This poem, written on a small slip of paper, fell out of Flo’s album, and I can’t be sure where she meant to place it. I believe she wrote it herself: she made a correction in the text, and I could find no reference to it anywhere else. The poem is addressed to a flyer, yet none of her Third Division friends–nor her fiancé–were flyers. So who was she writing to? I found one possible clue in a letter she wrote to her sister Ruth in August 1944:
“When I returned from Sorrento, Ruth, I found some tragic news awaiting me. A letter I had written Johnny on July 19 was returned to me and on the envelope in red ink was written “accidentally killed in training flight July 15, 1944 near NY.” I simply can’t believe he is dead – he was so alive and so anxious to get over here and do his part. He had had nothing but bad luck since getting into the air Corps. His last letter told me he was just recuperating from pneumonia – common due to flying in sub zero altitudes. It is easier to “take” over here than it would have been at home because you develop a different philosophy, but it is hard nevertheless. His poor mother – both sons killed in airplanes!”
The poem implies that Johnny was more than just a friend. But Flo never told me about him and I can find no other reference to him in her papers. The poem must have been enclosed in her returned letter.
3rd Division souvenir paper tells history of the division
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 100
Don’t throw this away! admonishes the Front Line newspaper of their post-war special edition. Flo didn’t throw it away. She saved it and tucked it into her album. The issue consists entirely of stories which appeared in the big and little dailies of the nation about the Third Division.
From the introduction: “During the rush of battle few men were able to get a hold of a newspaper published in the states, much less take time to read it thoroughly….Hence, this special edition.
“We hope you hang on to your copy as the supply is limited to one per man. If you want to send it home, go ahead. All the material in it was censored by Sixth Army Group censors before it could appear in the home town papers.”
The Front Line is the official newspaper of the Third Infantry Division. In the interest of archiving, I’m posting the whole six-page paper. You can read it by pinching out the image.
Gen. Schmidt’s New Year’s party celebrates Third Division
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 99
The card shows the route of the 3rd Division from Africa to GermanyThird Infantry Division New Year’s partyFlo captioned this “Blackmail material”Flo didn’t ID these guysGeneral Schmidt hosted the party Christmas ‘C’ company 30th Infantry
While they were in Berlin for the football game between the Third Division and the 82nd Airborne, Flo and her comrades were invited to a party hosted by the 504th Parachute Regiment. To celebrate Armistice Day in occupied Berlin must have been especially poignant so soon after the end of this second world war.
Flo saved the wine list which listed no wine, but more cocktails than I knew existed. I recognize a few—Manhattan, Martini, Gin Fizz—but not most. I wonder if modern bartenders are still making any of these drinks. The list notes that champagne and beer are available, but there is no mention of wine, at least on this page. Maybe Americans were just not partial to wine in the year 1945.
By the end of World War II, Berlin was no longer a city so much as a vast field of ruins. After enduring 363 air raids and a final, catastrophic ground assault, the German capital lay shattered—famously described by its own residents as a heap of rubble. Street by street, block by block, the urban fabric had been torn apart, leaving behind a landscape of collapsed buildings, twisted steel, and drifting ash.
Flo at the Brandenburg Gate, built in 1791. It would soon be incorporated into the Berlin Wall, dividing the city into East and West sectors during the Cold War.
Nearly 80 percent of Berlin’s city center had been destroyed. Across the wider metropolis, some 600,000 apartments were reduced to dust and broken brick. Infrastructure collapsed alongside homes: in the final days of fighting, 128 of the city’s 226 bridges were blown apart, a quarter of the subway system was deliberately flooded, and running water, electricity, and rail transport virtually ceased to function. Iconic landmarks suffered the same fate as ordinary neighborhoods. The Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate were battered by artillery and close-quarters combat, while along the grand boulevard Unter den Linden, only 16 of its 64 buildings remained standing.
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the city center
The human cost was staggering. Civilian deaths from bombing raids alone are estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000. During the final Battle of Berlin, another 125,000 civilians are believed to have died amid the chaos of street fighting, shelling, and firestorms. At least 450,000 people were left homeless, and the city’s population collapsed from 4.3 million in 1939 to just 2.8 million by the war’s end—a mass exodus of refugees, evacuees, and the dead.
All photos from Flo’s album
Unlike many cities that later erased the physical traces of war, Berlin chose to preserve parts of its devastation as visible memory. Bullet holes and shrapnel scars still mark walls in districts like Mitte and Charlottenburg. The shattered spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands deliberately unrepaired, a permanent anti-war monument rising from the city center. Elsewhere, mountains of rubble were piled into artificial hills—Teufelsberg and Volkspark Humboldthain—turning the wreckage of war into silent landmarks.
Some monuments survived
These images of destruction are not only records of ruin. They are reminders of the scale of collapse, the human suffering beneath the debris, and the deliberate choice to remember, rather than forget, what war reduced Berlin to in 1945.
The grand boulevard of Unter den LindenThe Berlin CathedralMajor Dan Wickersham in the US zone
By command of Gen. Schmidt permission to attend a football game in BerlinLove the car. Mary McAuliffe, ARC; Gen. Schmidt; Flo WickHaving a little snack before taking off. Flo and MaryNo fair getting photographed while eating!Mary McAuliffe, Major Wickersham, Lt. Col. RamseyGen. Schmidt saw them off.The Third Division played the 82nd Airborne at Hitler’s Olympic stadium Nov. 11, 1945.The brass section Attention! The gigantic stadium, built for the 1936 Olympics, survived the bombings.
Heated Rivalry has got me thinking about the gym among other things
Watching Heated Rivalry, a series about gay hockey players, stirred up memories of my own athletic life. I competed in the Olympics too—the Gay Olympics. Well, we couldn’t call them that after we lost the right to the name in court, so they became the Gay Games. Alliterative. Less grand. Same spirit.
Me and my team of lesbian power lifters, Gay Games 1982
At the Gay Games in different years, I was a powerlifter, a wrestler, and a rower. But more than that, I was part of something new. The Gay Games didn’t just raise the aspirations of queer athletes; they lifted up women’s sports in ways the mainstream world hadn’t yet imagined. Women had never competed in powerlifting at the Olympics before women competed in the Gay Games. When my small crew of gym-going lesbians formed a team to compete in the first Gay Games in 1982, we were pioneers. Women’s powerlifting wouldn’t enter the official Olympics until 2000, at the Sydney Games. We were nearly two decades ahead of the curve. Of course it was us lesbians.
Teammates watch my dead lift 1982 Gay Games
My journey into weightlifting began in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, when I was working construction and needed to get stronger. I don’t remember exactly how the idea came to me—women simply didn’t lift weights back then—but I started going to the gym with my friend Jill for moral support. At first, we trained at the Sports Palace in the Mission, which had been an all-men gym. They didn’t even have a women’s changing room or bathroom. The owner tacked up a sheet of plywood in the corner so we could change behind it.
The squat, Gay Games NYC 1994
The men didn’t exactly welcome us. They didn’t like the sound of women’s voices, or having to share equipment, or having us “work in” on their sets and move their heavy weights. So when Betty Doza opened the Women’s Gym in 1979, in a storefront next to the Swedish American Hall on Market Street, I crossed over immediately.
Bench press Gay Games NYC 1994
The Women’s Gym had shiny new machines upstairs, but the real action was in the basement where the serious lifters gathered. Until then, I had only learned the three Olympic power lifts—bench press, squat, and deadlift—because those were the only lifts women were officially allowed to compete in. But downstairs, women were doing the clean and jerk and the snatch. These were lifts we’d been banned from performing, so we taught each other proper form. Coaching was essential. Done wrong, those lifts could seriously injure you. It felt like sneaking gin in a Prohibition-era speakeasy—dangerous, forbidden, intoxicating.
Dead lift Gay Games NYC 1994. I had changed to a wide stance.
The Women’s Gym became a training ground for women who wanted to be firefighters, cops, and competitive athletes. There are two very different branches of weightlifting: bodybuilding and powerlifting. Bodybuilding is about appearance—sculpted, ripped muscles, thinness, aesthetics. Powerlifting is about strength: how much weight you can move in three lifts. You can be fat and be a powerlifter. That distinction mattered.
I competed in the 148-pound class, usually weighing about 144, and spent my time trying to gain weight. Every pound meant more leverage, more power. While other women obsessed over dieting, I complained that I couldn’t put weight on. They thought I was strange.
My rowing team, the Bay Blades, had some cute men too.
After workouts, we crossed Market Street to Leticia’s, a gay Mexican restaurant, for margaritas and nachos. We were strong, and we knew it. We were powerful. We were a team. There were about ten of us training together for the 1982 Gay Games in San Francisco. I’ve forgotten most of their names now, but I remember the feeling: solidarity, purpose, pride.
The 1982 Gay Games may have been among the first major powerlifting competitions for women anywhere. That year marked the beginning of what would become an international movement. We didn’t really care about medals—we were just thrilled to compete, to exist publicly as strong queer women. But I did come home with gold, besting a woman from the Netherlands.
Twelve years later, in 1994, I competed again as a powerlifter at the Gay Games in New York City. I was lifting more than I had in ’82, but the field had changed completely. The women I competed against were world-class athletes, capable of lifting three times my best numbers. Women’s powerlifting had exploded!
In Amsterdam the Dutch rowers greeted us in navy caps and with champagne. Nancy Stoller (L) and me with some of our hosts. 1998
The Women’s Gym didn’t survive. Men sued, claiming discrimination, and eventually won. But for a few glorious years, it was a sanctuary—a place where women could build strength, community, and defiance. The Gay Games and the Women’s Gym together cracked open a door that could never again be closed.
We weren’t just training our bodies. We were reshaping what women, and especially queer women, were allowed to be.
In the top picture, marching into the stadium are Nancy Stoller (L) and Helen Vozenilek of the Bay Blades rowing team. Amsterdam 1998.
James Cagney plays the unlikely role of talent scout in 1945 when a photograph on the cover of Life magazine stops him cold: Audie Murphy, the boyish Texan just discharged from the Army and celebrated as the most decorated American soldier of World War II. Impressed by Murphy’s heroism and screen presence, Cagney invites him to Los Angeles and signs him to his production company, determined to help turn a war hero into a movie star.
This is the photo Flo took of Audie Murphy when he was awarded the Silver Star in the field in 1945. Picked up by Wide World Photos without attribution.
Cagney pays for Murphy’s acting, voice, and dance lessons and offers guidance during his first years in Hollywood. But despite the investment and publicity, the arrangement fails to deliver actual film roles. The problem is not personal between Cagney and Murphy, but business. In 1947, a contractual dispute and personal friction with Cagney’s brother and producing partner, William, brings the deal to a quiet end.
The collapse of the Cagney contract leaves Murphy stranded—broke, living on his military pension, sleeping in a gym, and carrying the unspoken weight of wartime trauma. Yet the door Cagney had opened does not fully close. Forced to make his own way, Murphy rebuilds his career from scratch and ultimately appears in more than forty films, mostly Westerns, forging a hard-won Hollywood life that echos the endurance that had first drawn Cagney’s attention.
The agreementmarked a territorial change in the occupied zones
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 93
The meeting took place at the Russian and American liaison headquarters in Wanfried.
Flo attended the historic Russian–American conference in Wanfried, Germany, where the Wanfried Agreement was signed on September 17, 1945. The agreement was a post–World War II territorial exchange between U.S. and Soviet occupation authorities, finalized in English and Russian, to resolve a logistical problem along the Bebra–Göttingen railway. A roughly 2.7-mile stretch of this crucial rail line briefly crossed into the Soviet zone near Wanfried, disrupting traffic vital to U.S. connections between southern Germany and the American-controlled port of Bremerhaven. To secure uninterrupted U.S. control of the line, two villages in Soviet-occupied Thuringia were exchanged for five villages in American-occupied Hesse. The agreement, informally known as the “Whisky-Vodka Line,” stands out as a rare, peaceful, and highly localized negotiation between the two superpowers in the tense early months of the occupation.
Figuring out the new borders between occupations zonesFlo’s head sticks out on the left. It looks like there was one other female at the table. At least one participant wore a gun to lunch.Flo sitting next to Russian regimental CO. Col. Michael Paschchenko. Flo told me she had a big crush on this handsome guy but neither spoke the other’s language.Agreement signed! Russian general and Gen. Sexton toast.
tradeswomn musings 