When young Harriet Green, who left her secretarial job right out of Hollywood High to join the new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the WAACS, in 1942, she didn’t realize she was a pioneer nor that she would be an inspiring role model for her daughter and hundreds of other young women.
That daughter is Robin Robinson, Bucks County Recorder of Deeds. When I interviewed Robin for another story, she gave me a book her mother had written 20 years ago. Undoubtedly a hero in her daughter’s eyes, she was her role model and way ahead of her time. “She taught me it’s not what happens to us in life that’s important but how we deal with it is.”
“The Gaylord WACS,” by Harriet Green Robinson, is a touching memoir of the author’s life during the war years, 1942-1945. Her journey was inspired by a recruiting poster reminding that it was a woman’s war, too, promoting the plan for women to take over desk jobs to free men for combat. The WAACS morphed into the WACS and became part of the regular army in 1943. Harriet’s story is charming, funny, poignant, a bit frightening and sometimes downright sad, but it sheds light on a group of gutsy females who stepped forward to serve a country at war.
It begins as she and four other uniformed young women, all assigned to recruiting duty in San Francisco, are housed in the Gaylord Hotel – in one small room. It was their job to convince others to join the corps, but they also befriended and sometimes had to fend off young servicemen roaming the city and defend the virtue of military women some considered tramps. They did both, forcefully, and became famous, speaking, even singing together, as the Gaylor WACS, on the West Coast.
Later, Harriet, volunteering for overseas duty, found herself on a crowded troop ship crossing the Atlantic in a convoy, facing bombing threats and heading to a destination unknown. She landed in Naples just before D-Day in 1944, and then on to Egypt, where she served as secretary to the adjutant general at U.S. Army Headquarters for the Middle East in Cairo until war’s end.
Then back to California and a public relations job with the Ford Motor Co., marriage, two daughters and divorce and back to her old job at Ford.
“It was her dream to write that book,” said Robin, “and she went to UCLA after she retired to study writing. It was also her dream for my little sister and me to finish college.”
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