My Aunt Ellen tells her story of her courtship and marriage in 1940, 1941 and 1942. Then in 1942 her husband joined the Navy. She went on the train to live with him in Providence. R. I., then in San Diego CA. Her experiences on the train and when getting into New York City, a Texas girl who never had been out of Texas is in her own words and I wrote this story as she told it to me.
She Was A Navy War Bride
A few years ago, I wrote a story about my Aunt Ellen, or Aunt Ine, as we all called her. It was called “Ellen’s Courtship”. She was an amazing woman. Last night, Aunt Ine passed away. She was 85 years old, and had a life in which she always worked and also lived her life to the fullest. I thought about her and her romantic courtship days, when she met the man of her dreams whom she married and was married to for nearly 60 years. I thought about their love and how close they were all those years. He died about 5 years ago, and now she is with him again. Today I went back and listened to the tape I made of that interview. I decided to write this story as she told it to me. Pictured is my Aunt Ellen on the left and my mother Bertie Lee Goode Zook on the right. Probably taken in the late 1940's.
Here is the real story of Ellen’s Courtship:
Lois: You got married in 1941. Where did you meet Uncle Jelly?
Ellen: I met him in Kingsville in 1940.
Lois: What were you doing in Kingsville?
Ellen: I was a car hop. It was at a place called Reese’s Coffee Shop.
Lois: What were you doing in Kingsville?
Ellen: You may not want to hear this, but back in those days………well, I had this friend
….and she talked me into going back with her to Kingsville…where she was living with her sister, .and she told me she would help me find a job down there…and well, I had broken up with my boy friend…..so, I decided to go….
Lois: Were you living with Grandma and Grandpa then?
Ellen: Yes, and so Daddy took us to the edge of town so we could hitchhike down there.
Lois: You hitch-hiked?
Ellen: Yes, we did. You wouldn’t do that these days. But this man picked us up and he was going all the way down to Corpus. But when he got to Corpus, he went right on through and took us all the way to Kingsville. He was a very nice man. We got to her sister’s house and the very next day she went with me over to Reese’s and they hired me right away. I was a car hop. Your Uncle Jelly was working for a construction company. He would come by there early every morning and drink a cup of coffee.
Lois: How old were you then? And how old was he?
Ellen: I was 22 years old. He was two years older than me. He was 24.
Lois: Was he from Kingsville?
Ellen: Yes, his Mother and Daddy were from there. And then he would come back at night and drive up there in his little car, it was a little Model A. It was one of those roadsters; I guess you’d call it. I’d go out and I would wait on him.
Lois: You were working a split shift?
Ellen: Yeah, we would close about 11:00 AM, and then open again later in the afternoon. I would go wait on him every night, and didn’t realize for the longest, it was the same guy who was coming by in the mornings.
Lois: Sounds like he was coming to see you!
Ellen (laughing): Oh, he was! That’s what he said!
Lois: So then what happened?
Ellen: We didn’t date for a long time. I guess I had known him a month or so before I went out with him. And I dated him probably a year before we got married.
Lois: When did you get married?
Ellen: We got married on July 12, 1941.
Lois: So you married down in Kingsville. Did you live down there too?
Ellen: Yes, we rented a little house. We paid thirty dollars a month for it. It had a bedroom, a living room, a bath and a kitchen.
Lois: Did you still work?
Ellen: No, he made enough money so I didn’t have to work.
Lois: I know he went into the service. When was that?
Ellen: I guess it was in 1942, after the war started. He joined the Navy.
Lois: Where did he go for his training?
Ellen: He went to Virginia. Then he got sent to Rhode Island. And I got on the train to go be with him. He came home for leave, after Boot Camp and then went back to Rhode Island. He didn’t know where he was going to go from there, and he wanted me to come.
I took a train up there. It was the first time I had ever been out of Texas.
Lois: You went by yourself?
Ellen: Yeah, and you know, when we went through Pennsylvania, where all those coal mines were, there was so much black soot, that when we got to New York, I was covered with soot. I had to go to the bathroom, and when I saw my face, it was black. See, they didn’t have air conditioning in those days, and all the windows were down, and that soot would come in on you.
Ellen: And when I got up to Grand Central Station in New York, I had to take another train out to Rhode Island. And when I got there, he was supposed to be there waiting for me. I didn’t see him anywhere and he didn’t see me anywhere. I finally had them to page him and he came to where I was. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.
Lois: Where did you go from there?
Ellen: We went to a hotel. I hadn’t gotten a room and so the next day I went to look for a room, and I found a room with a family in Providence. I got a room there and I’ll never forget it. It was upstairs. They were a real sweet couple, but every time they would get company, I would hear her talking, “Oh, you’ve got to meet this girl. She is so sweet.
She is from Texas, and her husband is in the Navy.” Then she would call me real loud, “Mrs. Sharp! Come on down here-I want you to meet someone!” So I would have to go down there, and she would introduce me, and say, “Oh you’ve got to hear her talk. She is a real Texan!”
Lois: She loved to hear you talk, then!
Ellen: Yeah, and up there, they didn’t know what chili was. They never heard of chili. And me…I was raised on chili. And I would go to the grocery store to buy chili meat. And the butcher didn’t even know what it was, so I had to tell him how I wanted the meat cut up. Not like hamburger, but a little bigger, and he would cut it into little bitty chunks of meat for me to make chili…I had to tell him how. And I couldn’t find chili powder up there, and had the hardest time finding it. But anyway, I started making chili for them. And they couldn’t get enough of it…the people I lived with. So I had to show her how to make chili.
Lois: So did Uncle Jelly come over from the base to see you or stay with you?
Ellen: Yes, he would have the weekend off and he would come and stay with me there at the house. He was waiting on orders to go overseas.
Lois: How long did you stay there?
Ellen: Not very long, about three weeks. And I went back to Texas on the train. I never will forget….when I left Providence, I came to what I thought was Grand Central Station, and I got off there, and it was before Grand Central Stati0on! And I didn’t know what to do! So I caught what I thought was a train, but it was one of those…. what do you all them….. like a trolley….but it was underground?
Lois: Do you mean a subway?
Ellen: Yes! That was it. It was a subway. And I finally did get into Grand Central Station.
And then I got on a train there to come to Texas. And I didn’t have to get off any more! And they had standing room only on that train. I didn’t even get a seat. I had to sit on my suitcase. I sat on my suitcase almost all the way to Texas. Till someone finally got off and I got a seat. It was terrible.
Ellen, continued: When we got into Texas, every one said, “Oh you’re from Texas aren’t you?”
I said, “Yes, I am”.
They said, “You’ve got ranches here don’t you?”
I said, “Yes we have some.”
And then they said, “Oh, my, and you have cowboys and Indians, don’t you?”
That is all they could think of…. was Cowboys and Indians, because that is what they had seen in movies.
I told them, “Well, not any more. That was years ago.”
But they just couldn’t believe we didn’t still have Cowboys and Indians.
Ellen: Well, I got home and I wasn’t home too long, when he called and told me they were being shipped overseas, and they were going to Oakland first. So he wanted me come, and I got on the train in Kingsville and went all the way out there to California.
And he met me at the depot and he already had a room for me at a hotel. I stayed there a couple days and then we went out to the base, and he found a room for me in a little town near there. It was with a family, and they owned a restaurant, and they let me work there and gave me a room too.
Lois: How long did you stay there before he shipped out?
Ellen: Oh about three months. But then he had to come down to Oxnard, California, which was the Port of Embarkation, so I rode down there with a girl, whose husband was in the service too. Well, then we got us a room there in Oxnard with this family. They had the front bedroom, but they moved to the back room, so we could have the front room. It was real nice of them. It was so neat. They just treated us so nice!
Ellen: I got a job while we were there. It was at the place where they had oranges, which came from an Orange Ranch. We had to check those oranges. I got so sick, seeing all those oranges. We would go out to the base and eat dinner and go to movies. But while we were there, this couple would always want us to eat with them. They wanted us to have Christmas dinner with them. And they had the nicest Christmas for us. They were so sweet.
Lois: So you all spent Christmas there in Oxnard.
Ellen: Yes, and on January 1, Jelly and I went to the Rose Bowl Game, in Pasadena. We had such a good time. That was where we saw Bob Hope. He was in the seat right below us! We talked to him and everything. We shook hands with him and his wife.
Lois: How exciting! You must have had really good seats!
Ellen: Yes we did. Then the week before Jelly left, we went to see this movie, called “The Fighting Seabees”. That was what he was, he was in the Seabees. And John Wayne was in that movie. Well, that wasn’t no movie to see when your husband was going off to war in the Seabees!
Ellen: Well he left, and I stayed there about a week, getting ready to come back home. There was two ladies and me, and one of them had a car. So we all rode with her. She was going to either Oklahoma or Missouri. And we wouldn’t stop at a tourist court or a hotel, we would stop at places, where there were families that would take in people like we were.
Lois: How would you find these places when you would come into the towns?
Ellen: We would stop at a filling station and ask. They would tell us because they had all the information. There was always people in every town that would take in people like us and not charge anything.
Lois: That was really nice of them. Where did this lady take you to?
Ellen: She dropped me off in Abilene, Texas. From there, I caught a bus to Coleman, where I had a grandmother and some aunts living. And from there… later on, I caught the bus on to San Antonio.
Lois: Then what did you do while he was gone overseas?
Ellen: I got me a job in San Antonio, and a room. It was off of S. Flores. The job was out at Camp Normal. You probably never heard of it. I worked nights at first, in the area where all the jeeps and trucks got gas. I had an office and I had to take down the license plates numbers and then when the guys would holler how much gas they got, I would write it down. Then they would leave and go up to Camp Bullis, and when they got back, they would tell me how much gas they used. One day our boss took us all up to Camp Bullis. Boy, what a ride, it was in a jeep. And we went everywhere, ugh, what a ride. But
it was fun.
Lois: How long was Uncle Jelly gone?
Ellen: He was gone until 1945. He was in the South Pacific. He said he slept with his gun by his side all the time. But he never got hurt.
Lois: What did he do when he came back?
Ellen: When he came back home, he had a job waiting for him in Kingsville, with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. We moved back down there and that is where we lived. That was five years after we had met. We both had done a lot of traveling in those five years. It was good to be back home.
Want to review or comment on this short story?
Need a FREE Reader Membership?
Reviewed by Ronald Hull
1/29/2015
I enjoyed Ellen's story. I never asked my aunt Marion and uncle Ed's war story… He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1940 and served 20 years. I believe they got married around 1943 and traveled a lot during his career. He never served overseas during World War II. She is 90 and he will soon be 96. My father tried to enlist in 1941 but was rejected for a perforated eardrum and poor eyesight. He married my mother in 1942 when she was 17. My twin brother and I were born that same year. My mother didn't leave Wisconsin until 1947 when she took the train to California to drive my grandparents back to Wisconsin.
(Richard M. Feldman) Ever since I was a young boy, the only thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. I wanted to own and work on a real ranch, with cattle and horses. Especially horses.
While I never became a cowboy, considering everything I have done
Jamie was a healthy, active 12-year old who loved to skate and played hockey as well as any boy. Then one afternoon during a game, she suffered a stroke that changed her world. Her memoir takes the reader through her ordeal and her journey out of the
She Was A Navy War Bride
