- The Journey Is The Reward – Installment 6 of 6 -
Jean Courter Marchand was born in 1921 and grew up in the Climax area. In 2000, she wrote this article on her memories and perspective of events and people she came in contact with, focusing more on the first twentytwo years of her life.
“Life after college: After the May 1942 commencement exercises at Manhattan, when I graduated from college, my parents took me to their home by way of Soldier, where the high school board interviewed me for a teaching position. I was hired to teach American History, Physiology one semester and Psychology the other, Civics, General Science, and two classes of Home Economics, a total of five classes daily in this high school of seventy students and five teachers, including the principal.
“The day of my interview I did not look for a place to live for the school year. A couple of weeks later I got a letter from a woman in Soldier who said she had an upstairs apartment that she would rent to me, she said she was an older lady with a sick husband. I wrote back to accept the offer. When I got there, I found my room quite austere, with a kerosene two burner cooking stove, a table and a bed. The toilet was outdoors. Soldier had no water or sewage system. I grew up with very plain surroundings, so I was not too concerned. I frequently heard someone coughing downstairs. Two days later my landlady told me that there was someone at the grade school principal’s house who wanted to talk to me there. I walked over and found the County Health Doctor there who said that I as a public-school teacher and could not live in my new apartment because the landlady’s husband had tuberculosis. Since it is a contagious disease, I could catch it and pass it on to my high school students. I shed a few tears because I feared that the landlady would resent my moving out after only three days and that she might tell lies that would make my life difficult for me. Fortunately, she did not do so, her husband died only a few months later. I was fortunate to find another place to live which was much more desirable.
“I was paid $41.05 for each of the nine months. I felt quite well-to-do. I paid off the $300 loan I had received from the college and I bought a secondhand sofa for my parents for Christmas. My second year there I got a raise to $115 a month. I bought some clothes from my Sears catalog. I caught a ride with some friends to Topeka for a weekend and shopped for a coat. My Aunt Irene went shopping with me. I told her I could spend about $40 for a coat and she said “Oh, Jean you’ll never find one for that little!” But I did, a classic camel color wool coat, which served me well the two years I wore it. Irene was accustomed to a better quality of clothing than I had experienced.
“School started on the day after Labor Day. World War II had been declared nine months earlier, tires and gasoline were strictly rationed, so I took the bus from Climax to Holton, with two transfers. There was no bus for the sixteen miles from Holton to Soldier. Soldier was one of the rare towns in Kansas that never had a railroad, Freda Teske who carried the mail from Holton west to Onaga, took passengers along with the mail in the canvas covered back of her pickup, this was wartime and practicality was essential. Soldier was a rural town of perhaps 250 people. I was twenty-one years old and practically the only single person of that age in the area. As I look back, I was rather lonely. I enjoyed my students; I was only three years older than the seniors. My high school principal in Climax, who had gone on to teach in a California university, wrote to me my second year at Soldier to suggest that I might join the military. Perhaps if I volunteered that would allow some dad to stay at home with his children. I wrote for information about the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) and in January of 1944 I went to Kansas City for tests and was sworn in to enter military service, a part of the Naval Reserve, when the school year ended.
“I left June 1, 1944 from Severy on the Frisco train. I remember my mother cried as I left. I was excited by the challenges I expected. Two days later I was in New York City and, along with other WAVES, was stationed at Hunter College for boot camp, which was six weeks long. Until World War II, Hunter was a girl’s school. Our housing was on the fourth floor of a sixstory apartment building. We were assigned four to a room with two double decker bunk beds. My roommates were from Nebraska, Kansas City and Wichita. It was on the evening of my first day at boot camp that the radios carried stories of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
“The next day, bells rang with orders for us to “muster,” gather and line up in the street below in five minutes. One of my roommates did not get there in time and the rest of us got a front row demonstration of military discipline. Several times during our sixweek boot camp there were surprise inspections, a bell would ring and we were to have all our possessions laid out neatly on our bunks and we were to stand at attention by our bunks when the inspecting officer entered the room. One roommate, tired of waiting for the officer, laid down on her bunk and fell asleep, then the officer came in and said “Oh, what do we have here, a sleeping beauty?” The wave was reprimanded.
“Our meals were taken about three blocks from our barracks and we were marched in groups of fifty there and back. We drilled and marched. We had classes morning, afternoon and most evenings on about anything you could think of. We learned Navy terminology, head, starboard, bulkhead, that a watercraft is a ship if it is too large to be loaded onto another vessel. We learned how to salute. We learned about sexually transmitted diseases. We had happy hour (calisthenics). We got immunizations, smallpox, typhoid, etc. We learned that a WAVE does not leave her barracks unless in full uniform, including hose, hat and gloves. Gloves were to be put on before, not during, leaving the building. To gain support for the war effort, a movie, Here Come the Waves, was filmed at our boot camp, with movie start Betty Hutton as the star. We all marched one very warm morning, probably about six thousand of us WAVES, while the cameras rolled. A few women had the bad judgment to faint in the heat, this action was not popular with the officers.
“Most of us had never had an opportunity to travel much and we were enchanted with the chance to see the big City of New York. However, we were not allowed to leave the base until the last two Saturdays of our boot camp. At ten o’clock on each Saturday morning we were permitted to leave, in full uniform of course, and we took the El to Times Square. Three others and I had lunch at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, he had been champion prizefighter in his younger days. I saw Wall Street and Rockefeller center, went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, rode to the top of the Empire State Building and saw the Statue of Liberty from a distance. I mailed some postcards from the Empire State Building and too late discovered I had deposited them in a trash container, not a mail box. A friendly guard retrieved them for me. I was relieved to find my way back to the base by six o’clock curfew.
“After boot camp I was sent to Pensacola Naval Air Station for training. We traveled by train, as troops did in those days. The train I rode on had no screens, in July you certainly wanted open windows, and the smoke from the coal fire trains blew in the windows, so in an hour everyone was covered with soot. The barracks at Pensacola were only a couple of blocks from the Gulf of Mexico. Florida was my first experience with the deep South. It was the first time I had seen drinking fountains and restrooms labeled White Only.
“At Pensacola NAS the “uniform” for my work assignment was jeans. I went to the ship’s store to get mine and the clerk asked what size. I said “waist 44” and he said “I don’t know if we have any that big!” Although I knew that I was not as large as some of the other men and women, I still remembered the embarrassment I felt. I was already feeling selfconscious about my size. I think I realized even then that the clerk was teasing me. Many of the men sailors resented the idea that a woman could do the work of a man.
“After Pensacola I was allowed a week’s leave to go home, after which I went to Lee Field at Green Cove Springs, Fla., which was an auxiliary air base of Jacksonville NAS. There, the WAVES had a two-story building with the mess hall under the same roof. My roommate was from Buffalo, N.Y., who had been at Pensacola with me. We were assigned two to a room. There was a reception area where we met visitors, and a screened in porch with a Ping-Pong table. We were required to have a certain number of hours of physical education each month which were led by a WAVE physical education major in playing badminton, tennis, volleyball, etc. It was decided that any member of the Navy should know how to swim, so there were tryouts to determine how many of us already could swim. The male commander and the WAVE supervisor were the officials. When it was my turn, I was at one side of the pool and was told to swim across it. I could not let go of that side. I tried several times and finally added my tears to the water in the pool. I don’t remember that I was ever in the pool again, they probably decided it was a lost cause.
“I was assigned to the GunAir room of Ground School, where, using synthetic devices, we taught some skills to fighter pilots. The ground School was undergoing a transition, with WAVES coming in to replace some of the men stationed there so they could go on to sea duty or other assignments. At that time WAVES were not allowed to leave the continental United States. The duty at Lee Field was relatively easy and the men were not exactly happy to face the prospect of a different and more dangerous assignment. The dozen men in the GunAir room agreed that if any more WAVES arrived, they would all get their heads shaved. As you can guess, Ruth Bell and I arrived, but Bob Marchand and Chet were the only ones who followed through on their agreement. I started spending more and more time with Bob and in 1945 we were married. At the end of October, I was sent to Memphis for separation from military service and then I went by train back to Kansas. After six weeks with my Kansas family, I went to Lowell, Mass. And stayed with Bob’s family until he was discharged in December of 1945.
“My husband enrolled in the Capital Radio Engineering Institute in Washington, DC and for the next sixteen months that is where we lived, going to school under the GI Bill. In 1947 after Bob graduated, we decided the cost of living and lack of jobs in the Washington, DC area was a good reason to move to Kansas and look for a job. We had five wooden boxes built to ship our belongings by freight train back to Kansas. In August of 1947 we arrived in Emporia, with a new ten-month-old baby, where my dad met us and took us to Climax. And that’s another story.”
