life changed after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The waves kicked up by the troubled waters of World War II put her on a new course as it swept a generation of women into lives they’d never imagined possible.
The war turned what had been a man’s world inside out, reshaping the American workforce and redefining traditional roles.
Dorothy “Doe” Jane Wilson Hollimon, who died this month in her San Antonio home at 101, helped shatter that ceiling.
The era saw the full mobilization of the nation and large numbers of women in the military, including the first female officers in the Navy. Hollimon was one of them.
“I really considered those three years three of the probably outstanding years of my life because I was associated the first two years with an extraordinary group of girls,” Hollimon said in an interview two weeks before her death. “We were ‘girls,’ not women at that time, and we worked watches around the clock.”
Hollimon was among 100,000 to join the WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, created in 1942. Women did jobs on land to free up male sailors to serve on ships. Some did clerical and administrative work. Some trained men to fly. Many worked in hospitals and clinics.
Hollimon processed classified information.
“We would handle vital material, and it was all very secretive and we enjoyed each other very, very much. We had no problems, and I don’t think I had ever lived in a situation like that, and would ever live in a situation like that again,” she said. “It was a kind of tense period, but we knew we were at war so we just carried through with it.”
Hollimon later spent a year with the WAVES as a speech pathologist at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York. She had worked as a speech pathologist in Austin, Minn., when the war arrived, and she had a problem doing her job at five elementary schools because she couldn’t buy a car. The solution was to ask the local rationing board to let her buy a bicycle.
“Anyone who wanted to buy something had to apply to see if it was necessary, so they allowed me to buy a bicycle, and I had a Victory bicycle. The tires were about an inch thick,” she recalled.
“It was very difficult riding, but I rode that from school to school, and a friend of mine that had been to Bermuda and had bought a bicycle basket gave it to me to use, so I had a little bit of class.”
Hollimon entered the WAVES as an officer because she’d earned a college degree from the University of Minnesota. The first job, handling secret material at the all-female communications center in Norfolk, Va., exposed her to the Jim Crow South. It was first time she saw “colored” water fountains.
“When I assigned to Norfolk, I had to take a ferry across Hampton Roads. … And I got on the ferry and I was absolutely flabbergasted,” said Hollimon, a native of Granite Falls, Minn.
“That was my introduction to segregation,” she added. “I was horrified, but I knew it existed — I knew segregation existed — but I had never been around areas where there were many Black people. I was pretty disgusted with it, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”
Women, too, faced barriers, and she was aware of the pathbreaking role they were playing.
“I remember we had a man who was kind of young who was head of the communications department, and when he first got WAVES, the first … he got were enlisted WAVES who were radio operators, and he was horrified because he had always had men. And by the end of the war he said, ‘I’d take a WAVE that was a radio operator over the man because they don’t visit up and down the line.’ ”
Like many Americans, Hollimon smoked. As she entered the WAVES, her friends presented her with a cigarette case and a lighter, calling it a nice social habit. And a habit it became, for the next 20 years. At the end of her life, she struggled with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an inflammatory lung illness that obstructs air flow from the lungs.
Hollimon coughed frequently during the interview.
“I remember how sexy it was when a fella in the movies would light two cigarettes and give you one,” she said.
After the war, the WAVES asked Hollimon if she would stay on as a speech therapist, but she felt like more time in college was needed to be good at the job. She left military life a little worried about what the future held, but things worked out.
Eventually she met Jack Hollimon while both worked at the University of Houston, where she was a speech pathologist and teacher of general speech.
When he proposed, she accepted on one condition: that they leave Houston. It was an era before air conditioning.
They moved to Salinas, Calif., for a while. Later, they moved to San Antonio, where she earned a master’s degree in communication disorders from Our Lady of the Lake University.
Hollimon’s work as a speech pathologist lasted half a century. Her stints included stops at St. David’s Episcopal School and 17 years at North East Independent School District.
She is survived by two sons, J. Charles Hollimon II and Dr. Peter W. Hollimon.
Karen Von Der Bruegge, director of vocational discernment and pastoral care at Christ Episcopal Church, described Doe Hollimon as “an amazing and humble woman (who) so exemplified the greatest generation.”
“She did not believe that her efforts in World War II were noteworthy — ‘It was just the right thing to do,’ ” Von der Bruegge said, recalling Hollimon’s comment.
When reflecting on the war years, there was one thing above all else she found peculiar to those times, something politically polarized Americans today probably wouldn’t recognize.
Hollimon came to miss it, and she thought much about it in her final days — a truly United States.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m living in the United States of America. It’s so different,” she said a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has seen a rare moment of consensus among Americans. “But at that time, almost every family had someone who had been in the service that were still fighting. It was just a thing we lived with daily.”