Radioman by Carol Edgemon Hipperson

Author:Carol Edgemon Hipperson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

See Time Line and Historical Notes.

18

THE NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY

October 1942–July 1943

My parents drove me to the train station in Little Rock. It was a regular civilian passenger train, but most of the seats were filled with guys in uniform. Some reserved space in the sleeping car, but that cost extra. I rode for free in the section with the reclining seats. It was a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t that bad. I just read a lot and took naps between stops until the train pulled into Arlington. I caught a bus from there, and it was loaded with soldiers and sailors, too. I don’t know where they were going. I was the only one that got off at the Naval Research Laboratory.

I couldn’t get past the main gate without showing my orders to the Marines. That was normal for any kind of military facility during the war, at least in my experience. What surprised me was the way it looked once I got inside. The Naval Research Laboratory was exactly what I had always imagined a college campus would be: dozens of two- and three-story buildings, all red brick, with ivy growing up the sides. There were big green lawns and shade trees, statues, fountains, and park benches. Guys walking around with books under their arms. Good gosh, I thought I took a wrong turn and ended up at Harvard or Yale. I could hardly wait to go to my first class in the morning.1

Turns out, my orders were mistaken. The next session of Radio Materiel School was not starting until the first of November, so I had almost a month to kill in Washington, D.C. I spent most of that time with my sister. Verna was the oldest of seven children in my family. She was nearly thirty, but she was still single. She used to be a schoolteacher, which she said she loved, but “men’s jobs” paid better. She didn’t especially like her job at the Bureau of Engraving. I don’t know what she did, other than that it had something do with printing money. All she ever said about it was that most of her coworkers were women. Verna thought this was because the federal government was in the same boat as the civilian employers. They had no choice. They had to hire women to replace all the men who quit their jobs and joined the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I thought Verna had it made. She had her own apartment in Washington, D.C., and a car. She couldn’t drive it all that much because of the gas rationing, but still.2 She could also afford to take me out to all the best restaurants in the city, and we hit quite a few of them. I was shocked when she finally broke down and told me that she was going to give it all up and join the Army herself. She wanted to be a nurse. It was not my place to argue with her, and she sure didn’t need my permission.

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