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.

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.

W.A.C. Bennett grew tired of the company’s obstinance. In August 1961, after rumors of a potential takeover had circulated within the province for months, Bennett introduced the Power Development Act into the legislature in order to confiscate BC Electric for C$111.0 million. The bill passed unanimously, allowing the government to seize control of the utility. The move was highly controversial, sparking an uproar within the business press, with some overly dramatic papers even labeling Bennett a dictator. In an unfortunate coincidence, the head of British Columbia Power and BC Electric, A.E. “Dal” Grauer, had passed away a few days earlier, and his funeral transpired on the very same day the government took over the company he had led.184 In addition to taking BC Electric, the bill offered to buy the rest of BC Power for C$68.6 million, with interest accruing on this amount until the offer expired at the end of July 1963. Combined with the C$111.0 million paid for BC Electric, this offer would result in a total payment for all of BC Power’s operations of C$179.6 million—or the equivalent of C$38.00 per share. Bennett justified this price by highlighting that the proposal was a premium to the C$34.75 price the shares sold for the day before the expropriation.185 While the combined price of C$38.00 per share was reasonable, the valuation for the constituent parts was peculiar. The C$111.0 million price for BC Electric matched its paid-in capital but ignored the other C$28.6 million of common book equity. And this amount sidestepped the debate over whether book value was even an appropriate methodology for the utility in the first place. The C$68.6 million price for the rest of BC Power’s assets was even odder since these remnant assets generated no income and were carried on the balance sheet at only C$4.0 million. This was a clear overpayment for the holding company’s assets, proposed to entice it into consenting to the BC Electric takeover.186 Predictably, BC Power did not stand idly by. After preliminary attempts to negotiate a higher price were thwarted, the company took action in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on November 13, 1961. BC Power sought rulings on the validity of the initial Act, the right to additional compensation, and the convertibility feature of debentures issued by BC Electric (more on this last point in the next section).187 While the parties awaited trial, the government took additional steps to further entrench the takeover. At the end of March 1962—nearly eight months after the original seizure—the British Columbia legislature passed two new statutes. The first was the province’s amendment of the Power Development Act, which paid an additional C$60.8 million to BC Power for BC Electric and eliminated the offer for the rest of the parent company’s assets. Table 1 shows that the amendment didn’t significantly alter the total compensation. But the new consideration was a more realistic number for BC Electric and solved for the peculiar offer for the remaining assets, which BC Power would now have to sell themselves.

Learning by watching and doing is what Judy did at home, so she could see that life in the WAC would not be that different from life at home in one important way: no one would teach Negro women what they needed to get ahead. The women would have to figure it out on their own.

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.

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

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

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.

At the beginning of my last year in elementary school the class was tested and, based on our academic records and scores on these tests, about twelve of us were promoted, to be sent to the freshman year of high school a year early. I never made it. I stopped by home on my way to Booker T. Washington High School to share the good news with my parents. I expected praise, but they would have none of it. I was already two years ahead, having begun my schooling in the second grade. They feared that I would miss too much by skipping a grade at this point and sent me back to elementary school. I was hurt and embarrassed until I found out that only two sets of parents had permitted the promotion. Of these two advanced students, one graduated with the rest of us and the other finished high school a year later.

As we grew older there came a gradual awareness of a black social order and a white social order, each interdependent but separate and unequal. Each side knew the rules even though the white order, having made the rules, included members who changed the rules at will. In general, children in their early years were protected by their parents from the harshness of the system.

We have tried to teach you right from wrong. Just do right.

And teach I did, in my hometown, in the same segregated system where I had been a student. Several of us who had been in high school together were back, now college graduates, teaching in a system where our white counterparts were high school graduates. Negroes had to be twice as qualified as whites for equivalent jobs.

-Don't advertise when you are down. When people believe that you are down, they press down; when they think you are up, they push up. - Don't worry that people talk about you, just hope that the talk is good. The time to worry is when no one mentions you at all, for it means that you have made no impression. - Don't tell a lie; you may have to tell a second, even a third, to protect the first one. Real trouble begins when you forget the order in which you told them. - Don't look back when you have made a decision. You cannot change the past, and looking back only impedes forward movement.

In the society of the forties, great effort was exerted to prohibit the appearance of Negroes in any activity that even smacked of the unusual, of being honorable, and especially of being first. Even in the battle areas Negroes were denied the opportunity to fight for their country and were kept in the dirty and most unmilitary positions as the unsung support personnel.

I, a Negro, had my picture on the front page of a white daily without having done anything criminal, a most unusual situation that added to the community's support of my actions.

The Sun Is My Undoing (a novel about the evils of slave trading),

The only event that seemed of significance was that the air-conditioning broke down before we arrived in Toledo and, when we finally did arrive there, we were moved to another Pullman car.

Colonel Faith apologized for the fact that we were segregated. He assured us that it was not his idea, that he had hoped that it would not be so, but that he was just following Army policy. I felt then, and a year later had an opportunity to express that feeling to the colonel, that his apology was made to ease his own feeling of guilt about not being in a position to see that the WAAC be integrated.

patriotism and discrimination reached an "accommodation": there were jobs for all, but some were "white" jobs and some were "colored" jobs.

Whatever of glamour that was brought by any of the women was promptly and completely eliminated with the donning of the uniform. We were very proud of ourselves and the uniforms we had been issued.

The first officer candidate class was the guinea pig for the WAAC, and lots of adjustments had to be made on both sides, by the trainees and the trainers. We were subjected to hundreds of changes during that first six weeks. We were the people upon whom the rules and policies were tried out, changed and tried, and in many cases changed back to the first position. We were the people, as Colonel Hobby said, and said so well, beginning the tradition for women in the service. There were many unpleasant moments and disillusioning experiences, and there were the pleasant and hopeful ones.