Dorothy Reed

By Brian Emtman and John Moody

We sit expectantly waiting as our teacher reads the list, listening for the name of the World War II veteran we have been assigned to interview for this project.  As students and veterans are paired up and sent off to discuss life during the Great Depression and World War II, we remain seated, having not heard the name of our interviewee.  Finally, the last name is called, and one more student and veteran leave the room.  We approach our teacher to ask why we have not been paired up with the man we were originally assigned to interview and are informed that he was unable to show up.  So, he leads us down to the cafeteria, saying that we will have the opportunity to interview someone else.  It is here that we meet Dorothy Reed.

Dorothy Reed is a woman with thousands of stories to tell, starting back in her childhood days when she was growing up in rural Idaho.  Reed is a woman who is limited by a wheelchair but still looks like she has the strength to do anything she wants to do.  With a monstrous tape recorder set in front of her, she begins her story.

She was born in Lewiston, Idaho in 1917, then attended grade school in Kamiah.  She attended high school in Clarkston, to and from which she walked several miles every day.  Unlike many high school age children of her day, she was able to get a job.  Her work at a dime store brought in important extra money.  This was very helpful, since at that time the Great Depression was well underway.  She recalls that at one point, her parent's savings totaled twenty-five dollars.

After high school graduation in 1935, Reed attended a business college.  She then moved across the country by herself and went to work for the government in Washington, D.C.  She was there when World War II broke out. Later she rejoined her mother in California and took a job in a shipyard as a welder, which paid ninety-five cents an hour.  Soon after taking the job, however, a man came out into the shipyard while she and the other welders were working and asked if anyone knew how to type, as they were very short on typists at the moment.  At the time Dorothy could type one hundred twenty-five words per minute, and she said so.  From then on, she worked in the office typing documents for the company, receiving a raise every time the welders did until she was earning one dollar and thirty-five cents an hour.

In 1944, however, her mother decided she would like to move back to Idaho.  This return might have been in response to Dorothy's younger brother being shot down over Burma where he was serving as a fighter pilot in the China-Burma-India theater of the war.  There was not much work available in Idaho, prompting her to join the Women's Army Corps, or WACs, in Spokane, Washington.  After attending basic training in Des Moines, Iowa, she was sent to Stockton, California where her excellent typing abilities landed her a job that mainly involved typing the certificates for soldiers who advanced in rank or passed flight training.

After a while, Reed was sent to New Hampshire where she participated in shipping soldiers overseas.  Then, as a turning point in her life, she was sent across the Atlantic toward the great European continent.  She and some other WACs traveled by plane over the Azores to land in Casablanca.  She recalls that they were stuck in Casablanca for a week with hideous drinking water that came in a bag.

"Champagne was the only thing we could drink without making us have diarrhea," she recalled while we cringed at the thought.  However, while she was there she took a tour and had a chance to view what she called the "pastel colored houses" of the city.

On her way to Karachi, India, the pilot flew the plane low over the city of Jerusalem, where Reed remembers how she could see the incredibly narrow and crowded streets of the city.  She then transferred planes in Karachi and flew to the city of Calcutta, India where she again worked in an office, this time keeping track of  the soldiers at a large military base.

Reed remembers that the base was like a modern day warehouse - large and spacious.  The people working there were fairly isolated and were required to have escorts every time they left the building.  Reed was in Calcutta in August, when what she and other war veterans refer to as "the bomb" was dropped over Hiroshima, ultimately ending the war.

Nine months had passed since Reed had joined the army and it was time to go home.  When Reed and others were on their way from the base to the airport in Calcutta the enemy opened fire upon them.  "It was the closest we got to anything of a war as far as I was concerned," she recalls.  When we asked about what the locals were like, she responded by saying, "They carried umbrellas instead of guns!"

We then, with confused faces, asked who were the people who were shooting at her.  "They were the ones that were carrying the guns," she replied with a bright smile. 

On the way home, they visited the Taj Mahal, where she witnessed the local people doing some very strange things.  The Ganges River runs behind the Taj Mahal and there she saw many large sea turtles being fed infant human babies as sacrificial food. 

After what seemed like a long plane ride, they landed in Texas and were shipped over to Washington, D.C. for "some stupid reason," as she put it.  Reed was finally moved to Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of  Chicago for her honorable discharge.

"So where did you move to then?" we asked.

"I stayed in Chicago."

"Really?"

"Yep . . . for forty years!"

"And what did you do there?"

"I got married."

During those long forty years Reed was married to a man who had also participated in the war.  Mr. Reed was a radar man for the Navy and was primarily stationed on the aircraft carrier Cabot in the South Pacific.  He was there when the Atomic Bombs were dropped. 

Reed and her husband had two daughters and five grandchildren.  After forty years in Chicago, in 1985 Reed and her husband became residents of Clarkston, Washington.  And as a most recent turning point in her life, her husband passed away in November 1999, which compelled her move to Pullman, Washington, where one of her daughters now lives.

Our interview came to an end with both Reed and ourselves talking about what an amazing life she's experienced.  The life of someone of our generation is not even remotely comparable to the life of a World War II veteran.  Through the experiences they had, whether in front of the enemy or in the struggle to defend the world from the enemy, the people of that generation have been given some sort of patriotic characteristic that we don't have.  It's these people who value freedom the most and live their lives to the fullest.  If Dorothy Reed had not experienced the Depression and the War, it is guaranteed that she would be a much different person than the amazing person she is now.  Obviously, her aiding in the War was meant to be.