My Own Two Feet (20 page)

Like the younger sons in folktales I had told in Yakima, I set forth to seek my fortune, beginning with the Oakland Public Library. I flunked the physical examination because the doctor said I was too nervous to meet the public. I did not let him discourage me.

My next stop was the Department of Employment, where I half expected to be sent to a shipyard to become another Rosie the Riveter. Instead I was sent to apply for a library opening at Camp John T. Knight, which turned out to be a compound of barracks, a chapel, and one-story white shoebox buildings in the Oakland Army Base on the edge of San Francisco Bay. There I learned that another librarian, older than I, had
been sent from the San Francisco Department of Employment. She was given the title of Post Librarian, but since librarians were in short supply, Xenophon P. Smith, Chief Librarian of the 9th Service Command, did not want to let one slip through his fingers. Would I consider sharing the position with the title of Junior Hostess? A Junior Hostess would normally work in a service club, but since there was none at Camp Knight, funds were available. Why not? I was amused by my title, which reminded me of the song “Ten Cents a Dance.” This time I passed the physical examination with the army doctor's gentle comment “Why, you're frightened.” I met the Special Service Officer, who was responsible for library and recreation services. He introduced me to Colonel Alfonte, an Old Army Commanding Officer, who told me that listening to the men talk was more important than library work, but I must never ask questions. I had a feeling that life in the Yakima boardinghouse full of men had been basic training for my new army life.

And so I went to work at raw, windy, bleak Camp Knight. Even sunny days began with cold fog pressing down on white buildings, gray sidewalks, and mud. When the sun did come out, the men whistled tunes from
Oklahoma!
, and the camp often had a sickly-sweet smell of coconut
as copra from the South Pacific was unloaded on its way to becoming soap. At one end of the block-long street, ships loading explosives flew red flags. On one side of the library a railroad track of flatcars was loaded with tanks, guns, explosives, landing craft, Jeeps, the machines of war. In daylight the cars stood motionless, but during the night their loads disappeared, and by the time we came to work, another trainload awaited its voyage to the South Pacific. Camp Knight was not a place to lift the spirits.

The post librarian and I worked in a small room in a building designed to be a mess hall but temporarily used as a day room, the army term for recreation room. As I listened to the men, new words, which Clarence defined for me, were added to my vocabulary. I did not use them. Pool balls clicked, Ping-Pong balls, as James Thurber was to say,
gnip-gnopped
, and the jukebox played over and over the men's two favorite songs, something about “Why don't you do right and get me some money, too?” and a burlesque song that contained the line “‘Take it off, take it off,' cries a voice from the rear.” The children's room of the Yakima Public Library seemed a long, long way away.

In a few weeks book-filled shelves lined the walls. The pool table, Ping-Pong table, and juke
box were moved out and replaced with long tables and pewlike benches. When we remarked to the colonel's wife that we thought a library needed some comfortable chairs, Mrs. Alfonte, loyal to the Old Army, said indignantly, “Some of the finest generals in the army have sat on those benches.” Perhaps that explained why West Point officers were always so erect. Slumping was impossible on those straight-backed benches.

Then our Special Service uniforms arrived. They were blue gabardine suits with shoulder patches that looked like the end of an open book with pages of different colors representing branches of the service. “The Rainbow Division,” the men called us. I was lucky enough to find a pair of British Walker shoes that buckled on the side and were appropriate with a uniform. The camp was so muddy that polishing them seemed a waste of time, but I did shine them once in a while. My shoes must have bothered the men, who were required to keep their shoes polished at all times. One of them presented me with a can of Kiwi polish. After that I treated myself to professional shines, and my shoes gleamed and passed the men's inspection, which my stockings did not.

My one remaining pair of nylons had to last the Duration. For work I found some handsome,
I thought, cotton mesh stockings imported from England, where they were probably worn for hiking on the moors but were suitable to wear with my British Walkers. I wore them until the men began to ask, “Do you have to wear those stockings?” I did not care to paint my legs as some women did, so my next choice was rayon stockings, presentable if worn wrong side out so they didn't shine, but with feet so badly shaped that pulling them on was like putting my feet into paper bags. They did not dry overnight, and all through the war our shower rod was draped with damp rayon stockings. The men said no more.

The white shirts we were required to wear with our uniforms were also a problem. They were difficult to find and were usually rayon, sure to disintegrate in a short time if sent to a commercial laundry, which in wartime could not promise when they would be returned. Even though housekeeping was simplified by a lack of furniture, I resented ironing shirts in my limited free time until I discovered I could cut the work in half by wearing shirts wrong side out on the second day and keeping my jacket buttoned. No one noticed. Then overcoats arrived. They were made of such coarse stiff woolen fabric (“shoddy,” Mother would have called it) that when I sat
down on the A train, the overcoat did not sit with me. The collar rose above my ears.

On the mornings when I opened the library, no matter how cold and blustery the weather, men, both black and white, were waiting to use the Coke machine. At that time the army was segregated, but our library was not. Rank and race made no difference to us.

The men of the United States, uprooted from their lives by lottery and thrust into the Quarter-master Corps or Military Police, were a revelation more enlightening than travel. I was astounded at the variety of men who found themselves at Camp Knight. A furrier from Marshall Fields in Chicago remarked, “Humph, split skins,” when a corporal's wife walked in wearing a fur coat. A professional gambler from Georgia confided that payday gambling with young soldiers was “jest like rakin' in the leaves” and asked for our help in filling out applications for postal money orders so he could send his winnings home, where he was buying an apartment house. A bootlegger explained how to smuggle liquor into the dry state of Kansas. Several law school graduates from City University of New York hoped somehow to get onto the Judge Advocate General's staff. A man whose job in civilian life had been dyeing the marbleized edges of dic
tionaries explained how it was done. Another man had done a stretch for robbing a Chicago hotel. Men from crowded cities reminisced about their lives in the “C's,” as they called the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The men seemed equally amazed by one another. I overheard a black man telephoning his wife on the library's pay telephone say, “They sez they's Creoles. What the hell is Creoles?” Men from big cities spoke contemptuously of “those farmers” and looked down on fresh-faced small-town boys from the Midwest who saw war as adventure. This did not sit well with me, once a farmer's daughter, and I finally snapped at one man, “You eat, don't you?” After a moment of startled silence, he said apologetically, “I never thought of it that way.”

The language of the army fascinated me. Once when I was hurrying to the Post Exchange to buy a sandwich before the only sort left was potato salad on white bread, a private caught up with me and said, “Jeez, you shoulda been in the infantry, the way you pick 'em up and lay 'em down.”

Our feet grew cold on the cement floor as men showed us pictures of their families and confided, in their various accents, plans for the days when the war, which had only begun, would end and
they could return home. When one man who had been promoted from corporal to sergeant asked if I knew where he could get his new stripes sewn on his blouse, I volunteered to do it for him. After that I sewed on new stripes several times a week. Private First Class stripes were the most difficult because they tended to stretch or bend while I was sewing.

Companies were moved out of camp and replaced by others. Often men from the East came straight to the library to ask, “How far is it to Hollywood?” When told it was about four hundred miles to the south, they asked in disbelief, “In the same state?” When we said that California extended about the same distance to the north, they often said “Jeez” in disbelief.

Once the camp had for a brief time a detachment of men who censored mail for the Army Post Office. They were ordered to skim through letters going to men overseas but not really read them. “You can't help reading them,” one man said. “You get so you watch for certain letters.” Another said, “It seems like some women have no shame.”

I felt sorry for the men, most of whom worked in shifts around the clock loading and guarding ships. Many men had no consideration for those who had to sleep in the daytime and did not
lower their voices. Radios played night and day. One man told me he became so angry he picked up a radio, held it over his head, and dropped it on the floor. We did not disturb exhausted men who came to the library and fell asleep on the new couches. These couches had mysteriously arrived to replace the pewlike benches, leaving us to wonder what became of those benches. Were they shipped to the South Pacific so men would sit up straight in the jungle?

This seemed as reasonable as some of the army's orders. When an order came from Post Headquarters—“The men will attend the movie, and the men will enjoy themselves”—the men laughed about it. When a man imprisoned in the guard house, probably for the usual offense of swearing at an officer, requested a book on mathematics, we sent him one. A sergeant returned it. The Bible was the only reading material permitted in the guard house.

Then one day it was announced that the camp was to have a gas mask drill. Everyone would be issued a mask and be required to walk through a building filled with gas. The day came, but the library staff had not been given masks. “What about us?” we asked, only to be told we were not included in the drill because we were paid from different funds.

Life on the home front was difficult. When we worked a five-day week, I could sometimes go to Mill Valley to visit pregnant Jane, whose army officer husband was in Italy, but when the government decreed that we must work six days a week, I no longer had time for the trip or any other recreation. Going to work meant either waiting for an unreliable bus or walking thirteen blocks to an A train, where passengers were curious about my uniform with its jaunty hat, which also bore the rainbow insignia. “What kind of uniform is that?” I was often asked. One woman wanted to know, “Just who do you think you are in that getup?” Another asked what I was all togged out for. At the army base I had a choice of walking a cold, windy mile to the library or riding in a truck. Going home was easier. Clarence, concerned about my traveling through an unsafe West Oakland neighborhood on the nights I worked until nine o'clock, applied to the ration board for extra gasoline so he could pick me up after work. He was granted enough to come for me every day. We often stopped to eat at one of the several small restaurants on the way home.

When I worked nights I packed a spartan meal, usually a Spam sandwich and a piece of fruit. According to Army Regulation 210-70, librarians and hostesses were the equivalent of captains.
This should have entitled us to get meals in the officers' mess across the street, but we were denied this right, a decision apparently made by a Red Cross volunteer who impressed officers with her wealth. She always carried five hundred dollars in cash so she could lend money to any man in need. That we could have complained by way of our library officer to Colonel Alfonte did not occur to us, and today I wonder why a volunteer was allowed to assume so much power. It was she who insisted the men wear uniforms instead of fatigues to the library because being in uniform would make them “feel better.” We felt men should be entitled to use the library no matter how they were dressed.

Although I enjoyed listening to the men, I did not find Camp Knight a pleasant place in which to work. Almost no one wanted to be there except a few officers who had never had it so good. Enlisted men resented their officers and disliked their work on the docks. As one man told me, “When you stand guard all night, it seems like you hate the whole world.”

One event lifted spirits. Not long after the library opened and Colonel Alfonte was transferred or retired, one of his successors was court-martialed for “making improper advances to the wives of younger officers.” This was a great mo
rale booster for enlisted men because it showed them officers were not always given preferential treatment.

Still, the library was an uncomfortable place. The post librarian understandably resented having to share her position with a junior hostess. I was doubtful about her abilities as a librarian because she disliked selecting books and left their choice to me, work I enjoyed. She also refused to catalog books. I did not mind taking over because I used a simplified system and used the authors' names on title pages. Mark Twain was Mark Twain. She spoke of “her” library, which irritated me after Miss Remsberg's lecture on no part of a library belonging to any one staff member.

The assistants were usually engrossed in personal problems and did not stay long. I missed the calm kindness I was used to from Miss Remsberg in Yakima, the friendly cooperation of the Yakima staff, and the companionship of Sather Gate Book Shop. Poor food, erratic transportation, irregular hours were beginning to wear me down. I was well paid by the standards of the times, but I had little need for money. In wartime, stores spread their merchandise thin or left shelves bare, and wearing a uniform six days a week, I had no need for
more clothes. We could have used more furniture, if we could find any, but I would only have to dust it, and a rug would lead to a vacuum cleaner that would have to be run. A dust mop was faster. I had nothing to do with my checks but deposit them in the bank. Did I really need this job?