Back Home Depression Takes Over

Flo Listens to Lili Marlene on Repeat

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 120

In April 1946, Flo returned to her hometown of Yakima, where she spent the summer reflecting on her two years in Europe as a Red Cross “donut girl.” My cousin Sandy, who was then six years old and a frequent visitor to “grandma’s house” remembers that Flo sat in her room listening to the song Lili Marlene over and over during that time, likely while compiling the album of her wartime experiences–a way of processing the grief and loss she carried home.

Back in the USA. Flo was always reading.

Lili Marlene was a German love song that became an unlikely anthem of World War II, beloved by both Axis and Allied troops. Originally written as a poem in 1915 by Hans Leip, a conscripted schoolteacher, it was set to music in 1938 and first recorded by Lale Andersen in 1939. The song gained massive popularity after being played frequently by Soldatensender Belgrad (Soldier’s Radio Belgrade), a German radio station broadcasting across Europe and the Mediterranean. Despite initial opposition from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the song’s immense popularity among soldiers—including General Erwin Rommel—forced the Nazi government to embrace it as a broadcast sign-off.

For soldiers in the field, the song’s nostalgic, melancholy tone symbolized the distant homes and loved ones they left behind. Allied soldiers in North Africa and Italy often listened to it as a nightly ritual, with some even adapting the melody to their own lyrics.

The song’s reach expanded further through the U.S. Office of Strategic Services’ “Muzak Project,” which used musical propaganda to influence enemy morale. As part of this effort, Marlene Dietrich recorded the song in German and performed it live for Allied troops across Europe. Dietrich continued to perform Lili Marlene throughout her career, including in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, cementing the song’s legacy as a poignant symbol of the shared loneliness and longing experienced by soldiers on all sides of the conflict. For Flo, the song’s melancholy resonated deeply with her own shattered state of mind.

Flo was depressed and I suspect that she suffered from what we now recognize as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing so much destruction and death including the death of her fiancé, Gene Gustafson. She was quoted in a newspaper saying she was “surprised at the seeming apathy with which world affairs are considered by most persons.” She told me that Americans were most concerned with shortages of things like nylons and gas rather than the war. After the war they didn’t want to talk about it. Flo worried about the fate of Europeans, many of whom were homeless and starving, but Americans just wanted to move on.

The Fuchsia Jacket

Countering Dyke Wardrobe Anxiety

No one has ever praised me for my fashion sense. In the 60s and 70s it didn’t matter. Lesbians all wore pretty much the same thing–jeans and T shirts. I bought my flannel shirts at JC Penney in the boys’ department, boys size 18. I worked construction and so I could wear the same outfits for work and play. For lesbian dress up events I bought a used tuxedo. But straight affairs like weddings left me perplexed as I surveyed my closet.

I didn’t have a thing to wear. 

By the 1980s I felt the need for something a little dressier. I enlisted my friend Joan and her tailor girlfriend Lucy to help me. They accompanied me to Macy’s in downtown San Francisco to buy what my father might describe as a sport coat. Something you would wear with slacks of a different color. 

With my girlfriend Pat Cull, wearing the fuchsia jacket

One of the highlights of my week used to be looking through the Macy’s ad in the Sunday Chronicle. It wasn’t a catalog, more like a magazine, even bigger than the Sunday New York Times Magazine. There, in gorgeous color photographs, were all the things we desired–clothes, kitchen appliances, leather furniture, gadgets. You had to go to the Sears catalog for tools, and I drooled over those pictures too. My collective houses had little by way of possessions–furniture found on the street, 2X4 and plywood beds, brick and board bookcases, tables refashioned from electrical spools, mismatched kitchen utensils and dishes from Goodwill. We lusted after the new, even if we dared not admit it to our politically correct circle of friends.

Department stores both excited and overwhelmed me. I loved the window and in-store displays even more than the color pictures. Macy’s was the best, not so hoity toity that you felt unwelcome, but still very classy. Macy’s had signed me up for my very first credit card at a time when most credit cards were still restricted to men. I was as loyal as a customer with little money could be. But I was overwhelmed by the number of departments and choices. I invariably narrowed them down by only shopping the sale racks, usually in the far back of each department. In fact, I could never bring myself to pay full price for anything, so I usually never got beyond them.

Now it was time to use my credit card to buy something new. At Macy’s, Lucy steered me toward the Misses section and we each began perusing a different rack. Cutting edge fashion in the 80s featured big boxy jackets and oversized shirts with padded shoulders. I thought the style would look great on me. Lucy was the one who found the jacket, boxy and big, size 12. It was bright fuchsia. Should I buy it? Would it be a good wardrobe investment? Both women encouraged me. And, while Joan was a sister construction worker, Lucy was a clothes person. I took her advice.

My jacket was well received in San Francisco. I stood out in a crowd of colorful outfits, but I fit in. Fuchsia became my favorite color, and my color consultant, Lucy, said it best complemented my pink white girl complexion.

My travels as a tradeswoman organizer and author took me to New York several times in the 80s. I would stay with carpenter Barbara Trees who lived in a converted warehouse near the tip of Manhattan. The apartment took up part of a floor of the high-rise warehouse—one big room. Residents had filed suit when the owner sought to evict them. They won and were able to stay in the building. Remodeled plumbing necessitated climbing a couple of steps to get to the shower and toilet.

Carpenter Barbara Trees with a coworker

On my first trip to New York I was tasked with meeting with the Ms. Foundation to ask for funding for the tradeswoman organization I was working with. Barbara was out of town but she left a key and I stayed in her loft alone, so I had no one to ask for fashion advice. She was also a construction worker, so she may not have helped that much.

Fashion anxiety overtook me. What does a clueless West Coast dyke wear to a meeting in NYC? I didn’t know anyone in New York, but I had the phone number of the writer and activist Sarah Schulman. She put my mind at ease, advising me that all would be ok no matter what I wore. 

The morning of my appointment I slipped on black shoes and slacks, then topped off the outfit with my fuchsia jacket. In Barbara’s mirror I looked fabulous. Locking the many locks on her door, I rode the elevator to the street and walked out into a sea of people on a sun shiny Manhattan day. Wall Street traders in black suits, ladies walking little dogs–everyone was wearing black. Suddenly it seemed like every single pair of eyes turned toward me and my fuchsia jacket. I began walking purposefully toward the subway and I got a couple of blocks before I had to turn around. I couldn’t do it. I went back to Barbara’s and changed into a black leather jacket I had worn on the plane.

We didn’t get the money. Would we have gotten it if I’d been able to wear the fuchsia jacket?

Epilogue

Barbara Trees was so traumatized by the 9-11 attack that she moved away from New York City. We lost touch after that.

Sarah Schulman joined the faculty of Northwestern University in Illinois in 2016. Her writing has centered on queer life and AIDS activism in NYC. Her latest book is The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. In search of activist guidance I actually bought her tome Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, written using interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Macy’s photo by Vladan Raznatovic on Unsplash

Audie Murphy After the War

A Timeline of His Post-War Life

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 119

He was a war hero—THE most decorated hero of World War Two—and that was his epithet, even as he became a Hollywood movie star with more than 40 movies to his credit.

What no one, and especially the US military, wanted to talk about was the degradation of his life because of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, I would argue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Audie Murphy survived the war but not his invisible injuries.

To understand Audie Murphy’s post-war life, I’ve created a timeline that will help me explore the details in future posts.

Audie Murphy Post-War Timeline

My mother Flo’s famous picture of Audie when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the field May 12, 1945

Flo Back Home in Yakima

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 118

On this page of her album Flo attached icons from Northwest and United Airlines, pictures of herself and her mother at their home in Yakima and several newspaper articles. 

We Think Spokane is where Our Parents Met

Our parents told us kids that they met in the Spokane airport. They said Flo was ill and Carroll, our dad, helped her. But we never learned when this happened. My theory is that it was in April, 1946 when Flo flew back from Washington DC where she had been debriefed by the Red Cross. The United Airlines map on this page shows the flight going to Spokane, where she must have had to transfer to Northwest Airlines for the final leg to Yakima. Flo and Carroll carried on their relationship in Seattle where she moved in the fall of 1946. She worked for the publisher of the Seattle Times as a secretary. He worked at a gas station which was on her way as she walked to work. They married in November, 1947 and moved to Yakima.

The page from Flo’s album

Here are some excerpts and quotes from the news stories. It’s interesting that all the newspaper stories refer to Flo as a girl. One of the second wave feminist movement’s demands was that media stop infantilizing women. She was 32 when she returned from Europe.

Awarded the French Fourragère

“One Yakima girl is entitled to wear the fourragère awarded by France for distinguished service by an army unit. Miss Florence Wick as one of the four Red Cross girls attached to the Third Division was officially given the right to wear the coveted fourragère in full uniform. Certainly no one who knows of Miss Wick‘s work, which often led her to the firing line, will doubt in the least her right to the emblem of honor. Her friends are certain she was as gallant a soldier as any of her brothers in arms.”

Surprised at American Apathy

“Miss Florence Wick, who recently returned from overseas Red Cross service, is back home after a short stay in Seattle. Miss Wick is following the news of overseas needs with great interest but has no great faith of permanent peace in Europe under present conditions. She is, also, somewhat surprised at the seeming apathy with which world affairs are considered by most persons.”

Visited Families

She visited the town of Walla Walla to see the parents of two men that she was stationed with in Germany. (The men) are stationed at Bad Wildungen, and are expected to remain in Germany until late summer.

She Spoke Publicly About the War

She spoke to the Lions Club luncheon in the Commercial Hotel about “the combat history of the third infantry division that had the most casualties and fought the most battles. She celebrated the fall of Rome from a Roman villa amidst flabbergasted and excited Italians and VE day in the Salzburg Castle, where Hitler and Mussolini met near Brunner Pass. Describing the food situation on the continent as tragic when she left six weeks ago, Miss Wick told of people starving and of shelves bare of bread, soap, fat, oils, and sweets. The only food available, she said, was through the black market with a good meal costing $25 in Paris. Sweden and Belgium seem to have plenty, she pointed out, but the remainder of Europe is starving.”

She Stopped in DC to be Cleared

“She arrived Tuesday in New York. She telephoned her mother that she will go to Washington DC to be cleared by the Red Cross before leaving for her home here. She visited relatives in Sweden. 20 relatives from different parts of Sweden attended a reunion upon her arrival.”

Yakima Girl Returns With Four Battle Stars on Dress 

“Miss Wick served in artillery range during Vosges mountains fight. The slender vivacious, former Yakima business girl was one of four Red Cross workers who drove a clubmobile and served coffee and as many as 6000 donuts a day to weary dog faces and artillery men. They were with the rear echelon, lived in tents and were able to pack, take down their tents and move in 20 minutes when the army was on the go. Six GIs, battle fatigue cases, made the donuts which the four girls distributed.” 

The Only Division with a Presidential Citation

“We have lots of mosts in our division,” says Miss Wick, whose pride in the division is tremendous. “We even had the most casualties.” She added that is to be expected because the units were in some of the toughest fighting. “We were the only infantry division to have a presidential citation for the whole division.”

On V-E Day Sadness Mixed with Rejoicing

Miss Wick says (V-E Day) was quite exciting, of course, but “I don’t believe there was one person there who wasn’t thinking of the ones who weren’t there, the ones who made the victory possible. There was sadness mixed with rejoicing.”

What Was Germany Fighting For?

“’The German people had so much more than the other people in Europe, it made the Americans wonder what the Germans were fighting for.’ The Yakima girl says she earnestly believes all the Germans should be held morally responsible for the war. They certainly do not feel this, she says. They think they are just unfortunate to have lost the war. Miss Wick visited Dachau prison and Landsberg, where the Jewish concentration camp was and says stories of these horrors are not exaggerated.

“Switzerland and her mother‘s native Sweden, which Miss Wick visited on leave after hostility ceased, she found peaceful and beautiful, strangely so after the rubble and ruin of Italy, Germany, and France and the damage in England from the blitz.
“Among Miss Wick‘s most interesting souvenirs is a Gestapo camera, a machine about 2 1/2 inches long and an inch high and an inch wide. She has not yet decided upon her future plans although she could go either to Europe or the Pacific area with the war department if she wishes.”

Chapter 119: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/08/15/audie-murphy-after-the-war/

Catching Some Culture in NYC

My Mother and Audie Murphy chapter 117

Flo saw shows and friends in the Big Apple

Flo sailed into New York City at the end of March 1946, and she partook of as much culture as she could in a few short days. She saved the playbills from several shows. She heard music at Carnegie Hall, saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the City Center of Music and Drama, and caught a play at the Cort on Broadway.

I love this ad! Flo was a career girl.
Carnegie Hall lineup

She connected with a friend, Dr. Edward Dunlap, who was starting his medical practice at New York Hospital, and she included his announcement, a picture of the hospital, and a picture of him. He could have been someone she knew during the war, but there are no other pictures or mentions of him in the album.

Dr. Eddie, his announcement, and the New York Hospital on East 68th Street.

Did she see her lesbian girlfriend, Edna Lauterbach, while in New York? Probably, but there’s no mention of “Eddie.” They had seen a show together when Flo visited in 1941, so it’s likely they reconnected — or maybe their friendship had ended by this time. Edna was definitely smitten with Flo, and I can imagine that Flo may have felt uncomfortable in the situation. I wrote about their relationship after discovering love letters from Eddie saved in another scrapbook. https://mollymartin.blog/2016/09/03/my-mothers-lesbian-affair/

Chapter 118: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/08/08/flo-back-home-in-yakima/

A Day to Thank the Earth

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

In Andean cultures, the feminine figure was valued as a living expression of Pachamama’s attributes. AI generated image

August 1 in the northern hemisphere is celebrated as Lammas, the first harvest day. In South America it is Pachamama Day, the start of the growing season.

I first encountered the idea more than fifty years ago, but I didn’t recognize its importance until much later.

While reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, I kept noticing one name in the footnotes: Alfred Crosby. The name stopped me. Crosby had taught history at my alma mater, Washington State University, and I had been his student.

At the time I knew him simply as a professor. I had no idea I was sitting in the classroom of a historian who would change the way the world understood history.

In 1972 Crosby published The Columbian Exchange, introducing a revolutionary way of thinking about European conquest. History, he argued, was not driven only by kings, generals, and battles. Plants, animals, microbes, and ecosystems were just as important. His work essentially created the field of environmental history.

The Columbian Exchange describes the enormous movement of crops, livestock, diseases, technologies, and cultures between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn transformed Europe, Africa, and Asia. Horses and cattle transformed the Americas. But the deadliest travelers were invisible.

In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby argued that European conquest depended as much on biology as on military power. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases swept through Indigenous populations that had no immunity. Entire societies were devastated before they could organize resistance. Europeans inherited landscapes emptied by epidemics as much as they conquered them by force.

Charles Mann takes the story even further. He argues that the Americas were home to far larger populations than historians once believed—perhaps tens of millions more. The continent Europeans imagined as a wilderness had actually been carefully managed for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Forests, fields, rivers, and grasslands all bore the imprint of human stewardship.

The tragedy becomes even greater in that light. Not only were millions of people lost; countless traditions, languages, and ways of understanding the natural world nearly disappeared with them.

Nearly—but not entirely.

Some traditions survived.

Every August 1, Indigenous communities across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina celebrate Pachamama Raymi, or Festival of Mother Earth, one of the oldest pre-Hispanic ceremonies still practiced in South America. Pachamama, from the Quechua words pacha (world, space, or time) and mama (mother), is often translated as Mother Earth. But she is more than the ground beneath our feet. She represents the living world that nourishes all life. Pachamama is the fertility goddess in Inca mythology, responsible for planting, harvesting, creating mountains and earthquakes, as well as the very existence of life on Earth.

The celebration coincides with the start of the agricultural season in the southern hemisphere and centers on a simple but profound idea: reciprocity.

The Earth feeds us. We must feed the Earth.

On August 1, farmers allow their fields to rest. Families prepare offerings of cooked foods, corn, potatoes, fruits, coca leaves, medicinal herbs, chicha, seeds, and flowers. A small hole is dug in the ground—symbolically Pachamama’s mouth—and the gifts are placed into the earth. The offering is not payment but gratitude, an acknowledgment that human life depends on the generosity of the land.

It is, in essence, Thanksgiving.

Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, Andean peoples had developed a tradition that recognized what modern environmental science is only beginning to emphasize: humans are not separate from nature. We exist because of it.

The ritual feels remarkably relevant today. We celebrate technological progress while exhausting soils, warming the climate, polluting rivers, and treating the Earth as an endless warehouse of resources. Pachamama Day offers another way of thinking—not about ownership, but relationship; not about extraction, but reciprocity.

I find myself wishing we had something similar in our Western culture.

Our Thanksgiving has become centered on football, shopping, and overeating, with little reflection on the land that produces our food or on the Indigenous peoples who first cultivated many of the crops on our tables. Imagine setting aside a single day each year not to consume more, but to acknowledge our dependence on healthy soil, clean water, pollinating insects, and the astonishing web of life that makes our existence possible.

Perhaps that is why Crosby’s work and Pachamama Day seem connected to me.

Crosby taught that history cannot be understood without ecology. The Andean peoples never separated the two in the first place.

One explains how civilizations rose and fell. The other reminds us how to live.

As August 1 approaches, I think about the professor whose lectures made a great impression on me, the civilizations whose knowledge survived against overwhelming odds, and the simple wisdom embodied in a handful of food returned to the soil.

The Earth has always sustained us.

Perhaps it’s time we remembered to say thank you.

On the Ship, Sailing into NY Harbor

Chapter 116 My Mother and Audie Murphy

Seeing Liberty: What Does the Statue Symbolize?

In Sweden, afternoon coffee is a daily ritual, and my grandmother Gerda carried the tradition with her to America. We often joined her at her tiny house in Yakima and later at her apartment in a senior housing complex across from the Presbyterian church.

As Grandma arranged homemade butter cookies on her little table and poured coffee into delicate cups, she reminisced about sailing into New York Harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1905. She had been herded toward the line marked Aliens. The statue, rising above the harbor, filled her with emotion. Forty-four years later, after returning from a visit to Sweden, she saw it again. This time she joined the line marked American Citizens.

Flo on the deck of the USAT George Washington crossing the Atlantic

For Gerda, the Statue of Liberty symbolized America’s welcome to immigrants.

“I could only think, This time I’m a citizen,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

My mother, Flo, sailed into New York Harbor in 1946 as she returned from Europe after the war. For her, the statue carried different memories. It reminded her of enormous loss—her fiancé and many friends had been killed—but also of pride. She and her generation had fought fascism and prevailed.

“When I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought about all the people who died in that war,” Flo said. “The Americans were fighting for democracy.”

Ship dinner menu for March 25, 1946

Her face crumpled. A tear rolled down her cheek. Soon both my mother and grandmother were crying. To me, it seemed almost hysterical.

Flo loved history and liked to imagine the future.

“Maybe by the turn of the twenty-first century,” she sniffled, “war will be history.”

Lounging on deck. It took the Geo Washington about ten days to sail from France to NYC

Both women were unabashed patriots. Flo flew the American flag every Fourth of July, though by the early 1970s she had also become deeply troubled by America’s conduct in Vietnam. Gerda proudly displayed both the American flag and the blue-and-yellow Swedish flag in her home. She liked to say that she had voted in every election open to women since becoming a citizen.

I was not a flag waver. I was a flag burner—metaphorically. I never actually set fire to a flag, but my brother and I once cut up an American flag to sew a shirt. It was illegal then; today it might pass as a right-wing fashion statement. To me the flag represented a country whose foreign policy included overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and installing compliant dictators.

A musician entertains the crowd of GIs on deck

I had never seen my grandmother cry before, but I had often seen my mother cry, usually over war. During the Vietnam War she would call me in tears, saying her generation had failed to end war and now the responsibility belonged to mine. She carried the suffering of the world on her shoulders.

I vowed never to be like her. I wouldn’t cry. Crying was weakness—or so the culture taught me. Men didn’t cry, and men held the power. I wanted to be like them.

That afternoon, what struck me as sentimental nostalgia repelled me. I had never sailed into New York Harbor and never would. When I looked at the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t see freedom. I saw the thousands of Southeast Asians killed in a war my country was waging, the millions of tons of bombs dropped on civilians, villages burned, children scarred by napalm.

A finger points to the sign on shore reading “Welcome Home. Well Done.”

Years later, I began to wonder whether my mother’s extraordinary empathy exacted a physical toll. She was repeatedly hospitalized with severe asthma attacks. The disease eventually killed her at seventy.

Later still, I came to believe that Flo had probably returned from the war with what we now recognize as PTSD. The government had little interest in acknowledging psychological trauma, even among combat veterans, much less civilian war workers like my mother.

In NY harbor the Transportation Corps sign reads “Welcome Home.”

Like so many Boomers, I had grown up with a parent emotionally wounded by war.

At the time, though, I understood none of that.

All I felt was embarrassment at her tears.

The Statue of Liberty had meant hope to my grandmother, sacrifice to my mother, and hypocrisy to me. It took me a while to understand that all three meanings could be true at once.

Now, when I see the statue and read the Emma Lazarus poem, I’m the one who’s crying. I still cry for the people we kill in endless needless wars, for the immigrats we imprison, murder and deport, and I cry for our democracy and all that we have lost.

Photo by Tom Coe on Unsplash
The famous inscription mounted inside the statue

To start at the beginning of this story: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/11/04/my-mother-and-audie-murphy/

Chapter 117: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/08/02/catching-some-culture-in-nyc/

Crossed Off

Welcome to the Face Plant Club

I’m illustrating this essay with pictures of a hike this week across the Bodega Dunes to Bodega Head.  This is a unique ecosystem with cool native plants. Photo of me by Joe Tenn.

It was humiliating.

A friend texted and asked if she could come over to talk about the horse-packing trip we were planning. I assumed she wanted to discuss food, gear, or transportation. She had already added me to the group, and I was thrilled at the thought of getting back into the Sierra backcountry.

Instead, she came to ask me to withdraw.

She explained that she thought I represented a falling hazard. What if I fell and injured myself? What if the group had to call in a helicopter? I would ruin the trip, she said, and she would spend the entire week worrying about me.

Our native cobweb thistle with yellow sand verbena

I sat there stunned. I couldn’t believe this was how she saw me.

It couldn’t have been easy for her to come to my house and have this conversation. We aren’t close friends, but we’re neighbors who hike with the same club. She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She was trying to prevent what she imagined could become a disaster.

True, I’d taken a bad fall stepping onto my deck a couple of months earlier and injured my ankle. I blame thick-soled flip-flops. Years before, I’d tripped over a root and landed flat on my face during a hike. My companions shrugged it off. “Welcome to the face-plant club,” they said. “It happens to all of us.”

Since then I’ve become a much more careful hiker. I switched to two trekking poles. I stop before taking a picture or removing a jacket instead of trying to multitask. I’ve even taken classes on how to fall safely. Every setback has taught me something.

My friend asked what I was doing to recover from my ankle injury. Had I added balance exercises to my daily routine? Did I do squats? Stand on one foot while brushing my teeth?

As if, after living seventy-seven years, I had somehow never heard this advice.

The yellow bush lupine was in bloom. Looking across Bodega Bay at the town of Bodega.

The irony is that I walk really well. I hike several miles almost every day with different hiking groups. Sonoma County is filled with wonderful trails through state and county parks and protected open spaces, and I rarely miss a chance to explore them. The longest hike on this Sierra trip would have been seven miles—a distance I cover routinely.

What I can’t do anymore is backpack. After two back surgeries, I know I can’t carry a heavy pack for days. That’s why this horse-packing trip appealed to me so much. The horses would carry the gear, leaving me free to hike.

I told her I wasn’t ready to resign from the trip. I felt strong and capable.

Coast paintbrush

At first I was angry that she’d invited me and then, in effect, uninvited me. But as my anger faded, I began wondering how she had come to see me this way. As I write this, I realize I played a part in creating the image she has of me.

Among my hiking friends—especially the women my age—we talk openly about our health. Who’s taking Fosamax? Who opted for the Reclast infusion? (I did both). We compare bone scans, surgeries, aches, and physical therapy.

I’ve talked about my osteoporosis diagnosis and my back surgeries. At one point I joked, “It seems like my spine is crumbling.”

More recently, though, a bone-density scan upgraded me from severe osteoporosis to osteopenia. Had my doctor exaggerated my diagnosis to persuade me to take medication?

Perhaps I’d spent too much time talking about what was wrong with me and not enough time showing people everything that was still right.

Native beach aster and invasive ice plant. Volunteers are working at removing the ice plant.

The next day I texted my friend and withdrew.

What changed my mind wasn’t that I’d suddenly decided she was right. It was that I realized her anxiety would poison the trip for both of us. Even if I hiked every mile without incident, she’d spend the week worrying, and I’d spend it wondering whether every stumble or awkward step was confirming her fears.

That wouldn’t be much fun for either of us.

I’m deeply disappointed not to be going into the Sierra backcountry. More painful still is the realization that perhaps I’ll never get there again. Growing older means slowly crossing things off the list of what you can still do. Sometimes you choose to cross them off. Sometimes someone else does it for you.

Russian thistle with native bumble bee and yellow lupine

After I’d withdrawn, I wrote to her:

“I think what makes me saddest is that somehow I’ve made you think I’m an unsafe, incompetent hiker who is likely to ruin a trip. I don’t see myself that way, and I don’t think others do either. I only ask that you not promote that image of me to the other hikers. If you need an explanation for why I didn’t come, you can simply mention my ankle injury.”

She replied, “I’m feeling your sadness and feeling sad too. I appreciate your generosity in letting go. I do tend to be a worrier sometimes. Hard to say whether my worry or your optimism was more accurate.”

On the way back hiking up Salmon Creek Beach we encountered fishers.

I’ve thought a lot about what happened.

What we tell people about ourselves shapes how they see us. Repeated often enough, stories about our illnesses and injuries can become our identity in someone else’s mind.

There is a difference between acknowledging our limitations and allowing them to define us.

I don’t intend to pretend I’m younger than I am. My back has been operated on twice. My bones aren’t what they once were. I have fallen.

But I’m also someone who hikes almost every day, who loves being outdoors, and who still thinks of herself as capable.

Maybe the lesson isn’t to stop talking about my health.

Maybe it’s to make sure that’s not the only story I tell.

Lunch at Bodega Head with my hiking buddies. 7.3 miles out and back.

Going Home After 2 Years in Europe

Flo Boards the USAT George Washington at port of Le Havre

Chapter 115 My Mother and Audie Murphy

Flo and her cohort of Red Cross workers and G.I.s boarded the USAT George Washington at the port of Le Havre, France for the trip to New York. The ship was commissioned by the US Navy for troop transport in both the first and second world wars. 

Orders. Flo was hoping to accompany her friend Janet Tyson on the ship home but it appears they missed each other. Flo wanted to visit relatives in Sweden first.
Waiting to board the ship home
At the port of Le Havre where most US ships departed from
Lifeboat on the USAT George Washington
“Nissen huts at Le Havre”
Many flags. Photos by Flo Wick

An ocean liner built in 1908 for the Bremen-based North German Lloyd, at that time the George Washington was the largest German-built steamship and the third-largest ship in the world. Built to emphasize comfort over speed, she was sumptuously appointed in her first-class passenger areas and could carry a total of 2,900 passengers. Intended for Bremen to New York passenger service, the ship was named after the first president of the United States as a way to make the ship more appealing to immigrants, who then made up the majority of transatlantic passengers and believed formalities on arrival would be easier on a ship with an American name. After a fire, the ship was sold for scrap in 1951.

USAT George Washington. Photo: NavSource

Chapter 116: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/07/12/on-the-ship-and-sailing-into-ny-harbor/

Flo in Paris for One Last Visit

She saw topless dancers, fashion shows, museums

Chapter 114: Continuing the story of My Mother and Audie Murphy

On March 6, 1946, my mother, Florence Wick, received travel orders to go to Paris from Kassel Germany by rail for the purpose of returning to the U.S. She had been in Europe almost two years working as a Red Cross “donut girl.” She must have been delighted to be going home, and also to have the opportunity to visit Paris one last time. It would indeed be the last time she saw Paris.

Travel orders March 6, 1946

This is what as a child I remember Flo telling me about Paris. The fragrance on the overcrowded trams overwhelmed; people doused themselves with perfume to cover body odor. The public urinals were everywhere, except they were only for men. There was no place for women to relieve themselves. What were women supposed to do? she wondered.

One of the ubiquitous pissoirs. Photo: The Guardian

In the Louvre she got up close enough to the Mona Lisa to see that the painting was surprisingly small and covered with tiny cracks. She also said the only French most American soldiers learned was coucher avec moi, or “sleep with me”, probably asked as a question. But in general she was smitten with the romantic city.

She went to the Moulin Rouge and Tabarin where women danced bare-breasted. She visited famous museums. She saw fashion shows. And she recorded it all in her WWII album.  She included pages from LIFE magazine’s feature about post-war Paris.

Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany from June 14, 1940, until its liberation on August 25, 1944. The occupation was marked by strict regulations, food rationing, and significant hardships for the civilian population, including the persecution of Jews.

Despite the oppressive conditions, a network of resistance groups emerged, engaging in acts of defiance against the occupiers. The liberation of Paris began on August 19, 1944, with an uprising led by the French Resistance and the Communist Party, culminating in the city’s liberation by Allied forces on August 25, 1944. This marked a significant turning point in the war and the end of the Nazi regime’s control over the city. To read more, I recommend the book The Liberation of Paris by Jean Edward Smith.

It Belongs Also to Parisians: Photographs for LIFE by Edward Clark
Quoting from LIFE: “Paris, the grand courtesan of cities, is all things to all men, and this may be one reason why American soldiers and Parisians have been getting along so badly since World War II. The G.I. grew up in a generation when Paris to most Americans was a cheerful bawd: the Paris of Maxim‘s, the Ritz bar, the Moulin Rouge, the Scheherezade, and Boeuf sur le Toit, the Folies Bergéres, long-haired Montparnasse, feelthy pictures, the Quatz’ Arts Ball, and the Sphinx. To the young man who had seen this Paris in pictures who had read about it in Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, who had overheard wise conversations between his father and his uncle Tom, the Paris in which he found himself these last two winters was a grim and depressing disappointment. He found people who were cold, hungry, confused and tired–above all tired–who were too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining him, who, because they were proud and sensitive to the shame through which their country had passed, resented his slurs and his swagger. And the G.I., in turn, felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about? Where were the naked women?”

Paris was the capital of the fashion world. The industry started to come back to life in 1945 after the war. There was one fashion show but too little fabric. Then in 1946 the shows were bigger and better with a wider choice of fabrics. Flo attended several fashion shows and included stories about them in her album. It’s interesting to learn about the fashion industry scene right after the war. Paris was worried that it might move to the U.S. where it had moved during the German occupation.

Paris Makes Fashion Comeback

Quoting from LIFE magazine: “The haute couture of Paris, in a do or die bid for fashion leadership of the world, last month held its first complete fashion showings in seven years. During the fortnight in which the season reached its peak fashion, starved Parisians, important customers and a few foreign buyers were dashing to half a dozen shows a day from Lelong to Maggy Rouff to Rochas to the new wonder boys like Fath and Balmain. 

The showings brought back the elegance of years that seemed long past. There were champagne and delicacies and soft music. French princesses came as did the Duchess of Windsor and the King of Egypt’s sister. What they saw made the experts feel that Paris had successfully regained the world fashioned leadership, which had passed by default during the war to the U.S. An analysis of the portfolio of photographs by LIFE‘s Nina Leen, first to reach the U.S., shows that the general trend is away from the “woman-cut-in-two” look toward a better proportioned silhouette. The new clothes follow body contours. Daytime skirts are a little longer and less full. Jackets dip in back. Shoulders are more natural. In afternoon and evening dresses the deep-cut fronts and bared shoulders (“bathtub decolletages”) reveal almost as much bosom as Restoration fashions. Reversing itself, Paris this year showed more colors and patterns than solid blacks. The luxury and glitter of the Paris showings made a strange contrast with the arrival in Washington of Léon Blum to beg a $2 billion loan. But, actually, the fashion export business is a big item in France’s trade. Last week all Frenchmen hoped that the prodigal shows would pay off in orders from all over the world, especially the U.S.”

Corduroy: A lowly, rugged fabric is used in new and elegant Paris styles

From LIFE: “For the past hundred years corduroy has been the sturdy, dependable fabric for work clothes. From the farms of Missouri to the vineyards of France, farmer and peasant have chosen it for its warmth and ruggedness. Made of cotton with raised ridges, it is almost indestructible. Like the tread on a tire, the ridges, which are called wales, protect the basic fabric against wear and tear. In the early 20s U.S. college boys began to wear slacks of corduroy and later college girls adopted it for jackets and skirts. But it retained its lowly character. 

This spring the French haute couture took a good look at corduroy and discovered it offers more than wearability. It also has beauty. It has a velvetlike pile and good design possibilities in its ridges. Furthermore Cosserat et Cie., which since 1850 has been making all the corduroy in France, this year came out with bright new pinks, yellows and greens. As a result corduroy has now become a fabric for elegant Parisian clothes.”

Where the correspondents hung out

From the LIFE caption: The Scribe Hotel barroom is the headquarters and the hangout of correspondents in France. Here artist Floyd Davis found old acquaintances of the Time and LIFE European staff. At the table in center the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, broadcaster William Shirer, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. Every other day, the bar served brandy, and then the place was crowded with correspondents who drank the brandy, they insisted, just to keep warm. Correspondents rushed out to the front to get stories. Disheveled correspondents rushed back from the front to file their stories. At any time, reporters could be heard complaining about sensors, brass hats, editors.

Where the naked women were

From the Tabarin playbill saved by Flo

To start at the beginning Chapter One: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/11/04/my-mother-and-audie-murphy/

Chapter 115: https://mollymartin.blog/2026/07/07/going-home-after-2-years-in-europe/