Not long after we graduated high school, the war was over and there was an ad in the paper for typists to work at Great Lakes Naval Training Station discharging sailors. Wow, was that every girls dream or what? We lived about 40 miles from there outside of Chicago and lost no time getting up there to apply. We were hired, along with at least 100 other girls and our home was in one of the barracks in Camp Moffet. There were fences around it and we had a house mother. Every time a man entered the building, even a maintenance man, you could hear "man aboard." Of course we worked with sailors all day long at the office and went to a dance at the Hostess House nearly every night. We were there at a dance one night and the person I wanted to be with kept asking Gloria to dance and she wanted to dance with the one that kept askng me to dance, so we did what twins do, we went to the ladies room and changed clothes, went back to the dance and no-one was the wiser and we got what we wanted.  We were waiting for a train to go to either Waukegan or North Chicago..don't remember which. Gloria is in the upper left corner and I'm in front. We were there about a year and we made some life long friendships with other girls, a lot of them from Milwaukee, and this was where we both met our "first loves". As it turned out neither of us married them so I guess absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. After the job was over, they went home to another state and we went back home outside of Chicago. They did come to see us, but it's hard to maintain a long distance relationship when you're 19 and there are hometown boys to date. I guess everything works out for the best, and it was fun while it lasted. ~continue~ Home |