Class of ’44 went to war
The day after prom, the Allies landed in Normandy
POTTSTOWN >> Students graduating from Pottstown High School in 1944 had a big surprise waiting for them the day after their senior prom.
The prom was held on June 5. They woke up the next morning to discover that the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the largest amphibious invasion in the history of the world, and to those in Pottstown High School’s class of 1944, it was the day’s big war news.
And 75 years later, those who remain still get together regularly to share the day’s news.
But as for that day, it was a shock but not a surprise.
“We all knew it was going to happen, we just didn’t know when,” recalled Betty Anderson, then known as Betty Boyer.
“The D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, was the largest by air, land and sea in history and involved more than 150,000 soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada who stormed the Nazi-occupied French beaches of Normandy,” according to USA Today.
“The invasion is credited with changing the course of the war and ultimately pushing Nazi troops back to Germany,” according to the newspaper.
When it happened, Boyer was already part of the war effort.
“I didn’t go to the prom, I was already working,” she said. Due to the labor shortage during World War II, many high school students “were let go early,” she explained.
“I was working at what was then Jacobs Aircraft, where Firestone is now” at the end of Armand Hammer Boulevard. “I was a bookkeeper there.”
Her classmate Betty Hughes, now 93, graduated as Betty Boyd and was also involved in the war effort when the landing occurred. She was training at Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia for the Nurse Corps.
That was where she met her husband, Richard Hughes, who was in the Army and in pharmacy school at the time.
That training served him well. After the war, Hughes worked for many years as the pharmacist at Professional Pharmacy on North Charlotte Street.
Charles Wilde, known to everyone as Chuck, was 17 at the time of the landing and could not join many of his classmates who enlisted almost immediately after graduating, and some before they graduated.
“His parents wouldn’t sign the waiver, so he had to wait until he was 18,” said his widow Lanette.
“He was in the Army and training to go to Germany when the war in Europe ended. So they started retraining him for landing in Japan when the war in the Pacific ended. He was very lucky,” she said.
And although many members of the Class of 1944 were not so lucky and never came home, this class was lucky in one regard — the ties of friendship they re-discovered 50 years later.
Wilde said her husband was one of the members of the class who organized the class 50th reunion.
“They had never had a class trip, because of the war, so they formed a committee and met every month to plan one,” Wilde said.
The trip was a cruise to Bermuda, said Hughes. “It was very nice, we all had a very good time.”
So good, in fact, that the trip and reunion long completed, they continued to get together.
For 25 more years, a group of classmates from the Class of 1944 have continued to get together, sometimes as often as once a month.
“We used to meet at the Elks Club, but now we meet at Brookside Restaurant,” said Hughes.
And of course they brought their spouses, which is how Wilde met all of her husband’s classmates.
“We were both widowers and we met on a windjammer cruise and we just clicked. We fell in love” and she has been part of the group for 20 years.
“They’re my friends now too and I’ve heard some very interesting tales,” she said.
“A lot of the World War II veterans didn’t always like to talk about their experiences, but we would try to draw them out. Some of the stories were truly amazing,” said Wilde.
One amazing tale involves how Anderson met her husband.
She grew up on Jefferson Avenue in Pottstown and her mother was in her second marriage.
Anderson’s mother met her first husband while serving in Washington, D.C. He was from Nebraska, but died soon after their marriage, although she remained close with his family.
When Anderson was 16 years old, her mother suggested she write to Oreon Anderson, who was her first husband’s nephew and served overseas for 30 months with the U.S. Army, first in Africa and then in Italy.
“We were complete strangers, but we were all urged to write to service people so they would get letters from the states,” Anderson recalled.
“So I started writing to him, and he wrote back, and things got a bit more interesting and when the war was over, he went back to Nebraska,” she said.
“He was home for about a month, but he wanted to meet me, so he came to see me around Thanksgiving,” Anderson recalled.
“Well, we got engaged Christmas Eve and married on Jan. 19. I had known him five weeks, and we were married for 47 years,” she said.
Many of those who told those stories are gone now.
According to the World War II Museum, “the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their late 80s and 90s. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 496,777 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were alive in 2018.”
In fact, 348 of them die every day, according to the museum’s statistics.
“There are not too many of us left,” said Hughes.
But if the last 25 years is any indication, those who remain will be having lunch at Brookside next month.