‘You just trip them’
At lunch, the women told marvelous stories, like how when Phyllis’ mother went into labor with her in North Platte, Nebraska, her father put her in the wagon, took her to the station, and put her on a train to a hospital 50 miles away.
He stayed home with her sister and then, two weeks later, met the train and took his wife and the bundle in her arms home. “That was me!” Phyllis said.
How Wilma was born on a day in May when it snowed in Inspiration, not far from Globe, and how as a kid, she found scorpions in her bubble baths and a rattlesnake in the front yard.
I mentioned how hot it is, and they recalled a time before air conditioning, when Mary Lou Bennett’s dad rigged up a cooler in the window and Wilma draped herself with damp sheets to keep cool.
They remembered a time when people seemed more patriotic, and always in times of trouble.
Mary Lou is 91, a former teacher and a fourth-generation Arizonan. She went to North High, started at Phoenix College and then decided to join the U.S. Navy.
Her father had been in the Navy in World War I, her boyfriend had joined up for World War II.
She was just 19 and you had to be 20, so the recruiter told her to come back the next day, ask for a different recruiter and say she was 20.
She was assigned to Roosevelt Base on San Pedro Island, California, as a civil-readjustment officer’s secretary.
“I was very patriotic,” she said. “Everyone was very patriotic back then.”
Phyllis was in teachers college in Nebraska when the war broke out and, within two weeks, only women were left in her classes.
Food was rationed. Everything was in short supply. Still, Phyllis remembered how the people in North Platte would lay out meals in a canteen near the train station for troops going off to war. The men would pour off the trains, eat and get back on.
“No one complained,” Phyllis said. “That was so beautiful.”
“Remember we could only get two pairs of leather shoes a year?” Mary Lou said.
“We didn’t know we were doing without,” Wilma said. “It was the same for everyone.”
When I am 90, I will remember that we are stronger together.
The women lamented that people are less polite these days. Helene mentioned that hardly anyone even holds open doors anymore.
“Then you just trip them,” Wilma said. The women laughed.
When Phyllis worked at Hayden Library at Arizona State University, she once pulled open the door only to have a young man squeeze in past her. “You’re welcome!” she called after him. When I am 90, I will open my own doors.
Mary Lou married that Navy boy when she was 20. They had three children and spent 67 years together before he passed away.
Wilma was studying drama at the University of Arizona when she met her husband, an engineer. She was an actor and musician. They had three sons.
Phyllis’ husband died 42 years ago, in 1975. “I had a good marriage. I had something that lots of women didn’t have,” she said.
When I am 90, I will consider myself lucky to have had one real love in life.