WOMEN AND THE WAR
THEN
PEGGY TERRY
The first work I had after the Depression was at a shell-loading plant in Viola, Kentucky. It is between Paducah and Mayfield. They were large shells: anti-aircraft, incendiaries, and tracers. We painted red on the tips of the tracers. My mother, my sister, and myself worked there. Each of us worked a different shift because we had little ones at home. We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. [Laughs.] To us it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing.
Tetryl was one of the ingredients and it turned us orange. Just as orange as an orange. Our hair was streaked orange. Our hands, our face, our neck just turned orange, even our eyeballs. We never questioned. None of us even asked, “What is this? Is this harmful?” We simply didn’t think about it.
Mamma was what they call terminated—fired. Mamma’s mother took sick and died and Mamma asked for time off and they told her no. Mamma said, “Well, I’m gonna be with my mamma. If I have to give up my job, I will just have to.” So they terminated Mamma. That’s when I started gettin’ nasty. I didn’t take as much baloney and pushing around as I had taken. I told ‘em I was gonna quit, and they told me if I quit they would blacklist me wherever I would go. They had my fingerprints and all that. I guess it was just bluff, because I did get other work.
The night my husband came home, we went out with a gang of friends and got drunk. All of us had a tattoo put on. I had a tattoo put up my leg where it wouldn’t show. A heart with an arrow through it: Bill and Peggy. When I went to the hospital to have my baby—I got pregnant almost as soon as he came home—I was ashamed of the tattoo. So I put two Band-Aids across it. So the nurse just pulls ‘em off, looks at the tattoo, and she says, “Oh, that’s exactly the same spot I got mine.” She pulled her uniform up and showed me her tattoo. [Laughs.]
I was raised in the fundamentalist faith. I was taught that I was nothing. My feeling is is God created me, if God sent his only begotten son to give his life for me, then I am something. My mother died thinking she was nothing. I don’t know how chaplains can call themselves men of God and prepare boys to go into battle. If the Bible says, "thou shalt not kill", it doesn’t say, "except in times of war". They’ll send a man to the electric chair who in a temper killed somebody. But they pin metals on our men. The more people they kill, the more medals they pin on ‘em.
NOW
JOSIE PISA
Tetryl was one of the ingredients and it turned us orange... None of us even asked "What is this? Is this harmful?"
The only reason the boys went to college—and they were all smart, Connie especially...She was brilliant. When she entered the convent she went to college. [She was] Twenty-five.
But your brothers went to college?
Oh yeah. They went to the second world war, and then when they came back, they had the G.I. Bill, which put ‘em through college. And they all became successful. One was a teacher, one was an accountant, and the other was treasurer of a company, you know. But we didn’t go to college. I mean I didn’t. Anne married John, her husband, he was a chemist, you know, he was well educated. And in between their marriage she took courses, you know, she did well. And Connie, when she entered the convent she went to college she got her master’s. And then it came to me and I just graduated, and went to work.
Ok, World War II was in forty-one, I was born in twenty-eight, I was thirteen.
Do you remember it?
Oh yeah. I remember when we got bombed, Pearl Harbor. I remember, we had a radio, no TV, and we were glued to the radio. And I remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt coming on and that we were just bombed in Pearl Harbor and that’s—that’s it. So we started there, so we got into the war, and everybody went into the service, all the boys, we were lucky that my brothers came back. Two of my brothers were in World War II, Frank was in the Korean war, which came way after the second world war. They all came back, safely. Yeah, my mother was proud. She had the four cards on the window.
What kind of cards?
When we had somebody in the service in the family, they gave us cards to put on the window, saying we had somebody in the service.
So everyone knew?
Yeah, yeah
What changed during the war?
Oh, we had ration. They rationed us, and…we had different things, like at night during the war when the horn or the whistle blew, we all had to pull our shades down and huddle together in a clear place, a place where they couldn’t see us or shoot us.
It was scary…But we made it…yeah, that was the war. My mother and father were very proud of the boys. We’d go to their camps, where they were inducted to, and we would visit them, even though it was another state.
Where were they?
Where they trained ‘em. That’s in some other state, I was too young to remember.
What was it like to visit them?
Oh, we were happy. Yeah, we loved ‘em. And it was funny, Dominic, my brother, he went away a little chubby, to the service, and when we went to see him, he had lost a lot of weight. And my mother cried, she said, “What did they do to my son?” But it was all the training that he had to do. You know, all the exercise and so forth.
Click below to hear a snippet of Josie's interview.
Josie Pisa is pictured above.