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Kathryn Finegan Clark: By the Way

A pioneer’s influence

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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.”

Surely a mother with that background would be a huge influence for a little girl, would want her to seek adventure, to broaden her horizon, too.
Robin said she could not overestimate the influence her mother had had on her life. “But I don’t know that I could have done what she did – get on a ship not knowing where it was headed. She was going to save the world. She was a feminist way before others, an activist. She told the guys, ‘We don’t get the coffee.’ She was always volunteering, got me into that, interested me in politics. I remember as a little girl handing out Bobby Kennedy leaflets outside her office. I even taught the neighbor’s kids how to do that, although I’m not sure their parents liked it,” she added
“We had always been a family of service,” Robin said, with the men serving in the military as well.
Robin has brought her mother’s same irrepressible energy, to her job as recorder of deeds, finding grant money to restore and preserving historic deed books, speaking to municipalities, and doing that via ZOOM during the pandemic’s darker days, making the office more customer-friendly with records more easily accessible and managing a loyal staff that seems to consider her a force of nature.
She was named the YWCA of Bucks County Woman of the Year for 2020 and will be honored at a post-pandemic celebration delayed until October. Her mother’s book is available at the Military Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and on amazon.com.
kathrynfclark@verizon.net


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