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VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

Mom in the Navy

This was taken on the front steps of the Chapel of the Naval Communications Annex (the former Mt. Vernon Academy), 3801 Nebraska Ave, Washington, DC.  At the time it was taken, Mom (second row, second from right) was an officer in the WAVES.  We know nothing more about this photo, but we assume this was the group of people she worked with.  Perhaps one of these people is your (grand) mother or father, and you have one of the other 15 copies that must exist of this photo.  If this is the case, I'd love to hear from you.
What did she do, you ask?  Well, we're not sure of the details, and we can't ask her, because she died in 1985.  But we're pretty sure she was breaking codes, either German or Japanese ones, by machine.  She was 22 when she entered the Navy in January 1942, the child of a well-to-do Boston family (her dad was a surgeon, her mother a society lady).  She served throughout the war, worked at CIA for a while, got married and then became a housewife and mother.   She remained very quiet about this work for the rest of her life, and my brother and I never grilled her about it.  Now we wish we had asked a few more questions. View full size.

This was taken on the front steps of the Chapel of the Naval Communications Annex (the former Mt. Vernon Academy), 3801 Nebraska Ave, Washington, DC. At the time it was taken, Mom (second row, second from right) was an officer in the WAVES. We know nothing more about this photo, but we assume this was the group of people she worked with. Perhaps one of these people is your (grand) mother or father, and you have one of the other 15 copies that must exist of this photo. If this is the case, I'd love to hear from you.

What did she do, you ask? Well, we're not sure of the details, and we can't ask her, because she died in 1985. But we're pretty sure she was breaking codes, either German or Japanese ones, by machine. She was 22 when she entered the Navy in January 1942, the child of a well-to-do Boston family (her dad was a surgeon, her mother a society lady). She served throughout the war, worked at CIA for a while, got married and then became a housewife and mother. She remained very quiet about this work for the rest of her life, and my brother and I never grilled her about it. Now we wish we had asked a few more questions. View full size.

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Mom was very definitely DEcoding

She used to sing us the alphabet backwards, and told us stories about how hot it was in the office she worked in. She was in charge of a number of "girls," and had absolute authority over who could come into her room. This being the case, she allowed all the girls to strip down to their underwear in the DC summer heat.

She taught herself Braille transcription at 50, loved crosswords, and claimed to be able to read 5-level Teletype tape by sight. I never tested that. The only hint about decryption that she gave us, was a comment that she was the one who had to figure out, when a message wouldn't decrypt, which key the cipher clerk might have hit in error as the ship rolled.

As I said, if I knew then what I know now, I would have asked her a lot more questions.

Pre NSA

The Nebraska Ave facility, as I remember from the 1960s, was more of a cipher/code making facility.

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