Navy women leave mark at Moffett
If Dan Dugan had not been curious about the old slab of concrete behind building 569 at Moffett Field, the names of Shirley Bosser, Marian Fabian, Cheri Freytag and Gladys Leach might have been overlooked for a few more decades.
I certainly would never have made my way up to Moffett to read the fading inscriptions that the four women— and three of their friends in the naval WAVES during World War II — etched into wet concrete on April 27 and April 28, 1944. Though I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to determine who they are. If they’re alive today, they are probably close to 90 and unlikely to be on Instagram. ( For a full list of the names, see www. mercurynews. com/ scott- herhold.)
The inscriptions leave me hungry for more this Independence Day. What kind of women were these Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, or WAVES, surely a contorted acronym? What did they do at Moffett? What happened to them?
Dugan, a former Army pilot who went to work for NASA, agrees with me that they probably had independence of mind: They might have been chastised for the writing in concrete. They also had precision. Several of them left service numbers. And all of them wrote legibly.
As it happens, women have played a significant role in the history of Moffett. When the Navy began looking in 1929 for a place to locate a naval air station on the West Coast for its dirigibles, an untiring real estate agent from Niles, Laura Thane Whipple, stepped forward to push the Bay Area.
Moffett Field historians say Whipple was selling the 1,696acre Rancho Posolmi, which, 85 years before, was one of the few land grants given to a Native American. Where others saw fields of broccoli and cauliflower, she saw an air base ( and a commission? I confess: It’s occurred to me, though I have nothing to confirm that).
Whipple helped local communities raise more than $ 476,000 to buy the land, which was then deeded to the federal government for $ 1. It was a huge achievement, a piece of regional cooperation that sounds quaint today.
After the crash of its flagship dirigible, Macon, over Monterey Bay in 1935, the Navy turned over operation of Moffett Field to the Army, which used it as a pilot training base. Then, with Pearl Harbor, it was turned back to the Navy for training pilots on blimps.
Here there was plenty of room for the WAVES, who began in 1942. The naval archives have pictures of women operating the Moffett control tower and watching over the carrier pigeons that went aloft.
Is that what Shirley Bosser, Marian Fabian, Cheri Freytag and Gladys Leach did? Or their friends Ginger Nelson, Gloria Wells and another with the last name of Johnson? It might have been part of it. What we do know is that on an exuberant day in April 1944, they left their names in concrete for us to read seven decades later. No “Kilroy was here” for them.
The rest, I think, is up to any of us who know their story. Go online to read the full list and the service numbers. And if you can fill in the blanks, I’ll follow up with another column.