Tag: history

Flo Awarded the Bronze Star

The Military’s Recognition vs. Red Cross Restrictions

My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 123

The U.S. Army recognized Florence Wick’s service with multiple military honors, but the American Red Cross (ARC) severely restricted her ability to display them. Flo received the Presidential Citation Ribbon with four bronze battle stars for service in the European Theater, the fourragère (a French military decoration awarded to units that distinguished themselves in combat), and the Bronze Star. Despite these honors, the ARC forbade her from wearing most of them, a policy that reflected institutional tensions over the women’s status and role.

Why the ARC Prohibited Display of Military Awards

The ARC’s restrictions stemmed from a deliberate strategy to maintain the appearance that these women were noncombatants, even though their actual service contradicted this designation. After VE Day, clubmobilers who had served at least 30 days in designated battle zones became eligible for battle stars—the same recognition offered to military personnel. The Army awarded these women five battle stars to wear on their European Theater of Operations ribbons.

Sept 21, 1946 in Washington DC wearing the bronze star

The ARC’s response was to prohibit the women from wearing Army-issued battle stars and instead issued meaningless silver stars as a substitute. This move served two purposes: it denied the women public recognition of their actual combat-zone service, and it reinforced the Red Cross’s institutional need to classify these women as civilians rather than military personnel. Allowing the women to wear military decorations might have jeopardized the very arrangement that permitted them to work so close to the fighting front.

Evidence of Military Support

Not all Army officials agreed with the ARC’s restrictions. Colonel L.C. McGarr, who served as Assistant Division Commander, wrote to Flo expressing his support. In his correspondence, he stated: “I hope you get that bronze star—it was my last official act as Asst Div C.G. You gals deserve it first of all in my books.” This correspondence suggests that Army leadership recognized and valued the contributions of the clubmobilers, even as the Red Cross worked to minimize their visibility and official status.

Citation signed by President Harry Truman

The Casualty Record: Evidence of Actual Combat Risk

The casualty statistics reveal how close these women truly came to combat. The American Red Cross lost 280 personnel across World Wars I and II out of 51,600 serving—a rate of 5 deaths per 1,000 serving. This compares to approximately 3 deaths per 1,000 for the entire U.S. armed forces.

During World War II specifically, the ARC lost 86 personnel, and 52 of them (60%) were women. These women experienced higher casualty rates than male ARC workers because they spent significantly more time close to and on the fighting front. This casualty record provided irrefutable evidence that clubmobilers like Flo were exposed to genuine combat danger—contradicting the ARC’s classification of them as noncombatants.

Support from anothr officer: “…reading your name in a General Order gave me a bigger thrill than if it had been my own name.”

Broader Implications for Female Veterans

Flo’s experience reflected a larger institutional failure to recognize women’s wartime service. Post-war initiatives like the GI Bill were overwhelmingly directed toward male veterans, despite women technically being eligible. Female veterans were rarely informed of their eligibility for education and training benefits during discharge, while male veterans received systematic outreach. Noncombatants like the clubmobilers received no GI Bill benefits at all, further marginalizing their contributions and limiting their post-war opportunities.

This was apparently the best the ARC would do.

The ARC’s suppression of military awards was not simply bureaucratic oversight—it was a deliberate institutional choice that denied these women recognition for service that exceeded the danger levels of many official military personnel.

Thanks to: “After all, who takes care of the Red Cross’s morale?”: The Experiences of American Red Cross Clubmobile Women during World War II, A Thesis by Paige N. Gulley

“Girls” in Name Only: A Study of American Red Cross Volunteers on the Frontlines of World War II, A thesis by Julia A. Ramsey

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/

Samhain 2024: The Cailleach

My Regular Pagan Holiday post

She is a towering figure, casting mountains by flinging stones from her wicker basket. She is the crone goddess, ancient and wise, with flowing white hair and—some legends say—one eye in the center of her forehead. The Cailleach (pronounced kallyak), the Celtic goddess of winter, seizes control of the earth on November 1, at the pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in), and reigns until the thaw of spring. She governs the weather, especially storms, and with each step, she shapes the land.

The hag’s face is pale blue, cold like a corpse, her long white hair streaked with frost. Cloaked in a gray plaid, she appears worn by time, yet her power is immense. She is both creator and destroyer, molding the hills and valleys with her hammer, a deity tied to cycles of death and rebirth. Some say she has roots as ancient as the Indian goddess Kali.

As the harbinger of winter, the Cailleach has been feared and revered for centuries. On Imbolc, February 1, she is said to gather firewood for the remainder of winter. If the weather is clear and bright, it’s a sign she intends for the cold to stretch on, collecting plenty of wood to sustain her. But if the day is foul, people sigh in relief—the Cailleach sleeps, and winter’s end is near. Today, we mark this custom with Groundhog Day.

“Winter is coming”—a phrase popularized by Game of Thrones—is not just a warning of seasonal change, but a metaphor for scarcity, hardship, and the potential for conflict. The ominous truth is that winter is always coming, unless we are already in the thick of it. Perhaps, politically, we are.

The looming threat of a Trump presidency feels like the onset of a long, harsh winter. It keeps me awake at night. For decades, Republicons have skewed the game, and I’ve lived long enough to witness it firsthand. From voter suppression to outright vote theft, it’s been an ongoing battle. I was blown away by Greg Palast’s latest documentary, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, produced by Martin Sheen, George DiCaprio, and Maria Florio (Oscar, Best Documentary). He exposes the political history of racist Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his slave owning family. Stream it for free.

For those unfamiliar with Greg Palast, he’s a freelance journalist with a history of working for the BBC and The Guardian. His investigations predict that MAGA extremists may riot on December 11, the constitutional deadline for states to submit their final lists of electors. You can read more on his site: https://www.gregpalast.com/maga-militants-to-riot-on-december-11/

I’m sending this message before Samhain, hoping these warnings help to thwart the political winter ahead. We may already be in the storm’s grip, but awareness can help us weather it. 

For those of you in Sonoma County, I hope you’ll join me at a Democracy Fair, sponsored by the Deep Democracy group of the North Bay Organizing Project. Get voter information about local and state propositions and races. Plus games and prizes! It’s happening this Friday October 18 from 4 to 7pm at the SRJC student center. Registering ahead will help us plan.  Here’s the RSVP link: tinyurl.com/deepdemfair. (Apologies to those I’ve already sent this to.)

One more thing. I was saddened to learn of the death of my friend, the artist and writer Mary Wings in San Francisco. We were both born in 1949 (it was a very good year for Boomers) and shared a neighborhood in Bernal Heights. Mary was kind of famous; she rated an obit in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/arts/mary-wings-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU4.GC0y.GZ_rimClOb6P&smid=url-share

She was always working on art projects and her friends were often the lucky recipients of her creations. One of her gifts to me was this painting of Bernal Hill viewed from Precita Park where she lived. I lived on the opposite side of the hill. The painting had originally been framed in something she’d found at Scrap, but it fell apart over time. Recently, I rediscovered it in the garage and had it reframed. Now it’s hanging on the kitchen wall, and it’s a beautiful way to remember both Mary and our beloved San Francisco neighborhood.

Sending Samhain greetings to all.

Love, Molly (and Holly)

The top photo is by David Mirlea on Unsplash (having trouble with captions)

Celebrating May Day

Demand for the eight-hour day inspires a world-wide holiday

My regular pagan holiday post

No one ever knew who threw the bomb that killed a cop during a peaceful rally. Then the police opened fire, killing seven more of their own and several bystanders. 

But the Powers That Be said someone had to pay. They arrested eight men and charged them with conspiracy. 

The accused, immigrants and anarchists, became convenient scapegoats in a city gripped by fear and suspicion. The mainstream media fanned the flames of anti-immigrant hysteria with sensationalized tales and outright lies.

As the trial unfolded, prejudice tainted the proceedings. The judge’s bias was palpable, and jurors were selected for their predispositions. Despite a glaring lack of evidence, the men were convicted.

Four were hanged. One committed suicide in prison. Others were given long sentences. 

The progressive governor, burdened by the knowledge of their innocence, commuted the sentences of the surviving men. Then he faced the wrath of voters who, swayed by fear and misinformation, ousted him from office in a bitter electoral battle.

It happened in Chicago in 1886, but to me it reads like today’s news. Except for the bomb. Our modern methods of murder are far more sophisticated.

Could history repeat itself in a modern age? 

I worry. The specter of prejudice still haunts our land, immigrants demonized, and dissent silenced. The media—mainstream and social–wields its influence with impunity, shaping public opinion with biased narratives and sensationalism. 

Meanwhile, our judiciary does not even try to conceal its corruption. The militarization of police forces and the epidemic of police violence create more distrust in those pledged to keep us safe. We won’t forget the killing of a 13-year-old boy, Andy Lopez, in Santa Rosa at the hands of a deputy sheriff.

So, yeah. It seems little human evolution has taken place since 1886.

At that 1886 Chicago rally, workers had agitated for the eight-hour work day, a movement then brutally crushed by employers with the help of federal, state and local police forces. With its leaders executed and imprisoned, the Chicago labor movement’s head was cut off. Labor lost that battle, but eventually won the war for the eight-hour day. Their slogan, written in a song of the time, was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.”

The eight defendants were all thinking and articulate men, but the one I find most interesting is the one man who was not an immigrant, Albert Parsons. Born in Alabama in 1848, he traced his ancestry back to English colonists in 1632. Some ancestors fought in the American revolution.

Parsons moved to Texas and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Then he realized he had fought for the wrong side. He called the war “the slaveholders’ rebellion.” 

He became a Republican, supporting Reconstruction efforts and running for office, making enemies of his former comrades and the KKK. Then he joined the socialist movement, eventually denouncing electoral politics and joining the anarchists and the labor movement. 

His marriage to Lucy Parsons (Gonzales), a Black woman, defied the norms of a society steeped in prejudice, and her activism would become legendary in its own right. As she led the campaign to win a new trial, one Chicago official called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” 

Albert Parsons saw the connections between slavery and capitalism. He said: “My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the north are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers.”

What made Albert Parsons switch sides? I think it was working with previously enslaved people after the war and at the start of Reconstruction. He began to see things from their point of view. 

The Haymarket Affair, as the events in Chicago came to be called, inspired May Day, or International Workers Day, as a labor holiday in countries around the world on May 1. It was never a national holiday in the US because of ourgovernment’s resistance to encouraging worldwide working-class unity. But workers in the US celebrate May Day anyway, and it will be marked again this year in cities across the country.

Photos are from the 2019 Santa Rosa May Day march

California Labor Councils are planning actions up and down the state. This year’s May Day actions are about solidarity across sectors as workers push for higher wages, stronger contracts, the right to join a union, and fight back against corporate greed.

Here in Sonoma County on May 1 we will be marching for “Immigrant Rights Are Human Rights” starting at the county sheriff’s office. Marchers will demand that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors proactively advocate for a Path To Citizenship policy in Congress and also support a county ordinance which would prohibit any collaboration or information sharing between the Sonoma County Sheriff and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Haymarket Affair was a seminal moment in the struggle for workers’ rights. The martyrs of that turbulent era—Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer—must not be forgotten. Their legacy endures, inspiring movements for social justice and workers’ rights around the world. 

The Haymarket martyrs memorial and Lucy Parson’s grave at Forest Hill cemetery in Chicago

A happy Beltane and a revolutionary May Day to all!

Wharlest Jackson Died for Our Rights

The Black Freedom Movement and Tradeswomen History

I want to take us back in time and imagine a world, a culture, in which job categories were firmly divided between MEN and WOMEN. Women were restricted to pink collar jobs that paid too little to raise a family on or even to live without a man’s support. Even doing the same jobs, women were legally paid less than men. Married women were not allowed to work outside the home. Single women who found jobs as teachers or secretaries were fired as soon as they married. Black people were only allowed to work as laborers or house cleaners.

This was the world we fought to change.

Tradeswomen who have jobs today must thank Black workers who began the fight for jobs and justice. 

The Black Freedom Movement has advocated for workplace equity since the end of the Civil War.

The movement gained power during and after WWII. A. Philip Randolph headed the sleeping car porters union, the leading Black trade union in the US. In 1940 he threatened to march on Washington with ten thousand demonstrators if the government did not act to end job discrimination in federal war contracts. FDR capitulated and signed executive order 8802, the first presidential order to benefit Blacks since reconstruction. It outlawed discrimination by companies and unions engaged in war work on government contracts. This executive order marked the start of affirmative action.

The fight to desegregate the workforce continued.

In the early 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area, protesters organized successful picket campaigns against businesses that refused to hire Blacks, including the Palace hotel, car dealerships and Mel’s Drive-In. Many of the protesters were white students at UC Berkeley.

In August 1963, the march on Washington brought 200,000 people to the capitol to protest racial discrimination and show support for civil rights legislation. The civil rights act of 1964, signed into law by President Johnson, is the legal structure that women and POC have used to put nondiscrimination into practice.

But change did not come quickly or easily.

Black workers at a tire plant in Natchez Mississippi were organizing to desegregate jobs. The CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations, supported them in this fight. In 1967, three years after the civil rights act became law, a Black man, Wharlest Jackson, who had won a promotion to a previously “white” job in the tire plant, was murdered by the KKK. They blew up his truck as he was driving home from work. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted for this crime.

Wharlest Jackson was the father of five. His wife, Exerlina, was among those arrested for peacefully insisting on equal treatment during a boycott of the town of Natchez’s white businesses. She was sent to Parchman penitentiary.

Jackson was just one of many who died for our right to be treated equally at work.

Tradeswomen are part of the feminist, civil rights and union movements. We continue to seek allies because we are few.  

Discrimination has not ended, but, because of decades of organizing, our work lives have improved. We owe much to the Black workers who sought equity in employment for decades before us. 

Photo: the Zinn Education Project

Love the film, hate the church

I think of the catholic church as a dangerous cult and that perspective was only reinforced when I watched the movie The Novitiate, about a cloistered order of nuns and its response to the directives of Vatican II in the early 1960s. From the movie, directed by Maggie Betts, I learned that 90,000 nuns left the church after Vatican II, which devalued nuns and left them without support of the church.

2nuns
Barb and I as bad nun good nun

The protagonist is a 17-year-old novice played by Margaret Qualley, but the star of the show is the angry, strict mother superior played with force by Mellissa Leo (remembered fondly as the lawyer in Treme). She represents the old habits and choses to ignore the new catholic rules until the cigarette-smoking, newspaper-reading archbishop visits and “suggests” she begin implementing the protocols if she wants to keep her job. We learn that she has never set foot outside the convent in 40 years and we sympathize with her bitterness and frustration.

Some of the old disciplines that must be abandoned include the medieval practice of self-flagellation. In this order the novice must ask the reverend mother for the “discipline,” a stranded leather whip with knotted ends and she must tell mother the fault or lapse that deserves punishment. Another curious practice is an activity in which each novice kneels in the middle of a circle of kneeling novices and confesses her faults to the reverend mother. In an odd way it resembles the encounter groups that were just taking off in that era.

All who lived in the cloistered convent observed hours of silence and they developed a sign language to communicate. The novices spent time on their knees or crawling on hands and knees or prostrate on the floor in penance for sins against god. Touching other human beings was strictly forbidden. But the protagonist, sister Cathleen, seeks comfort in the infirmary after having starved herself in penance for a sexy dream. She hugs and kisses another novice, who it seems has been transferred here because of lesbian exploits in another order. And so the constant undercurrent of sexual attraction finds expression and then contrition. Guilt abounds.

For me, the catholic church represents a historically misogynist institution bent on maintaining control over women, our bodies, our reproductive lives, even our intimate relationships. It damages not just catholics, but all women and the cultures we live in all over the world. Hate is not too strong a word for my feelings, especially since the church continues its anti-woman postures and politics.

I believe no one truly recovers from catholic propaganda, especially when immersed as a child. The dictionary’s alternate meaning of propaganda: “A committee of cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church responsible for foreign missions, founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.”

The Blue Album

It is massive, about the size of a small suitcase, with a dark blue padded leather cover now, 70 years later, quite beat up. It weighs 25 pounds. Throughout our childhoods my brothers and I pulled it out, looked through it, listened to our mother’s war stories. The scrapbook is filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, 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. With a crew of three other women she drove a clubmobile, a truck retrofitted with a kitchen, near the front lines, making and serving coffee and donuts to soldiers of the Third Infantry Division in Italy, France, Germany and Austria.

Mom was a scrapbook maker and for that I am now grateful as I try to piece together the events of her life. 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 compatriots had moved on and no longer thought about the war.

When my mother, Flo, 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 the mold-infected storage room and so it was infected along with other archives. I’ve exposed each page to sunlight in an effort to reduce the mold and that’s helped, but when I really want to examine the book I don a respirator to avoid breathing in clouds of invisible mold spores.respirator

In trying to understand the World War II era, my ongoing research includes reading about this historical period and the books I know Flo was reading during the 30s and 40s. Her saved scrapbooks from the 1930s give many clues to what she was thinking and reading, setting the stage for the advent of the 1940s and the war. I’ve found useful artifacts in boxes saved by my brother Don and my cousin Gail. Don dug out a box of Flo’s essays and letters-to-the-editor from the 1960s to the 1980s that I had thought were lost. We have precious few of her personal letters, but my cousin recently found two letters written to her mother, Flo’s sister Ruth, from Europe in 1944! Don, the family historian, has helped me track down information about Flo’s clubmobile comrades. They are now all dead, but I’m in touch with one of their daughters, who is providing another perspective on the “donut girls.” I’ve read accounts of their experiences, although I haven’t found one that mirrors Flo’s particular journey. And I’ve read the stories of men who served in the Third Infantry Division, to which Flo’s clubmobile was attached.

I’ve dreamed of traveling to Europe to trace Flo’s route through towns and battlegrounds. Someday I may do that but I’m thankful that now I can take a virtual trip right here on my computer.

Florence E Wick dogtag

I Find Eddie’s Last Name and More

Chapter Three

I had given up finding out any more about my mother’s admirer, Edna L. Then, looking through a box of family photos and letters that my brother Don had taken with him to Vancouver BC, I found another scrapbook made by my mother. This was mostly high school-era, 1920s-1930 (Flo had graduated in the class of 1929½). But Flo had tucked mementos from other decades into it. Among the high school graduation notices I was delighted to find another note from Eddie (as she sometimes signed her name) in her now familiar diminutive handwriting. It was an invitation to a party during the Columbus YWCA conference. It said:

In the Wick and Lauterbach den

On Wednesday night at half past ten

We hope you’ll join us for a spree

To give us one more Council memory

Then there is one of Eddie’s cute stick figure drawings—two skirted figures with F and E written underneath. At the bottom it says, “Just to be sure that my roommate will be here to act as co-hostess with me.” While they were roommates Eddie could never keep Flo at home it seems. It was written on the Neil House stationery and dated April 27, 1938.floeddie

I had found Eddie’s last name—Lauterbach—the one thing I’d been searching for in the scrapbooks, the one thing I needed in order to find out more about the woman with a crush on my mother! I was so happy I danced around the house singing her name.

Googling her name got me to the Edna A. Lauterbach scholarship fund for the education of nurses. She was a nurse who championed home care. Then I started making up stories. I imagined Edna was an important historical figure, an organizer. Perhaps she had been a speaker at the conference. I imagined she traveled around the country on speaking tours seducing women in every town. I wondered whether Eddie had had lots of lovers, or no lovers at all. Was she the archetype of the lonely lesbian who never found her mate? Was it hard to seduce women in the 1930s?

I wrote to the scholarship fund to see if they could provide more biographical information. The marketing director got right back to me saying it was a different person, as the age didn’t match up. This Edna Lauterbach was not even born until after the meeting in Columbus took place. Scratch her and all my associated fantasies.

Then Don and I got on the computer and looked at census records. We found an Edna R. Lauterbach, born in 1900 and died in August 1979 who lived her entire life in Brooklyn, NY, after 1930 in a 43-unit apartment house on 88th Street. I found pictures of the building, built in 1926, online. The apartments now sell in the million-dollar range, so I’m guessing the neighborhood was gentrified long ago. But when the Lauterbach family moved in, this would have been a working class neighborhood. Edna had two sisters, one named Gertrude. This was a deciding clue, as her sister Gertrude had been mentioned in one of the other notes found in Flo’s scrapbooks. Don found records for Edna in the 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. In all, she was single and living in the family home. By 1940 their father (a truck maker whose parents had emigrated from Germany) had died, but the three sisters were all still unmarried, in their thirties and living at home with their mother. A household of old maids! Perhaps all the sisters were lesbians.

According to the census, Edna worked in advertising. She was there for the Mad Men era, although she would have been 60 years old in 1960. I imagine her as the staid older secretary who runs interference for her philandering boss while correcting his spelling and grammar and making him look good. She may have worked in the industry until she retired, possibly at the same job. Had she remained a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture and if so, where was it centered? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. But I’m imagining big lesbo parties through the decades at the apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn on the parents’ bowling nights.

It turns out Edna R. Lauterbach wasn’t anybody famous. I couldn’t even find a funeral notice for her, although we did learn that she is buried in the famous Brooklyn Greenwood cemetery with some 560,000 others. She was a workingwoman, a stenographer, who managed to keep a job through the Great Depression. In 1939 she worked in advertising 44 hours per week and 52 weeks in the year. Her income was $2040 that year.

Her parents were ethnically German and my guess is they were not Jewish. The YW is a Christian women’s organization, but it did work with Jewish groups against anti-Semitism and to prod the government to increase numbers of Jewish refugees allowed into the U.S. during the Nazi era. Jewish women did join the YW, but usually as members of the Biz-Pro groups or associated Jewish organizations.

Edna Lauterbach and my mother were two of the thousands of workingwomen who benefited from their membership in the Business and Professional Women’s organizations under the umbrella of the YWCA. One benefit was being able to make friends with other workingwomen from around the country.

Eddie surely had a giant crush on Flo and my heart aches as I read her letters. My mother never revealed that she’d had a sexual relationship with another woman but when I came out to her in the 1970s she did confess that she had known lesbians. And the name Edna Lauterbach is vaguely familiar to me. Did Flo tell me about her? I can’t remember. But it seems as if they kept up the friendship for some years at least. What was the nature of their relationship? They were certainly close friends, and possibly lovers, although I found no conclusive proof.

I have no evidence that they ever saw each other again after 1941 when Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie. My mother returned to her hometown of Yakima, Washington where (after a stint in Europe with the Red Cross during WWII) she married, raised four kids and lived the rest of her life. Edna L. lived out her life in her family home on 88th Street in Brooklyn.

There is so much more I want to know about my mother’s admirer. Did she frequent the lesbian bars in Manhattan? Was she involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? Did she continue to be active in the YWCA? I do know that, even if she and my mother were lovers, the affair would have been long-distance and periodic. And perhaps Eddie’s attentions were not returned at all.

Dearest Eddie, I hope you found love in your lifetime. I hope you found a woman who could love you back.

Chapter 4: https://mollymartin.blog/2022/08/03/who-was-my-mothers-lesbian-admirer/

Driving Jack

Driving from one place to another is the best time to get the old Commies talking. Today I drove Jack from Fort Point to our regular lunch at the restaurant near Lands End. He started telling me about visual images still in his head from his childhood, memories of living in an all-black town, of walking across the plains in Texas hunting as a kid. I think he said prairie.

“What did you hunt?”

“Rabbits, squirrels, really anything that moved.”

Looking back at the City
Looking back at the City

“What kind of gun did you have?”

“I started out with a .22, and then later got a shotgun when I was about 14.”

“Did you skin them and eat them?”

“Yes, I ate everything I killed. I loved that shotgun and kept it till just a few years ago. I didn’t want a gun in the house. My grandson was growing up.”IMG_1015.JPG

I told him I have a gun, a .22 handgun, how my mother was horrified when I told her I’d bought it. It was just before John Lennon’s murder. My gun is a Taurus revolver, the exact model that killed John. I put my gun far away in the storage room, partly because I didn’t want any visiting kids to find it, but also because I went through a period of deep depression and was afraid I might kill myself.

Then he said he had owned another gun, a .45. Jack had been in the Army in World War II. An Army friend who took it from the Oakland Army base after the war gave the gun to him. The guy asked him, kept asking him, if he wanted a gun. Now he thinks the FBI planted it on him.WaveCity

“Most of the black Army officers were recruited to the FBI,” he said, and this friend was one. The FBI kept close track of Jack, and maybe they still do, he said. He was in the Communist Party USA till the mid-50s and the FBI would call him up periodically just to check on him.

The Communist Party, and particularly one friend, bugged him to get rid of the .45. The CP frowned on their members having guns. It was dangerous, and especially dangerous for black men. Finally he took the .45 apart, every screw, he said, put all the parts in a paper bag, then walked along the waterfront throwing the parts in the water one by one. No one will ever find that gun, or pin it on him!BridgeFlrs

Later, when a president was about to visit San Francisco (he thinks it was Truman) the FBI came to his house. When they knocked on his door and asked him if he had any guns, he was able to honestly say no.

The FBI would always have someone at CP meetings recording who was there and making lists. But even after Jack stopped going to meetings, they were surveiling him. He thinks an FBI agent even came to a Catholic prayer meeting he was leading a few years ago. “The guy picked up all the religious books and looked at them. He came a couple of times. I knew he was FBI,” Jack said.

“Didn’t it make you paranoid, knowing they were watching you?”

At first he said no, but then he admitted yes. That’s why he got rid of the gun.

Jack said he left the CP in ‘55 or ‘56, when the Krushchev report came out about Stalin. “We thought the Western press was making up all those stories, but there was no need. The truth was awful enough.”chain

Finding Wonder Women in the Tenderloin

My story, Wonder Women, posted on this blog on 9-18-15, which takes place in a Tenderloin cross dressers’ bar, is based on true events. But I couldn’t remember exactly where the bar was, and I couldn’t remember the name of the bar. So uncovering the facts required some sleuthing.

Barry the bartender
Served by Jose inside Aunt Charlie’s
Aunt Charlie’s neon

I needed to find an old-timer who had been there. So I set about describing this gritty watering hole, as best I could remember, to every old codger gay guy I knew. Nobody could remember having been there, or maybe they just weren’t talking.

I had a vague memory that the bar was associated with Charlotte Coleman, who owned a number of gay bars in San Francisco from the 1950s through the 1990s. During the 1970s Wonder Woman Electric worked on the electrical systems in many of her bars as well as in her home in Noe Valley. I learned that Charlotte, in her 90s, lived in an assisted living institution in Vallejo. Then I was lucky to meet an old friend of hers serendipitously. Roberta, in her 80s, regularly visited Charlotte and offered to drive me there to meet her.

In the meantime, I discovered a website, Lost Gay Bars of SF, with a map made by a guy named Mike Stabile that shows the locations of gay bars in San Francisco from the 1960s through the 1980s. I needed the name of the bar or the address to use this resource. I was stuck. But Mike responded to my questions in a Facebook message. He thought the bar might be Aunt Charlie’s Lounge on Turk Street, still there, perhaps the very last of the old Tenderloin gay bars. I googled Aunt Charlie’s and found an informative web page with interviews of some of the old timers. http://www.auntcharlieslounge.com. Could this be the bar I was searching for? It looked just as seedy as I remembered. And Aunt Charlie’s still has drag shows! I had to go there.

By the time I could arrange to meet Charlotte, her health had deteriorated and new visitors were no longer welcomed. But I did get Roberta on the phone and described the bar to her. Sure, she said, she remembered that bar. It was called the Blue and Gold and it was on Turk Street. It was a black and white bar, she said, meaning it was racially integrated. It was Charlotte’s most notorious bar, site of nearly nightly fights and disturbances. “They broke the toilet regularly.” But the Blue and Gold made far more money than any other bar, Roberta remembered.

BlueGold
Site of the old Blue and Gold

Blue and Gold! I had the name! I had the street! Now I could use the Lost Bars map to locate the bar. I quickly found the address: 136 Turk. The description on the website said the piano bar opened in 1947 and closed in 1993. The Blue and Gold had been right across the street from Aunt Charlie’s Lounge.

I chose a Saturday afternoon for a visit to Aunt Charlie’s, knowing that I’d be unlikely to stay up late enough to hit the drag show. The one hundred block of Turk Street still rates high on the funky list. But the bar’s regulars and bartenders welcomed us two old dykes and were happy to talk about the old days. Barry, who had tended bar at Charlie’s for decades, remembered the Blue and Gold, as well as dozens of other neighborhood gay bars, all closed. The building’s exterior had been covered in blue and gold tile, he said. (Nobody knows what the colors meant in 1947. A hangout for Cal alumni?) It has been painted over recently and it now houses the SF City Impact Rescue Mission. I noticed that the address is now 140, not 136, Turk.

The historic Cadillac Hotel
Graphic from the museum
Inside the new Tenderloin Museum

Feeling in a historical mood, we strolled the couple of blocks over to the new Tenderloin Museum, housed in the historic Cadillac Hotel. There we learned about the rich history of the Tenderloin neighborhood, including the gay and transgender scene in the 1960s. The Compton Cafeteria riot in 1966, “one of the first demonstrations against transgender and transsexual violence in San Francisco,” took place right up the street from the Blue and Gold. It was a fitting completion of my magical history tour. Tenderloinmuseum.org.