Interview with Marian Mohr Schwerman, World War II
U.S. Navy WAVE, Company S1, Telegrapher 2/C
Cook Memorial Public Library District
July 19th, 2006

Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Connie J. Pfeifer
Proofread by: Ellen Bassett

ELLEN: This interview is taking place on July 19, 2006 at the Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett, and I am interviewing Marian Mohr Schwerman, who enlisted in the Navy WAVES during World War II. She was a Telegrapher 2C. WAVES stands for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. Marian was born on April 17, 1923 and currently resides in Libertyville, Illinois.

ELLEN: Marian, can you tell me how old you were when you enlisted in the WAVES?

MARIAN: Wow, that’s a question. I had…my parents wouldn’t sign for me so I must have been either 21 or 22.

ELLEN: How old did you have to be before they didn’t have to sign for you?

MARIAN: Now that you say that, maybe it was 18 and then I might have gone in when I was 19.

ELLEN: What were you doing at the time?

MARIAN: I was working down at the Board of Trade building on the balcony part in an insurance company and the WAVE Office was…not office, but the WAVE Recruiting Office was on the next floor, the 3 rd floor and I’m there, and I had my desk right by the door. I’d go and I’d see all these WAVES walking around up there, and I’d think, “That ought to be a neat thing to do.” So I went up on the 3 rd floor, the one day that I decided to do it, and I enlisted up there. They’re all watching from the balcony, different ones. Each time I’d go through a different phase of my interview, I’d be given the thumbs-up, you know. So that’s what I did. Then when I got out of service, I came back and got my job back at the same place in the insurance company right there at the Board of Trade building. So that was neat, you know.

ELLEN: Once you enlisted, was your family supportive of that?

MARIAN: Yes, once they saw that I was going to do it. Yeah, and you know at that time we weren’t being sent overseas. Women were not. We were doing mostly clerical work or KP, like I told you. They were very supportive of me.

ELLEN: Even though they wouldn’t sign for you?

MARIAN: Right. Then they were very proud when my sister joined because then they had the blue star flag in the window and they had two blue stars on it. Which now, all of the organizations are promoting the blue star flag. They had that in the window with the two blue stars. That’s why it’s so sad when we hear of a blue star turning to a gold star, and knowing that somebody has lost…I really do not know how, and we have a gold star luncheon. I was in Reno, so I couldn’t go. You’d hear these mothers and sisters get up and talk about how their blue star turned to gold, you know. It’s so….I just sit there and just….I can’t believe they can even talk about it. See, one of them was Pete Kristan from Kristan Funeral Home.

ELLEN: Oh, yes.

MARIAN: I just saw Peter at Journey’s End a couple of weeks ago. His mother was a very, very active member of the auxiliary when she was younger. And so he used to bring her to every gold star luncheon, and she would talk about her son. And then he, I think it’s every two years now, but for awhile, he was going over every year to Normandy. He brought a picture back of Paul’s grave to me and wanted to show it to me. Those are the things you hear about.

ELLEN: Right. You were working in Chicago. Were you living at home?

MARIAN: I was living at home in Chicago.

ELLEN: In Chicago?

MARIAN: Yeah, yeah.

ELLEN: After you enlisted, how long before you were sent off to your boot camp?

MARIAN: Oh, almost within 10 days.

ELLEN: Oh!

MARIAN: It was not long at all before they gave me the orders and I was off to boot camp, which was Hunter College in New York.

ELLEN: How did you get out there?

MARIAN: By train.

ELLEN: Was it just a regular train?

MARIAN: Yes. They didn’t fly us. They just gave us the orders, and we went out there. Then you see all of these WAVES.

ELLEN: A wave of WAVES.

MARIAN: Well, it was. It was a college, but they had turned it into a boot camp. So it was all just WAVES that you saw.

ELLEN: Did all the WAVES travel together by train?

MARIAN: No. We went separately and just checked in when we got to Hunter.

ELLEN: Okay. Wow! Were they holding college classes at Hunter College then or was it strictly a boot camp?

MARIAN: No, strictly boot camp. We did all our marching. We did all our singing. We did everything that we were supposed to do in a regular boot camp, you know.

ELLEN: That was my next question. What kinds of things did they have you do?

MARIAN: We went to class. As I say, we sang as we marched. It was a regular routine that they put the guys through. Just because we were women didn’t make any difference. We still had to do the boot camp.

ELLEN: Was it the same routine as men had to do?

MARIAN: Yeah, oh yeah. I’ve got a couple of pictures of us doing that, where we’re all in formation, you know. Once they issued our uniforms to us and our raincoats and things, we were put right into boot camp, not knowing where we were gonna’ go from there. It was just boot camp. Period. That’s when I got sent from there to Washington D.C.

ELLEN: Well, was boot camp…was it rough then, was it pretty rough on you?

MARIAN: No, no no no. They weren’t rough on us like they would be for the guys, but we had to get up early in the morning. We had to make…I still know how to make the corners on the beds.(laugh) No. We did have an officer that was in charge. Naturally they want you to be…it’s just like when you go to a graduation over here at Great Lakes, they sailors all…and they are so proud when they announce who’s gotten a flag, you know. We didn’t actually have that at that time. I think more than anything, they were getting us ready for clerical work or some place where we could relieve some of the guys and they could be sent overseas and that’s the way I felt. That’s the way I felt when I got from Washington D.C…..no, from boot camp at Hunter College, that’s when I got sent to Washington D.C. That’s when there were 210 WAVES that were sent from boot camp to Washington D.C.

ELLEN: Oh. How long did boot camp last?

MARIAN: Six weeks.

ELLEN: Six weeks and then….

MARIAN: …and then on to wherever the assignment was. Nobody wanted to go to Washington D.C., because all you saw were WAVES. One WAVE after another, or one WAK, you know they were all doing clerical work in D.C. That was a big thing, you know and so thirty of us got sent to school, and I was one of the 30. So I was very fortunate. Then I went to school at…in the Pentagon building. They sent me to….in fact, the gal that’s our chairman for the National Convention just wants me to lead the group that we will be doing awards. She said, “What was your class?” and I said, “Telegrapher 2 nd Class.” She said, “How do you spell that?” But anyway, that’s how I went to school. Our barracks, the WAVE barracks, were right over in Maryland, right beyond the bridge going to the Pentagon building. So that’s where we lived, in the barracks there.

ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: I think I was there for three months in Washington D.C., going to telegrapher school.

ELLEN: If you hadn’t been chosen to go to classes….

MARIAN: The rest of them went to KP.

ELLEN: Oh!

MARIAN: For the rest of the time. Yes, I would not have been very happy.

ELLEN: So, that’s why you say you were lucky?

MARIAN: Right, I was lucky. Yes. I considered myself very fortunate, you know. After we finished there, then they asked us…we could do a choice of where we’d like to be…three different places. Naturally, all of them that I knew wanted to go to a Naval Air Station. There’s where you saw these good looking guys, and they’re all flying. So I asked for Alameda, California. Then my second choice was Pensacola, Florida and that’s how I left from Washington, D.C. and took the train down and went to Correy Field, which was a training…there were eight fields in Pensacola, Florida. Each one was a stop for the cadets to become a pilot. And so Correy Field…I forget all the names of those…

ELLEN: It’s called Correy?

MARIAN: Correy. K-O-R-R-E-Y (sp) Field. That was one of the stops for the…but some of them had already…they were already flying. They had already gone through their training so they were flying some of the planes out of there. But on the whole, most of them were cadets. So that’s why when I got sent to Pensacola, Florida. That’s when I met these two good friends that I still talk with and write with. Then I was stationed in the Operations Building. This is where they came in to file their flight plans.

ELLEN: Once you got down there, did you receive any additional training for what you had to do?

MARIAN: No. We had it back there in Washington, D.C.

ELLEN: Okay. As a telegrapher…..I don’t even know what that is. What did you do?

MARIAN: It was a teletype machine. All of the flight plans had to be…we were right underneath the control tower and all the flight plans had to be filed with us. We did the telegrapher, which was like a typewriter, but it was hooked up to Washington. That’s what you did and then other operations that were taking place on Correy Field came to us. It was a fun thing to do. Yeah, it was a neat thing to do.

ELLEN: Was that a job that a man normally did?

MARIAN: Yes. Oh, yeah. Then they put the two, which was my good girlfriend that’s now in Virginia…Barb and I got the duty…that’s when I met her. I met her on the bus taking us to Correy Field. She said, “I’m Barb, and I’m going to Correy Field, and I’m going to be a telegrapher.” And I said, “Gasp.” So that’s how we got to be such good friends. That plus four sailors, four sailors that were on duty in the Operations Office. The duty was from 7 to 3 for four days, 3 to11 for four days, 11 to 7 for four days, night duty, and then we had four days off.

ELLEN: Oh!

MARIAN: Yeah, it was a pretty good deal. We were allowed to use the Officers pool, so that’s where we spent our time was down at the pool on our off days, even on the days when we were off at 3:00 in the afternoon. It was good duty and the sailors that we were….the Commander in Chief that was in charge of Operations, he replaced another….he wasn’t as high of rank. But anyway, he was not happy because he was taken off a ship and had been overseas and he was not happy to be in charge of us, these lowly people that were at his office. So he didn’t spend much time in the office if he didn’t have to. He just let us run it. He was different, he was different. That was how we got started and then I was there for the whole time. That’s what I mean when they would come to file their flight plans and we’d be taking a bunch of the cadets up to Glenview Naval Air Station. That’s when they would come in and they’d file a flight plan, they’d say, “Hey Mar, we’re going up to Glenview for a couple hours, you want to come along?” So that’s what I would do. I would just get on the plane with them, and call my parents and say I’m going to be at Glenview for a couple hours and so they’d come over, and we’d fly back to Pensacola that night.

ELLEN: Oh, that’s very nice.

MARIAN: Yeah, it was. It was.

ELLEN: That sounds like that was probably the fun part of the job.

MARIAN: Right. That was. It was neat of these guys to do that, too, and to take me along. That was the fun part of it.

ELLEN: Were there any difficult parts?

MARIAN: No, not really. We got along real well with the guys that were…the sailors, as I said, they left these notes, “Clean up the office.” Especially on night duty, you’re not to be sleeping on the job, because there wasn’t much to do at night but it was an office that had to be manned 24 hours a day.

ELLEN: I forgot to ask you, what year was this? Was it towards the end of the war?

MARIAN: Yeah. What did I tell you? I don’t even remember what...

ELLEN: You know, I can’t remember. I thought it was towards the end of the war but I can’t remember exactly.

MARIAN: But I was there for, I think, like a year and three months or something like that so probably a whole year was spent in the Operations Office.

ELLEN: Oh, okay.

MARIAN: I forget those years, you know.

ELLEN: And highest rank that you achieved?

MARIAN: …was Telegrapher 2 nd Class. I started out as a Yeoman and then you worked your way up. I was happy to do that. Each time you got that, you got another pay raise.

ELLEN: I’ve got some pictures here of you in uniform…different uniforms. I just wanted to know if you could explain how many different uniforms you had to wear and if you wore them for any special occasions.

MARIAN: This is just neat because at department convention we had a gal that gave an award to. She was sitting with her mother at a cocktail party before we were going in to the banquet. So I said, “Let’s sit over there by her. She’s Navy.” Anyway, she’s been in 22 years already. When she gets out…she can get out almost any time now. But anyway, she had her sailor outfit on, her middy blouse. We didn’t have that kind of an outfit. I said to her, “This is different.” And she said, “Well, this is what we wear now.” Also, what’s happened now, they’re not called WAVES now; they’re called Sailors. They’re just like Sailors. Period. Then the next time we were going to another banquet, and she was waiting to get on the elevator and she had this real pretty, long dress on with a shawl. I hollered at her, “You’re out of uniform.” We did. I was talking to one of the women that was in the Navy also at convention, and we were talking about our uniforms. I said, “I don’t know whatever happened to my whites, and I loved my whites.

ELLEN: Now, what were the whites? The whites were…I think I’ve got a picture of that. Is that it? No, this is it.

MARIAN: This is it, yeah.

ELLEN: When were the whites worn?

MARIAN: Whenever we wanted to.

ELLEN: Oh. You didn’t have to wear them for anything specific?

MARIAN: No, no no no. I just loved to wear them when I was home. You could tell from there that our hats were different, too. This is a cap, like this with U. S. Navy on top.

ELLEN: Okay.

MARIAN: Even on here, we wore a regular cap.

ELLEN: Now this is pants. You could wear pants?

MARIAN: Right. Not when we were on duty. We wore a regular…like this…this is the three. This is my girlfriend in California, and this is the one in Virginia. This is myself, and one day we were at the barracks and we decided “Let’s just all dress in our three different uniforms.” We took that picture. This is the seersucker for the summer.

ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: Then it had the tie up here…the black tie. Then our hat was a seersucker…or cap and then this was our whites. Then this was our blues, which was the dress. And then when we wanted to go uptown to the bakery or something like that, that’s when we wore the pants with it.

ELLEN: So the pants were to be worn when you weren’t working.

MARIAN: Right.

ELLEN: I notice in this picture with your two friends, you’ve got a little leg showing.

MARIAN: We did that purposefully. I thought I had another one. That was when we got put on report because the Ensign was on the bus and saw us and we were riding our bikes down to the bakery. We were pulling up our pants legs just for the heck of it, you know and she saw us, so she put us on report but they never did anything to us.

ELLEN: There’s a picture of a bike.

MARIAN: Yeah, right. We used to ride the bikes to Warrington to the bakery. And it was all naturally navy blue, navy blue wool. Hotter than heck. I would walk from the barracks, that’s the barracks down in Pensacola, and I’d walk from the barracks a block and a half up to the Operations Office, and I’m not one that perspires…I’d be soaked. It was so…the humidity down there was really terrible, you know. So this is why we were…what we wore most of the time during the summer, we wore the seersuckers.

ELLEN: So even when you weren’t working you had to be in uniform? You could not wear civilian clothing?

MARIAN: No.

ELLEN: Did you ever….

MARIAN: I cheated. (laugh) I cheated.

ELLEN: And what happened?

MARIAN: I went to a dance. I was dating this fellow down there and went to a dance. My father sent me this…I can still see it…lime green dress. It was so pretty and I wore my Marine coat over it and buttoned it up. Then I go to the washroom, and here’s the Ensign that put us on report. She’s there. She never did do anything about it, which was nice. When I came home, I was always in uniform. When I came home, you know, I didn’t wear civies.

ELLEN: Even on leave?

MARIAN: Yeah, even on leave. Right. They were neat outfits, but this gal said, “I cannot think what happened to my blues.” I said, “I’ve got my blues,” I said, “ but I cannot remember whatever happened…” my mother must have…at the time I thought what am I gonna’…and my seersucker. I feel so bad now that I didn’t save that.

ELLEN: Were there expectations of you in terms of behavior? We talked about dress.

MARIAN: Oh, yeah. You had to salute as you were passing an officer. You did exactly what the sailors do. You had to always be a lady, even though we were women, it was not that…even when they filed the flight plans, everything was “Sir” and “Ma’am” to the Commanding Officers. The fellows that took then on these NAVHOPS were all officers, of course. There were not that many officers that were WAVES on our field. I think a lot of them went on to Whiting Field…was the last stop for them when they did their training. And this girlfriend of mine from California was Chief when she took them in the link, and they operated the link, which was to teach them how to fly. She really had a great job. But there wasn’t anybody, even, like in charge of her. She was Chief, and she was the boss in that particular area. I don’t know where the other bosses went. They left us alone.

ELLEN: Did you get along with all of the Commanding Officers?

MARIAN: Yes. Oh yeah, very much so.

ELLEN: Anybody that you particularly liked?

MARIAN: No. We all dated some of the…that’s why those sailors would just have a fit, you know. They’d say, “There they are. They’re going out with Lieutenant so-and-so.”

ELLEN: You were allowed to date?

MARIAN: Oh, yeah. The fellow that I dated was a pilot. Oh, yeah. We were allowed to date servicemen, or the officers. Oh, yeah. In fact, some of the girls even married…met the guys down there and got married…I often wonder how it went, whether they still… Now what’s interesting that this girlfriend of mine that’s from Virginia, last year or the year before she sent a letter to me and said that she and her husband, who she married on leave when she was home, were going to be cremated and will be in the crematorium at Arlington National Cemetery. I was shocked, because I thought she’d want to… she and (?) would want to be buried in their hometown. I think it’s an honor to do this, but that’s what she…..and so I inquired of the bus driver, “Where is the crematorium?” He said, “Well, it’s off in a separate section of Arlington National Cemetery.”

ELLEN: I didn’t know they had one.

MARIAN: I didn’t either. This has gotten to be a thing though, I think, this cremation, you know, and in order…because this one friend of ours that was very active in the American Legion Auxiliary, she had her plot in Arlington National Cemetery for years before she died. That was her wish to be buried at Arlington.

ELLEN: You mentioned you lived in barracks. Were those okay? What were they like?

MARIAN: 2 x 4. Bunk beds.

ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: Ohyeah. We had bunk beds.

ELLEN: So it was a big…like a dorm room?

MARIAN: Not even that. Probably not even any bigger than this room, with the bunk beds over there…two to a room and then we each had a dresser and that was the extent of what you got.

ELLEN: Did you share a room with a roommate?

MARIAN: Yes. I don’t think we were even…I don’t remember that we were assigned. I don’t know that we chose roommates, rather. I don’t think we were, you know, given a choice. We were just told, “This was your roommate.”

ELLEN: You got along with your roommate okay?

MARIAN: Right, because of my shifts.

ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: And then this gal that was the Chief that was my good friend, she would look out for me. She’d be at the Chief’s mess hall, and she’d bring something and put it on the dresser for when I woke up.

ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: Then one time this sailor came through. He never did stop to rape anybody, but he got in our barracks, not through a window, he came through our barracks. He took my silver dollar that was my birthday on it that my parents had given me and then when he got to…he was going to…tried to wake her up, the last gal in the cubicle. Then he escaped. They put him on trial, and it was my silver dollar that convicted him. He had it. They went through his locker the minute that they found who he was….

ELLEN: So it was somebody there on the base.

MARIAN: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, he was court martialed.

ELLEN: Wow!

MARIAN: That was an experience.

ELLEN: I would say. Very scary.

MARIAN: Right.

ELLEN: Wow. In your free time…I know you mentioned you got to go to the Officer’s Club and use the pool. What other kinds of things did you do with your girlfriends?

MARIAN: We didn’t even have TV. We played cards. We were out in the sun a lot, because it was always nice weather down there. We read a lot. We didn’t do a lot of activities with groups. It was just like the two…three of us together, you know. We went to the show. There was a show down in Pensacola, a theater so we would go there quite a bit. There wasn’t a lot for us to do, especially with our shifts the way they were. It wasn’t that we had the free time to go do the things that we would have maybe wanted to do. I don’t even remember. It seems funny. We never got bored.

ELLEN: I do have a memo here. Every time I read this, I think it’s so funny. It looks like…did you send it out or was this sent to you?

MARIAN: That was sent to me. In fact, I just looked at them. I think I’ve got 10 to15 notes from the different guys as they were traveling home.

ELLEN: I guessing that this was written as kind of a joke.

MARIAN: It is. They were all jokes. Like they would say…one of them I just read the other day, “Francois.” For some reason, they named us these French names. “It’s cold on the motorcycle. I wish you were in the middle.” It was a couple of the guys that had been discharged and were on their way home and then they’d send these cards to me, you know and the fellow that I dated would send me a card if had….like our flyaways, if we had really bad weather like they get down there now, too, then the flyaways were all usually in Corpus Christi, Texas and that’s where they took the planes and took them away from the field if the weather was bad. So I’d get these cards but they were all in jest. It was all a fun thing, you know.

ELLEN: This one cracks me up, going on about how that “the office has been left in a disrespectful, terrible, dirty, ….and furthermore, it is requested that all necking parties be cancelled in the future. Lovers Lane is not located on the couch in this office, Marian.”

MARIAN: That was one of the sailors. Yeah.

ELLEN: When I first read it, I thought, “Huh!” So, it sounds like you had a good time.

MARIAN: The night shift, we always had clean-up duty to do, just to sweep and things like that. We did have the couch that that we could sleep on, but we never had anybody up there.

ELLEN: You said you made a couple of close friendships. The one girl you had met on the bus. Who was the other girl in the pictures? You said there were three of you.

MARIAN: The other gal is from California.

ELLEN: How did you meet her?

MARIAN: I came on the bus with Barb, and then….how did we meet Jean? We became such good friends. I think we were just in the barracks together, and just all of a sudden the three of us just became very well acquainted.

ELLEN: …and have always kept in touch.

MARIAN: …and always kept in touch, all these years. I went out to California a number of years ago and visited her when she got married. She married the Chief that she met down there and they spent their honeymoon at our house after Chuck and I were married.

ELLEN: Wow.

MARIAN: She’s a good friend. I send her a postcard from everywhere I travel with the Legion and she loves that. She says, “Mari you’re such a good friend.” Those are the two people…I often wonder, though, when I look at the pictures if this one fellow…he’s probably the most handsome man I’ve seen…and he dated this Barb that was on the bus with me and I was thinking, “Oh, this is going to be neat.” And she went home and her boyfriend was home on leave, and they got married. So this was a big blow to the fellow that was down there. So, and I’ve often wondered what happened to Russ. He lived in San Diego. But you lose track, and then you don’t know how to find them.

ELLEN: Right.

MARIAN: In fact, Jean and I, when we would write back and forth, this girl from California, we’ll say, “What do you think happened to Russ? What do you think happened to Dick” Years go on. But anyway, those were my two best friends and still are.

ELLEN: And still are, yeah, that’s great. That’s very special.

MARIAN: Right.

ELLEN: Do you remember anything about VE Day or VJ Day? Were you still in the service?

MARIAN: Not really. That’s funny. No. Yes. All I remember is gathering around the flagpole when the flag was half-mast when President Roosevelt died. They brought all the WAVES and put us around the flagpole. That was a very emotional time, I think, for everybody, when we heard that President Roosevelt had died. No. I don’t remember VJ Day and I don’t remember VE Day. I was not part of it, evidently.

ELLEN: You don’t remember any big celebration or anything?

MARIAN: No. In fact, I don’t know where I even was, now that you say that, Ellen. I’m thinking , “Where was I?” Probably back at work, you know.

ELLEN: Hanging around the Officer’s pool.

MARIAN: Right.

ELLEN: You were in service about a year, you said.

MARIAN: About a year and three months, I think it was.

ELLEN: Once your service ended, what did you do?

MARIAN: I came home, I came home on the train. My sister met me that day and she said, “We’re gonna’ go to Lake Zurich,” which is where I grew up and went to school. And she said, “We’re supposed to go out there tonight.” That’s the night I met my husband-to-be, the day I got home from the service. After meeting all of these glamorous guys, you know. So we dated, and then I got my job back. They held my job open for me at the insurance company as one of the Chief Underwriters. I worked and took the train, the El, because we were living in the city at the time. Chuck and I dated, for what, about a year and a half before we got married.

ELLEN: The guy you were dating down at… Pensacola at Correy Field….

MARIAN: Pensacola?

 ELLEN: Yeah, at Correy Field…

 MARIAN: He got discharged before I did.

ELLEN: And that was the end of that?

MARIAN: That was the end of that. But the one that I told you was so good looking, when we were about to be…well, I was going to be discharged. We knew it, and so we were working the Operations Office that night, or I was, and we had our leave papers all ready to go, and Jean said…this girlfriend of mine from California said, “Why don’t we take a trip?” Not California, from New York…“Why don’t we go to California?” So, we waited until their was an AVHOP coming in, and when they said they were going to California we had our leave papers ready, so we took our leave. Her father said, “Who is this fly-by-night you’re hanging around with?” And that was me. We went to California and stayed at WAVE barracks, all the different cities in California and toured there and then got to New Orleans and met a bunch of the guys from the base and got a ride home from there and then I think it was about three months later that I was discharged but we did have a good trip to California. In that trip to California, Russ, this good-looking young guy, had already been discharged, and so we met him when we got to San Diego and we stayed in the WAVE barracks. We had a picnic. We had already met his mother and his sister once before. They had come down to the base and so we spent some time with them. We either took a flight to the next town or we took a bus. Either way, whichever way it didn’t cost us that much, that’s for sure. Staying in all the…in very town…all the big cities had WAVE barracks, see, so we could stay in the WAVE barracks. It was fun.

ELLEN: That does sound like fun. What organizations…Veteran’s organizations are you active with today?

MARIAN: American Legion Auxiliary.

ELLEN: You hold a post, don’t you?

MARIAN: I also belong to the Libertyville Post.

ELLEN: Post. Okay. I meant you hold a position.

MARIAN: So, what they call us are Duel Membership. I belong to both of them.

ELLEN: Are you an Officer?

MARIAN: In the Legion Auxiliary? I’m past President of the unit, twice I think, here in Libertyville, and past President of the state of Illinois. I loved that. That was neat… 1999 to the year 2000. My theme was a hot air balloon and traveling into the 21 st Century of Forgotten Country and so everywhere we went, I had hot air balloons. I’ve got every…our whole house is full of different plaques and things like that, you know. After I finished my term as President of the State, then I was…what did I have…two years, yeah, I got the appointment to be on the National Education Committee and I loved that. I loved that. Two years, the National Education and that’s when Samsung, the corporation, gave the Legion five million dollars. Remember?

ELLEN: Yes.

MARIAN: That was when the young girl from Samsung was on our committee that year when 9/11 when I was stuck in Washington D.C. We asked her to go out that night, and she said she had some friends and she had two children at home. She didn’t get to Washington D.C. that often, so she was going to go out with her friends. Then it was, I think two weeks later, that we got the letter from our chairman telling us that her husband had been killed in the World Trade Center. So, I sent her some money and said put it in the education fund for the children. I often wonder what happened to her, too. From there, I was appointed…in fact, one of the past national Presidents just emailed me and said, “I’m so proud of you. I was the one that gave you your appointment to the Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Committee and I remember you were leery about taking it, because you didn’t know if you could do it. But you’ve done such a great job.” This is my fourth year being on the Veteran’s Affairs and Rehabilitation Committee. I deal with 68 VA hospitals. I receive their minutes for four quarters, and I receive their attendance sheets and so I keep track of all…then when I find something is happening with one of the reps or that I have to write and say, “you’re not certified, I do not have a certification…” I’ve got a stack like this at home, Ellen, that I have to….in fact, I got the nicest letter just now from the Chief in Georgia and he said, “I was not aware that we were to be sending this to you. My office staff has not kept up with what they should be. I will assure you that from now on, you will receive the minutes from….” And then when I was in Reno, I met a couple of neat… a couple of nice Chiefs of different hospitals and they do nothing but praise the Auxiliary for the work, for our volunteers. So anyway, I keep busy doing that.

ELLEN: Were you always that involved with it….right after you were discharged?

MARIAN: No. My husband was very involved here in Libertyville and that’s all he…most, not most but a lot of the men in Libertyville I know just want to be involved in the post activities, bingo and stuff like that. So they had asked me any number of years to try to go up in department to become President and I had said, “No.” Then when my husband died, he died in January and in April I went to a meeting, and they came to me and they said, “Would you run for (?)” I didn’t even ask my unit. I had to get them over in a corner and say, “Will you guys support me if I run?” That’s what I did so you’re first one going up is…for the history, I did the history. That was the way you go up in the state. You start with the history and then Second Vice President, First Vice President and then President, so it takes you four years. So, I wrote the history for the whole state of Illinois. And her theme was Care us the Carousels. So, I had, every month they were on the carousel traveling, going into girls state and pulling in and all the girls getting on the horses and I named the different horses, and I had a good time and I won the biggest award you could get for the history, which was the Tumi award. Everybody was so proud. Three of us…only three from Illinois have ever won it and that’s like eight years ago, eight or nine years ago.

ELLEN: That’s something to be proud of.

MARIAN: Yeah. So, that’s how I was involved in the unit. And naturally, after I became the State President, that’s when I became involved in National. Some of them don’t. Some of them drop out, and some of them don’t get an appointment. As I say, I don’t know how long I’ll keep getting this appointment, but this is my fourth year. In October, I go….I just got the authorization to go to Pittsburgh. That’s the executive committee meeting for two days. So, then I go there, and then in May we go back to Pittsburgh again for five days and that’s about 500 people that come to that.
ELLEN: Oh.

MARIAN: Sothat’s a big…all theChiefs from the hospitals and a lot of the reps and a lot of the volunteers. I really enjoy it. I do enjoy it. I meet lots of neat people, and I guess I’m a people person.

ELLEN: You are.

MARIAN: So that’s how I’ve ended up being an Officer, not an Officer, Vice Chairman I have been twice now of the VA and R Committee.

ELLEN: Well, that’s all the questions I have. Was there anything you can think of that you wanted to add that we didn’t cover or anything…

MARIAN: No. I think we did a good job.

ELLEN: Yes. We did a good job. Well, thank you, Marian.

MARIAN: I appreciate it.

1. 2. 3. 4.

1. Fellow WAVEs Dottie and Barb and Marian in Pensacola, FL 2. Marian in front of WAVE barracks in Pensacola, FL 3.Marion on leave in Chicago 4.Marion, friend Barb and sister Jean modeling WAVE and SPARS uniforms