The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (33 page)

S
OOKIE AND
D
R
. S
HAPIRO WERE MEETING IN THE BACK ROOM OF THE
Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant out on the Causeway. After he came in and sat down, she looked at him and asked somewhat apologetically, “Dr. Shapiro, would you think I was terribly rude if I ordered something to eat? I don’t know if it’s all right to eat a meal during a session or not.”

“Of course it is. Order anything you want.”

“Oh, thank you. I was so busy working out in my yard all morning, I lost track of time and completely forgot to eat breakfast, and I’m just starving. I got so behind I didn’t even have time to change.”

The waitress who took their order informed her that, unfortunately, it was too late to order breakfast.

“The grill’s already off, hon. We just have what’s on the luncheon menu.”

Sookie looked it over. She knew shrimp was their specialty, but she had just made shrimp and grits last night, so she ordered the fried oysters, hush puppies, coleslaw, and a side order of fried zucchini sticks.

Dr. Shapiro stuck with his usual cup of decaffeinated coffee. He had not quite come to terms with Southern cuisine. You could hardly get a thing that wasn’t fried.

After Sookie’s food came she took a few bites and was in the middle
of telling him what she had said to Marvaleen about the twin sailors. “Honestly, Dr. Shapiro, I just don’t know what possessed me to say a crazy thing like that. I’ve never even dated a sailor, much less—” Suddenly Sookie’s eyes flew wide open and she turned white as a sheet. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’ve got to go.” She then jumped up from the table and ran back to the ladies’ room as fast as she could.

Dr. Shapiro had no idea what was wrong, and she didn’t have time to tell him. Sookie was sitting facing the door and had suddenly spotted Pearl Jeff, her mother’s friend, coming in the door with a group of ladies. Other than her mother, Pearl Jeff was the last person in the world she wanted to run in to.

When Sookie did not return to the table after fifteen minutes, Dr. Shapiro became concerned. She must have eaten a bad oyster, and it could be a case of seafood poisoning, because it had certainly hit her fast. He waited a little while longer, then walked over to the table of women sitting in the corner. “Excuse me,” he said. “My friend is in the ladies’ room and I think she may be ill. Could one of you please do me a favor and check and see if she is all right?”

“Why, certainly,” said Pearl Jeff, as she picked up her purse and headed back to the restrooms. One door was marked “Buoys,” and the other said “Gulls.” She entered the door marked “Gulls.”

Sookie was hiding in a stall, and the minute Pearl spoke she recognized the voice.

“Hello,” she called out. “Is there a lady in here?” When she didn’t get an answer, Pearl marched over to the stall where she saw two feet and banged on the door. “Hello? Are you all right in there? Your gentleman friend is worried about you.”

Sookie panicked. She didn’t know what to do, so she just kept flushing the toilet over and over again.

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
, Pearl came back out and asked Dr. Shapiro, “Was your friend wearing pink tennis shoes with pom-poms?”

“Yes, I think so,” said an anxious Dr. Shapiro.

“Well, she’s in there all right, but from the sound of things, I don’t think she’ll be out for quite a while.” Now he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t just leave, so he sat there and waited.

Finally, after the table of women left, he went up to the counter and asked the waitress if she would go in and check on his friend. After a moment the waitress came out and handed him a note that Sookie had just scribbled on her check pad.

The waitress had informed Sookie that the table of ladies had left, but she was afraid to come out too soon. Pearl and her friends could still be out in the parking lot.

By the time Sookie did think it was safe to come out, the place was empty. Her lunch was ice cold and she had missed her session. Sookie sat in the booth almost in tears. There was just no escaping, no matter how hard she tried. Being Lenore Simmons Krackenberry’s daughter in a small town was like having a tracking device attached to your body. Somebody was always going to know where she was at all times. She had always felt so sorry for poor Princess Anne of England. No wonder she lay low. Sookie knew just how she felt.

L
ONG
B
EACH
, C
ALIFORNIA

1944

It was a Tuesday in October. Fritzi walked into the barracks and greeted everyone as usual. “Hiya, pals, I’m back and ready to eat. Who wants to—” She stopped talking when she noticed that they had barely looked up, and some of the gals looked like they had been crying. “What’s the matter?” Willy pointed to the letter on Fritzi’s bed.

She picked it up and saw that it was from the Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington. She quickly opened it and read the news that General Hap Arnold had directed that the WASP program was to be deactivated on the twentieth of December. Fritzi was stunned. “Is this a joke?”

“No, read on.”

Fritzi sat down on the bed and read the letter. “When we needed you, you came through, and you served most commendably. Blah blah blah.” Then she cut to the end. “But now the war situation has changed, and the time has come when your volunteer services are no longer needed. If you were to continue in service, you would be replacing, instead of releasing, our young men. I know the WASP wouldn’t want that. Blah blah blah. My sincerest thanks, and happy
landings always.” That day, WASPs stationed on ninety different bases all over the country received the letter.

It seemed that thousands of civilian male flight instructors had been excused from joining the army as long as they trained military pilots. But now that the army had all the pilots they needed, they had started closing down flight schools across the country. However, the army didn’t have enough infantry troops for the ongoing war in the Pacific and in Nazi-controlled Europe. Suddenly, these civilian flight instructors found themselves subject to the draft and could end up in combat not as fliers, but as regular foot soldiers. And just as suddenly, a lot of these same instructors wanted to take over the WASPs’ jobs, so they could remain in the States.

Many would have to be trained at great expense to the government to handle the advanced planes the women were now flying, but, nevertheless, the men got together and organized a huge publicity blitz to try to defeat the bill that was now in front of Congress that would militarize the WASPs and keep them flying.

The public was told that it wasn’t patriotic for women to be military pilots if they would be taking jobs away from men, and it was suggested that if they wanted to serve in the military, the women could join the WAC and become nurses, where they were really needed. And then the VFW and the American Legion jumped on board, and the bill to militarize the WASPs was defeated. This meant that the families of the girls who had been killed would be receiving no death benefits, and at the end of the war, the WASPs, unlike all other discharged veterans, would be left with no GI Bill, no medical, no nothing.

It was the first time he’d ever said he loved her, and she really needed to hear that right now. It softened the blow a little. And she did take his advice about the drinks.

D
ECEMBER
17, 1944, F
RITZI LANDED THE BIG FOUR
-
ENGINE BOMBER
for the last time, and before she walked away, she stopped and gave it a pat. “Well, good-bye, old gal. You’re one hell of a plane.”

On December 20, all the WASPs who were stationed all over the country were called back to Sweetwater, and after they had turned over their equipment—gas masks, goggles, leather flying suits, and boots—the government gave the women a dinner to say “Thanks again for your service, good luck, and happy landings.” Fritzi sat there and thought to herself, “Well, that’s a hell of a note.” After the dinner was over, when she’d said all her good-byes, she wandered out on the field and found a plane, gassed and ready to go, and decided if she was being kicked out, the government owed her at least a free ride home.

Fritzi knew she was drunk, but she didn’t care. She had done something she would never be able to forgive herself for. And now that the WASPs had been disbanded and she wasn’t needed anymore, it really didn’t matter to her one way or the other if she lived or died, so she started the motors, took off to the left, and headed in the direction of Wisconsin. She didn’t really want to go home, but she had no other place to go.

She made three or four stops along the way, and the army finally found the missing plane a week later, parked outside a hangar at Blesch Field in Green Bay. After calling a cab, Fritzi was home. A little hungover,
but home. Hijacking a military plane was a serious offense, but no charges were ever filed.

Pinks had been left in charge of cleaning up inventory back in Sweetwater and agreed with her. She knew what Fritzi had been through. And Pinks figured that after what all those gals had done, the government should have flown all of them home.

After the war was over, the WASP records were sealed, and it was pretty much forgotten that they had ever existed at all.

It would be another thirty years before another woman would fly a military plane.

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

1945

O
N
VJ D
AY
,
A NEIGHBOR RAN OUT IN THE STREET AND WAVED HIS
arms and shouted, “The war is over!” Suddenly, there were church bells ringing all over town and horns blowing and kids running around banging pots and pans. They knew it was the end of an era for the entire world.

But most people who had been in it, like Fritzi, just sighed a big sigh of relief. For her, it meant that Winks had made it through alive and would be coming home for good.

The war was over, but it had taken its toll. More than 400,000 Americans had been killed and 1.7 million had been hurt in some way. And most people didn’t know about the 39 WASPs who had been killed or that 16 Army nurses had died by enemy fire, and 67 had been taken prisoner, including Nurse Dottie Frakes, who was held in a Japanese concentration camp for more than three years.

But in August 1945, Americans were in a jubilant mood. Finally, their world could get back to normal. As the headlines said, “Hooray! Rosie the Riveter can finally go home and be Rosie the Housewife again!”

The problem was that a lot of women didn’t want to be just housewives
again. Fritzi was hoping to join Billy and go to California for employment, and Gertrude hoped to get a good, high-paying job at the big Ford Motor Company plant in Willow Run, Michigan. But in the summer of 1945, Kaiser-Frazer Corporation took over the plant to prepare for the postwar years, and it had no room for women. It wanted the best of the jobs to go to the returning GIs. Wink came back home and reopened the filling station, and Angie was happy to go back to being a housewife and mother again. But Gertrude still wanted to work. She tried to get a job flying, but quickly found out that the only job open for women in aviation was that of a stewardess, and when she applied she was told she was too fat to be a stewardess, so she wound up teaching accordion over at Saint Mary’s school.