Wac Quotes

From: Bernadette Fox To: Manjula Kapoor Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now. I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a reservation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?” And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. Yes, I’m done. If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet. * I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.

Eventually, more than 150,000 women served as WACs during World War II, making them the first women other than nurses to join the U.S. Army.

probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy’s scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.

is imperative that WAC scholars account for the complex ways in which all students learn to write across the curriculum

One day June took some papers down to the army personnel office that was processing Louis’s classification. When she left, he had been exempted from the service, but she had been sworn in! She was very patriotic and just got carried away. As a WAC she studied electronics at Northwestern University and learned trigonometry and calculus and God knows what else. She had to do it by intensive tutoring, because she had no special aptitude for higher mathematics. But that’s the sort of person she was; no challenge was too big for her. If she didn’t know something, she’d burrow into library books and find out. June

The death toll had reached twenty-one. The survivors of the Gremlin Special were down to three: John McCollom, a stoic twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant from the Midwest who’d just lost his twin brother; Kenneth Decker, a tech sergeant from the Northwest with awful head wounds who’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday; and Margaret Hastings, an adventure-seeking thirty-year-old WAC corporal from the Northeast who’d missed her date for an ocean swim on the New Guinea coast.