On Monday morning April 17, 1944 the three women from Washington state reported for training at the American University campus. They checked into a large classroom full of milling women and immediately lost track of each other. In the din Flo could hear accents from all over the country, and as she met and talked with the recruits, she was impressed by their high level of education and abilities.
At graduation, Flo was photographed with her Washington State counterparts–the Suksdorf twins and a woman from Seattle, Josephine Ryan. Flo at right.
That first day was mostly filled with speeches from ARC directors, none particularly memorable. Then, the trainees fell into a routine: up at 6am, lectures and exams starting at 8am.
One instructor they dubbed Theda Bara. She was a thin older woman, hair drawn severely back from her face, who had served in France during “the last show” as she called the Great War. She warned of the pitfalls and perils women face in situations where they are sometimes outnumbered by men 100 to 1.
The women were admonished to date only officers and to “be careful not to let your heads be turned by all the attention.”
“As ARC staff assistants you are considered officers if captured, the equivalent of second lieutenants, and you are covered by the international rules of war,” she told them.
The women were allowed extra time to shop and they needed it. They hadn’t realized there was so much shopping involved–at their own expense. They were given one set of summer and winter Class A uniforms (dresses and skirts only; no pants), which they would need to have fitted. Flo was also issued a trench coat type raincoat, and a heavy topcoat with removable red lining. The Red Cross paid for the uniforms, but the women had to pay for a long list of required clothes and equipment. The list specified exactly how many white blouses, socks, cotton underpants, girdles, and cotton gloves they would need, plus odd items like canteen, web belt, musette bag (a shoulder bag, like a purse), boots, duffle bag and foot locker, leaving them to scurry all over town to track down every item on the list.
In her new uniform with “uncle” Alf
Once she had been fitted for her new uniforms, Flo paid a visit to “Uncle” Alf. The Wick family’s dear old friend, Alfred May, lived in Washington and Flo had telegrammed him of her arrival. She hadn’t seen her gay “uncle” since he had visited the family in 1929 when her father was still alive. Uncle Alf had been her father Ben’s partner in the family chicken farm business in Oregon and he was a presence in the four daughters’ lives until the business went bust and he joined the Navy in WWI. Alf, the son of a costume making English family–whose clients it was said had included the Queen–had dressed the girls and himself in Shakespearean outfits and produced plays. Flo had made a quite passable Hamlet. Alf was still living with the family who had taken him in, though he had retired from his job at the Naval Academy. Flo and Alf were photographed together in front of Alf’s apartment.
Back at the training school, a teacher admonished the women. “Once you get orders you’re incommunicado until you reach your destination, which might take as long as two months.”
On the packed trains from Yakima to Chicago and Chicago to D.C. were many others traveling to war. It seemed to Flo like the whole country was traveling east. Many on the train were wives of servicemen. Some fellow travelers were American Red Cross workers. Two sisters, identical twins, got on at Spokane on Washington’s far eastern border. Louise and Lucine Suksdorf grew up in the tiny Eastern Washington town of Rosalia. They were heading to D.C. and the ARC training school as well, and the women bonded immediately.
Flo was no rube. She had taken the train cross-country to YWCA meetings in Columbus, Chicago and Minneapolis, and she’d visited New York City in 1941. She had disembarked at Grand Central Station, the biggest train station in the country, but that was before the U.S. had entered the war. Nothing prepared her for Washington’s Union Station in April 1944, ground zero in war-related transport.
Stepping down from the train, the women found themselves in what felt like an anthill. The Beaux Arts vaulted ceiling arches of the station lent a turn-of-the-century air to the scene of rushing bodies down on its marble floors. They were just three of thousands (millions?) of people milling in all directions. The station itself was alive with frantic activity, its denizens dressed mostly in khaki uniforms. Soon, Flo would be one of them, shipping out to some unknown theater of war, somewhere in the world.
Washington, D.C. Interior view of the Union Station with Office of War Information (OWI) poster in the background reading Americans will always fight for liberty. Gordon Parks, 1912-2006, photographer. Library of Congress
The women had heard that the presidential suite in Union Station had been converted to a USO club during the war. They had to see it. Explaining at the door that they were about to enter service as ARC workers, they were ushered into the suite, admiring the opulent decorations. Service members in uniform lounged on leather-covered chairs and couches. They played cards and chatted at tables. This would not be Flo’s last encounter with the USO. She would work with the USO during her ARC service and she would later direct her own USO club back in Yakima after the war.
The Suksdorf sisters had received the same ARC letter as Flo and they would be staying at the same place while they went through the two-week training for overseas service workers. The Burlington Hotel was on 14th NW in downtown Washington, near the American University where they would attend training classes. The women succeeded in catching a cab to their destination, which was only a few blocks from the White House.
The women knew not where in the world they would be sent to work, but they kept close track of the war, raging in countries around the world. In April, 1944, in Europe and the Pacific, the war heated up. Bombs were dropped on cities; on April 18, the Allies dropped more than 4000 tons of bombs over Germany, the highest single-day total of the war so far. Submarines, liberty ships and destroyers were torpedoed and sunk, British and Indian forces fought against a Japanese offensive, Japan launched a series of battles against China, and Soviet forces invaded Romania. Hungarian authorities ordered all Jews to wear the yellow star. On the Italian front, the bloody battle for Anzio advanced.
October 1943. Murphy lands at Salerno during the Allied invasion of the mainland.
Clip from a Life Magazine story pasted in Flo’s WWII album
Italy has surrendered, and the road to Rome appears deceptively simple. Yet, the journey is anything but straightforward. Many thousands of lives will be lost on the road to the Eternal City.
“We land with undue optimism on the Italian mainland near Salerno. The beachhead, bought dearly with the blood and guts of the men who preceded us, is secure….We are prepared for a quick dash to Rome,” wrote Murphy in his autobiography, To Hell and Back.
This was far too optimistic. The Third Division will be fighting and dying on the Italian beaches and mainland until May, 1944.
The troops of the Third Division must first push through Salerno, cross the Volturno River, and take Anzio, Mignano, Cassino, and Cisterna before they can approach Rome.
Audie Murphy leads a small, diverse squad of men. Among them are an Italian immigrant, a Cherokee Indian manning the machine gun, an Irishman, a Pole, a Swede, and a Smoky Mountain bootlegger.
Members of Murphy’s squad begin to fall almost immediately. One soldier hesitates under heavy Nazi fire as he runs for a bridge and is cut down. The squad carries his body to the highway where it can be easily found.
“In death, he still bears the look of innocent wonder. He could not have lived long after tumbling. The bullet ripped an artery in his throat,” wrote Murphy.
Another fighter takes out a German machine gun nest and a foxhole with grenades, killing five Germans.
From Flo’s WWII album
The small victory is short-lived.
Later, the five remaining men find themselves trapped in a cave, surrounded by the enemy. The cave is infested with fleas, and the men are bitten mercilessly as they wait, parched and desperate.
We come to know and care for the men in Murphy’s squad, only to witness their deaths or injuries that force them out of the fight. Murphy becomes the last man standing at the end.
“All my life I wait to come to Italy,” says the Italian soldier. “I write my old man that the country stinks. Wait till you get to Rome, he says. Wait’ll you see your grandfather’s place. Then you’ll see the real Italy.”
The Italian never makes it to Rome. After three days without water, he breaks under the strain, running out of the cave only to be hit and killed by enemy fire. “He has come home to the soil that gave his parents birth,” wrote Murphy.
Finally, American troops break through the German lines and rescue the remaining men. Relief arrives with rations, water, and ammunition.
The next morning, they cross the Volturno River and join the push toward their next major objective: the communications center at Mignano.
Quotes are from Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back.
March 31, 1944 began as a black day in Yakima. Farmers had lit smudge pots in the orchards during the night to protect delicate buds from frost. The fuel, which included old tires, diesel oil and whatever could be found to burn, had left a black oily residue on the landscape. The white horse in the field down the street was now charcoal black. And the polluted air had seeped inside houses, coating everything.
The local Yakima paper kept track of citizens in the war. From Flo’s album.
When Flo awoke and blew her nose, the snot was black. Still, for her the day was a happy one. In two weeks she would be in Washington D.C. starting a new job as an American Red Cross (ARC) staff assistant. Today she would tell her boss that next week would be her last. She would give herself a week to get to D.C., taking the train to Chicago and staying overnight there. It would be the start of an exciting adventure and she could hardly wait to get started.
The ARC telegram that had come the day before said she would receive a letter with more details. She would have to send some telegrams herself to let friends and relatives know this good news. Her best friend, Molly, now working in Seattle, would need to know. And so would her sister Eve, stationed as a U.S. Army nurse at a hospital in Burford, England.
At work, the engineers were full of congratulations and good wishes. For them it was nothing new. Employers all over the country were having to deal with workers leaving for the war, either as draftees or volunteers. The U.S. had already been at war for more than two years, since Japan bombed Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. The Europeans had been at war since September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
A page in Flo’s WWII album
In January, 1944 the Third Infantry Division had landed at Anzio, Italy and the campaign had become a stalemate, costing heavy losses on both sides. The Allies would not rout the Nazis there until May.
Flo agreed to finish out the next week to train her stenographer replacement, and she was happy to have one more week’s pay, but now that she knew she was leaving, she couldn’t wait to be finished with the Washington State Highway Department. It had been a fine place to work for more than a decade, but she was ready for new challenges. And she would have many.
When she got home that evening, her sister Betty ran from the house waving an envelope.
Flo, still in her coat, opened the envelope carefully, thinking she would save the letter for a future scrapbook. Her life was about to change and she wanted to remember this moment.
The letter was headed American Red Cross, Pacific Area, Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California. It read:
“Dear Miss Wick:
This is to confirm our wire of yesterday offering you the position of Staff Assistant overseas.”
The “salary of $150 per month and maintenance” would be effective the day she was to report for training, April 17, 1944.
“You are scheduled to report for training at National Headquarters, Washington, D.C., on Monday morning, April 17th. After a period of training and probation you will be assigned, as needs require, somewhere abroad. The location cannot be determined in advance. However, the Red Cross reserves the right either to release or transfer to domestic duties any person who, during training period, fails to meet the Red Cross or Army requirements for overseas duty.”
“Expenses of travel and maintenance in connection with the training program in Washington will be assumed by the Red Cross. A check will be issued sufficient to cover these expenses and will reach you shortly before the date scheduled for your departure. You should take immediate steps toward securing train reservations, using the enclosed tax exemption slips, which will place you in Washington on the morning of April 17th. You should purchase a one-way ticket from Yakima to Washington, D.C., making intermediate accommodations to Chicago, and first class from Chicago to Washington.”
It was signed by (Miss) Esther Bristol, Assistant to the Director. The letter came with a list of “articles prepared by National Headquarters for the guidance of employees planning on entering foreign service.” The list of items included everything the ARC thought a woman would need for a year abroad, such as four girdles(!), sanitary napkins, and panties.
Flo resolved to do whatever was necessary to carry out her job to the best of her ability. She would respond by collect wire as instructed and then she would be officially in the Red Cross.
Their mother, Gerda, was in the kitchen cooking dinner for her daughters and their two boarders, female students at the community college.
She promised her daughter that she would write, and keep her supplied with homemade Swedish cookies.
They nicknamed him Baby and he couldn’t shed the tag. Audie Murphy had to fight for his place in combat. From the beginning of his military journey, he faced skepticism at every turn. Rejected by the Marines and paratroops, he was finally accepted by the infantry.
Battle route of the Third Infantry Division
Immediately his first commanding officer tried to shove him into a cook and baker’s school where the going would be less rough.
“That was the supreme humiliation. To reach for the stars and end up stirring a pot of C-rations. I would not do it. I swore that I would take the guardhouse first. My stubborn attitude paid off. I was allowed to keep my combat classification; and the Army was spared the disaster of having another fourth-class cook in its ranks,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In training, officers took one look at his skinny body and boyish face and tried to steer Murphy away from the front lines. At Fort Meade, one well-meaning officer attempted to save him from combat altogether by assigning him a clerical position at the post exchange. Again he stuck to his guns.
In July, 1943 he made it to the front in Sicily, but his youth and appearance worked against him even there. He was transferred to headquarters to serve as a runner. But Murphy wouldn’t stay away from the action. He repeatedly sneaked off on patrols and scouting missions. His determination eventually forced his commander’s hand. He was promoted to corporal.
Life Magazine photo essay posted in Flo’s album
By then, Murphy had already missed his chance to fight in North Africa. His convoy had docked in Casablanca only after the battles were over. Instead of combat, he endured more training—much to his frustration. “I just wanted to fight,” he later said.
Murphy finally got his chance in Sicily, but it was far from the glory he had imagined as a boy.
On his first day in combat, a mortar attack killed a young soldier sitting nearby. A boom, a whistle, the earth shakes, and the boy falls from the rock where he was sitting, just taking a break. As simple as that. One minute you’re sitting on a rock. The next minute you’re dead.
This was not the war Murphy had dreamed of. He had imagined men charging gallantly across flaming hills. Bugles blew, banners streamed, and the temperature was mild. Enemy bullets always miraculously missed, and his trusty rifle always hit home. As a kid, the dream was his escape from a grimly realistic world of poverty.
But now, as he trudged across the Sicilian battlefield, sweat soaking his uniform, his boyhood fantasies were shattered.
“Maybe my notions about war are all cockeyed. How do you pit skill against skill if you cannot even see the enemy? Where is the glamour in blistered feet and a growling stomach? And where is the expected adventure? Well, whatever comes, it was my own idea. I had always wanted to be a soldier,” he wrote.
His skill with a rifle, however, did not go unnoticed. In one skirmish, Murphy shot two German officers from their horses with two clean shots. He had shed his first blood. But he felt nothing except a weary indifference.
Even as malaria struck and forced him into a field hospital for a week, Murphy returned to the lines. The disease would haunt him throughout the war, but it didn’t stop him.
He had loved the idea of war, but it didn’t take long to hate the real thing.
“The Sicilian campaign has taken the vinegar out of my spirit. I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it. But I will go on fighting,” he wrote.
*Quotes are from Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back
The winter of 1943-44 had been mild in Yakima with less than the usual snow. On March 30, some fruit trees already bloomed in the orchards of the Yakima Valley, but frost warnings loomed and could result in a smudge night with fires lit in the orchards to keep the buds from freezing. It was a Thursday and tomorrow would mark the last day of Flo’s workweek at the Washington State Highway Department where she had been a stenographer for 13 years.
“You got a telegram!” sang her sister Betty as Flo pulled the car into the family driveway.
Flo had been anticipating this telegram, eagerly awaiting news on her application to the American Red Cross (ARC) overseas program. She opened it carefully.
It read:
APPLICATION OVERSEAS STAFF ASSISTANT ACCEPTED. EMPLOYMENT CONTINGENT UPON RECEIPT AVAILABILITY CERTIFICATE. FORWARD TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED WASHINGTON TRAINING MONDAY APRIL 17TH. LETTER FOLLOWS=
ESTHER BRISTOL.==
Throwing her purse and coat on a chair in the entryway, Flo ran to the kitchen to show their mother, Gerda.
Flo had signed up for the ARC program as soon as she’d heard about it. She badly wanted to be in Europe where her sister Eve was already working as an Army nurse. Eve had written that when their troop ship had docked in Guroch, Scotland on January 7, they were met by a clubmobile with ARC women handing out donuts and coffee.
The ARC had rolled out the clubmobile model in England in 1942 with repurposed buses modified as mobile canteens and now the program was to be expanded into the European theater of the war. The clubmobile “donut girls” were envisioned as one element that would keep American soldiers willing to fight and die on foreign soil.
In February 1944, a Life magazine article had described the ARC women as “handpicked for looks, education, personality and experience in recreational fields. They are hardy physically and have a sociable, friendly manner.” The qualifications included a high level of education, being between 25 and 35 years old, an upbeat attitude, social skills, and good health. The women were chosen for their attractiveness, embodying the wholesome, well-scrubbed appearance of the girl next door. Nearly all were unmarried. Flo had immediately pictured herself among them.
Handing out donuts from the Life Magazine story
Flo and her youngest sister Betty still lived at home, contributing their earnings to the family kitty. Gerda had found work at a fruit processing plant, and they had taken in boarders to make ends meet since their father, Ben, had died five years earlier. Times had been tough, but their finances had stabilized, and the ARC job paid $150 a month. Flo could send most of her paycheck back home.
Flo wondered what her father would have said, although she thought she knew the answer. Her father would have been proud of her decision to do her part for the war effort. He was a Norwegian immigrant, and a patriotic American.
To apply for the job of ARC overseas Staff Assistant, women were required to have at least two years of college education. White skin was an unwritten modifier, although there were some Black women recruited to work with segregated Black troops. Flo was 30 in 1944. She met the minimum qualifications except for the college education part. But Flo had mastered a skill that she would use throughout her life. She knew how to write a convincing letter. She was sure that she could show the ARC that she was just as qualified as any college educated woman.
The application process had been rigorous. Besides a written application, Flo included reference letters from her employers, the Presbyterian minister, and members of the Business Professional and YWCA groups where she was active. She passed a medical fitness exam and traveled to Seattle for an in-person interview.
Pasted in Flo’s album from the Life Magazine story
Flo understood that the college requirement was based on class. The ARC aimed to hire middle or upper-class “girls.” In her application letter, Flo emphasized her middle-class status, morality, and responsibility as a church-going citizen. During the interview, she felt they had been impressed.
Other opportunities existed for women to become involved in the war, but most were situated in the U.S. You could volunteer to roll bandages, but for that you received no pay, so those who volunteered tended to be women of means or women supported by husbands. You could join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAC), which did pay a salary about the same as the ARC. But WAC was not well thought of only because many people did not believe women should be involved in war, or even serve close to it. Few WACs were sent overseas, mostly performing office work to free men for combat roles.
The ARC flew under the radar because, even though the jobs were paid, the women were referred to as “girls” and “volunteers.” And the ARC was associated with nursing, which incited no prejudice. It was ok for women to take care of wounded soldiers as long as they weren’t allowed to fire the guns. As it turned out, the ARC women would be the first American women to fire guns in combat and Flo would be among them.
Flo knew she could be sent anywhere the war raged: the Pacific, England, North Africa, even India. She hoped for Europe where most of the fighting was. She had always dreamed of traveling to Europe. But she resolved to accept with enthusiasm whatever her assignment turned out to be.
The photo album that my mother, Flo Wick, shared with Audie Murphy when they reconnected in 1955 is massive. The scrapbook is filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and travel paraphernalia and it tells the story of Mom’s two years as an American Red Cross (ARC) “donut girl” in Europe during World War II.
It also tells the story of the Third Infantry Division, the only American division that fought the Nazis on every front—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. “The Fightin’ Third” had more casualties—nearly 35,000—than any other division, and it holds the record for high combat citations.
Throughout our childhoods my brothers and I pulled out the album, looked through it, and listened to our mother’s war stories. We kids especially liked the sketches by Flo’s comrade Liz Elliott of the everyday lives of the “donut gals.”
When my mother died in 1983 at the age of 70, I claimed the album and it’s been stored in garages and closets ever since, occasionally brought out for perusal by relatives or friends with an interest in World War II. For a time, it lived in a mold-infected storage room and so it was infected along with other archives. I exposed each page to sunlight in an effort to reduce the mold and that helped, but when I really wanted to examine the book, I donned a respirator to avoid breathing in clouds of invisible mold spores.
Mom was a scrapbook maker and for that I am now grateful as I try to piece together the events of her life during the war. Perhaps she had the idea for the album even before she sailed to Europe on a hospital ship in May 1944. I do know that the act of putting it together when she returned home after the war in 1946 salved her sadness at the deaths of so many and helped her readjust to life stateside where it seemed Americans had moved on and no longer wanted to think or talk about the war.
Recently I went through the album page by page, photographing all. That’s when I discovered that Flo had had a friendship with Audie Murphy that began somewhere in France when she served him donuts and continued after the war.
This story follows two narratives: one chronicles Flo Wick and the other chronicles Audie Murphy. They were both attached to the Third Division but mostly in different parts of the North African and European theaters. Their paths intersect in the Vosges mountains of France and as the Third pushed its way into Germany. For Audie’s tale I’m referencing his autobiography To Hell and Back, as well as letters and artifacts saved in Flo’s album.
A Little Background
She came of age during the Depression
Born in 1913, Florence Wick had graduated high school at 16 after being allowed to skip ahead a grade. Her class graduated in 1929½. Flo was excited about the prospect of going to college. She planned to enroll at the state college, but the Great Depression intervened. Instead, she completed a secretarial course at a trade school. At 17 she started working to help support her family. In 1931 she found a job as a stenographer for the Washington State Department of Highways.
Flo (R) at the Highway Dept.
By the time she learned about the ARC program, Flo had been working full time at that job for more than a decade. No doubt she was ready to do something else—maybe anything else. This seemed like an opportunity to travel outside of Washington State and to see other places in the world. And she was anxious to help the war effort.
He always wanted to be a soldier
Flo’s photo of Audie 1945
Even as a little boy Audie Murphy had wanted to be a soldier. His share cropper father abandoned his mother and their children leaving the family destitute. Then, when he was 16, his mother died. Born in 1925, the seventh of twelve kids, Audie tried to provide for the others, dropping out of school in fifth grade to pick cotton for a dollar a day. But he knew he had to get out of Farmersville, Texas. He tried to join the paratroopers and the Marines, but was told he was too short at five feet five. The Army took him and trained him to be a soldier. The baby-faced kid earned the nickname Baby. He was already a good shot, having fed the family with wild game. He couldn’t wait to shoot the enemy.
Murphy was assigned to the Third Division, then part of the Third Army under the command of General George Patton. He joined them in Sicily in 1943, on the way from Morocco and North Africa. They would fight their way through Italy and France into Germany. Murphy would be one of a very few of his company left standing and would become the most decorated American soldier of the war.
“When are we going to get some more donuts?” asked Audie Murphy of the photographer after he received the highest of all military honors, the Congressional Medal of Honor, in the field in Salzburg, Germany.
Flo’s photo of Audie Murphy receiving the Congessional Medal of Honor
It was 1945 and the photographer was my mother, Florence Wick. She had been serving as a Red Cross “donut girl” with the Third Infantry Division in the Europe. She had met Murphy and served him donuts somewhere in France.
That photograph was the only one taken of Murphy at the awards ceremony and it was published worldwide and used to recreate the scene for the movie of his life story, “To Hell and Back.”
1955 Flo and Audie reconnected on the movie set of To Hell and Back. Photo by Rollie Lane. The photo at top is the one taken by Flo at the awards ceremony in Salzburg in 1945.
The most decorated soldier of WWII, Audie would cross paths with Flo again ten years later when he came to our hometown of Yakima, Washington to film the movie. There at the Yakima Firing Center the two of them looked through the scrapbook Flo had compiled of her adventures and heartbreaks in the European theater.
Now I have that scrapbook. It’s gigantic and weighs 25 pounds. I have wanted to use its contents to tell my mother’s story, but the project is overwhelming. Maybe I can start with Audie.
Audie Murphy was known worldwide after the war. He had a huge fan club and maybe still does (he died in 1971). One of his fans recently got in touch with me and asked if I could supply more stories and pictures. Yes! Flo stayed in touch with Audie. She corresponded with his biographer, his associates and those putting together a memorial in Texas. She saved mementos and newspaper clippings.
As for her photo that became famous, she gave it freely and others took credit. A post-war letter she saved warns that others are charging for the use of her photo. She never received credit.
Group photo at the 1937 conference. Is that Eddie leaning against Flo (center)
Lately I’ve been walking around with my head in the 1930s.
I’ve been thinking about my mother and what her life was like as a young person. Mom was born in 1913 and graduated high school in 1929. She came of age in the 1930s. Born in 1949, I came of age in the 1960s. They were two very different worlds.
I thought I’d gone through all the evidence we’d found of our mother’s dalliance with another woman. Love letters we discovered revealed attempts at seduction, but there was nothing to prove that they had been lovers.
Then my brother called me. “I found pictures!” he said.
In an envelope in a forgotten file cabinet, Don found a slew of photos of my mother and her friends in the 1930s. Some were clearly pictures of the YWCA meetings in 1937 and 38 where our mother, Flo, met and roomed with her lesbian admirer, Edna Lauterbach (Eddie). Maybe Eddie is in the pictures! Of course Eddie is in the pictures!
I’m posting some of the pictures here and I hope readers will weigh in. I think these photos are from the 1937 conference where Flo and Eddie first met in Chicago. I’m pretty sure Eddie is in one of these photos, but which one is she? Here is what we know: Flo was 24 and Eddie was 37 in 1937. I know from the census records that Eddie’s father was ethnically German. I would love to know what she looked like.
Flo on the left. Are her two handsome companions a lesbian couple?
The photos show groups of women, many with their arms around each other, hands on legs or shoulders. My mother had her hands on several of them. These women seem way more physically affectionate with each other than my generation of female friends ever were in public. Were they all lovers?
In her seminal book Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Lillian Faderman posits that women in “Boston marriages” and “romantic couples” did not necessarily have sex. She writes that “romantic friendships” between women were accepted in the Western world up until WWI. After that, as women’s status in the culture changed, these friendships started to become less accepted. Today girls and women are not encouraged to hold hands in public or to enter into romantic friendships, presumably because they might turn lesbian. Today if there’s not a sexual component, we don’t take the relationship seriously. But Faderman argues that in the past these relationships were as serious as those between men and women.
By the 1930s American culture was changing, but close physical friendships between women were still more accepted than they were in my youth. My mother couldn’t understand why my generation was so focused on co-ed activities. She told me she had much more fun with her girlfriends than she did with boys. Mom maintained life-long friendships with women. She even named me, her only daughter, after her best girlfriend.
Flo and an unidentified girlfriend
Society was much more permissive by the time I was coming up than it was when Mom came of age. By the late 1960s, sex had become a hot topic. We thought about and experimented with sex all the time. For one thing, we had the birth control pill. For another thing, we had women’s and gay liberation. In three decades, our culture had changed. Women were now free agents. But women were no longer free to be so physically affectionate with each other in public.
From the moment we discovered the love letters, my question has been: Did Flo and Eddie have sex? From Eddie’s letters we know that she was crushed out on Flo. If any of Flo’s letters to Eddie existed it might be easier to determine how she was feeling. But even then we might not know whether they engaged in sex. Faderman uncovered letters throughout history in which women in nonsexual romantic friendships declared undying love for one another.
It’s not as if sex wasn’t going on. There were definitely lesbians involved in the YWCA, unions, and progressive organizations in the 1930s. Eleanor Roosevelt’s inner circle included women in Boston marriages, and Eleanor herself carried on a closeted affair with her press attache, Lorena Hickok. We know from their resurrected letters that they were deeply in love with each other, but there is no evidence that their relationship had a sexual component.
Flo (left front) with hands on two others
By the 1960s, physical closeness between women had become suspect. I have a lesbian cousin, Sandy, who is ten years older than I. That’s a whole generation in the gay universe. I’ve depended on Sandy to school me about her older gay generation. She was closeted. She worked for the YWCA in Seattle in 1963 and told me there were many dykes there. They all knew each other and they were all closeted. You had to be if you wanted to keep your job. Sandy had affairs with a couple of them. They did not feel so free to show affection in public as my mother’s generation of women did. They worried about being outed.
My guess is Eddie knew what she was doing when she wooed Flo in 1938. She wanted a lover. But, at least in the beginning, I believe Flo was oblivious. I believe she thought Eddie just wanted to be friends. Eddie may have been the first lesbian she encountered in her life. She was probably shocked when Eddie came out to her.
Eddie was a good romancer. She managed to lure Flo to New York City from Yakima, Washington in 1941. She bought Flo gifts, took her out to dinner and the theater, and squired her around the city. And that is when I imagine Eddie came out to her and declared her love. At least, had I been in Eddie’s shoes, that’s what I would have done.
1937 group photo. Can you spot the lesbians?
A small town gal, Flo was pretty green when she first met Eddie at the YWCA conference in Chicago. She may not have even known what the word lesbian meant. By the time they met up in New York, Flo was no longer so young or naïve. She was 28 and had traveled to cities across the U.S.
My best guest. I think this is Eddie.
I just had an epiphany. What if I’m culturally biased?
I see now that I’ve been evaluating my mother’s generation through the lens of my own. My generation thinks the word lover describes people who have genital sex. Maybe I need to redefine the term lover. Perhaps we should expand the definition of lover to include what Faderman calls “romantic friendships.”
My mother and her friends were activists in women’s organizations who enjoyed working and playing together. Maybe being lovers then was not all about sex. If we expand our notion, then we can imagine a culture in which physical affection extended to all. It’s fun to contemplate an army of female lovers.
Maybe for women like my mother the defining factor in a relationship was not sex. Maybe there’s a third choice: romantic friendship. Maybe I should stop asking whether they had sex. Maybe I should start with love.
Did My Mother Have an Affair With a Woman?Chapter 4
Flo (L) in the 1920s
After I discovered love letters from a woman to my mother in an old scrapbook from the 1930s, I endeavored to find out as much as I could about my mother’s admirer, Eddie. Who was she and what was her story?
Over a couple of years my brother Don and I uncovered some answers. A big breakthrough came when we discovered her last name in a letter stuffed in another scrapbook. Once we had that we looked her up in census records where we learned more details. She was Edna Lauterbach, born in 1900. She lived in Brooklyn with her family including two sisters. She worked in advertising and she was active in the Business and Professional Women’s group within the YWCA. She had encountered my mother, Florence Wick, at conferences in Chicago and Columbus in 1937 and 38 where they roomed together.
From one of Eddie’s letters
The letters convinced me that Eddie was at least a self-acknowledged lesbian who had a serious crush on my mother. There is so much more I want to know about her. Did she remain a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. We know that, as in Berlin, gay culture flourished in the 1920s in New York City, the epicenter of the “Pansy Craze” and the accompanying “Sapphic Craze.” Eddie came of age at a time when gay and lesbian characters were featured in pulp novels, stage plays, radio songs and (before the Hays Code) in movies. Born at the cusp of the 20th century, she would have been just the right age to experience this flowering of gay culture in New York.
Did she frequent the lesbian and gay gathering places in Manhattan during the 20s and 30s? We know Eddie worked in advertising, though the census doesn’t tell us which firm she worked for. But we can assume she traveled daily from her home in Brooklyn to her work in Manhattan. My mother, Flo, was a small town gal from Yakima, Washington. But I imagine Eddie, who grew up in New York, to be far more citified and sophisticated. Maybe she taught my mom some things.
Did she know Eve Adams, the notorious lesbian café owner who was arrested in 1926, jailed, and later deported, and sent to Auschwitz where she was murdered? Eve Adams is a Jewish radical lesbian foremother, but I had never heard of her until I read her biography by the gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz. The New York Times recently included her obit in its Overlooked No More obituary section and she was profiled in the New Yorker.
Eve Adams (a taken name alluding to Adam and Eve) was friends with anarchists Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Ben Reitman. In New York she mingled with the likes of Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Adams came to the US in 1912 and spent four years hitchhiking around the country before settling in New York. I learned from Katz’s book that one of the places she visited was my hometown of Yakima. What drew her there at the height of the nativist backlash in 1922? I’m still trying to find out.
In 1925 Eve Adams published the first American book with lesbian in the title, Lesbian Love. In that year she opened a café in Greenwich Village called Eve’s Hangout, which became a destination for New York’s bohemian contingent.
Did Eddie visit Eve’s Hangout? I bet she knew about the place. She may have been afraid to visit, especially after Eve was arrested in 1926 by an undercover policewoman for “disorderly conduct,” a charge that referred to her alleged sexual advances and for having written an “obscene” book. But if I had been in New York in 1925 you can bet I would have checked out Eve’s Hangout.
Gay culture flourished in the Roaring Twenties in New York. Then in the 30s with the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition, a backlash began and gay culture went underground. By the time Flo and Eddie met in Chicago in 1937 you were taking a chance going into a gay gathering place, if you could even find one. I speculate that Eddie’s two sisters may also have been lesbians. The 1940 census finds them all still single in their 30s and still living in the family apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn. I bet Eddie and her sisters had fun together in New York. Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie in 1941 and, whether or not she met the family, I know she met one of the sisters, Gertrude. The three women saw a Broadway play together, the antifascist play by Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine.
Was Eddie involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? She would have been 70 in 1970, but there were plenty of older women who joined the feminist movement, including my mother. Did Eddie continue to be active in the YWCA? The YW may not have harbored anarchists, but my mother and Eddie did rub shoulders with a progressive element who wanted to change the world. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI went after activists in the YW, calling them communists, but the attacks never stuck, maybe because of the Christian in the name or because they were allied with wives of industrialists. Researching the YW for this series, I am impressed with all the organization accomplished, and the stance it took against racism, even in its early years. It is a fascinating history, yet to be compiled into a book. I believe my mother’s progressive anti-racist politics were formed in the YW, and my own world view benefitted from activism in the organization.
The YW was at the forefront of the most critical social movements including women’s empowerment and civil rights. The activism of Flo and Eddie set the stage for my generation’s second wave of feminism and our gay rights movement.
I thought I had reached the end of my Eddie research and speculation. But now my brother has unearthed a batch of photos of our mother and her YW pals. We’ve been able to place them at the conferences in Chicago and Columbus. So in a final chapter of this story I’ll ask readers to weigh in on the possibilities.
tradeswomn musings 