Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [43]
A rare campus event that O’Connor truly enjoyed was the Golden Slipper, an annual drama contest between the freshmen and sophomore classes, with a small golden slipper as the award. “I remember her being behind some of the brilliant backdrops and scenery in this competition,” says her classmate Frances Lane Poole. The production that November was especially important to her, as the freshman entry, “Blossoms on Bataan,” was directed by Betty Boyd. It was set in a foxhole during the Battle of the Philippines, an American defeat in April 1942. The equally topical sophomore production “The Bell of Tarchova” took place in a village church during the 1939 Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia. When the sophomore class won, O’Connor’s November 14 cartoon featured her trademark girls, defeated, in highly elongated saddle shoes, with the caption “Doggone the Golden Slipper Contest. Now we have to wear saddle oxfords.”
Enough excitement was generated by these cartoons that at the end of her first school year the Macon Telegraph and News ran a profile, written by Nelle Womack Hines, alongside a freshman photo of a grinning O’Connor wearing round glasses, her hair done in the typical pin-curled style of the 1940s. The piece was headlined “Mary O’Connor Shows Talent as Cartoonist.” Hines found herself with an easily quotable subject in the girl she characterized as “fast making a name for herself as an up-and-coming cartoonist”: “When asked how she went about her work, Miss O’Connor replied that first — she caught her ‘rabbit.’ In this case, she explained, the ‘rabbit’ was a good idea, which must tie up with some current event or a recent happening on the campus.” Hines rightly observed, with coaching from the cartoonist, “Usually Mary presents two students in her cartoons — a tall, lanky ‘dumb-bunny’ and a short and stocky ‘smart-aleck’ — female, of course.” The interviewer’s conclusion was politic: “A keen sense of humor enables her to see the funny side of situations which she portrays minus the sting.”
IN JANUARY 1943, World War II came marching onto the campus of Georgia State College for Women. By that winter, the global conflict had intensified. GSCW students and faculty heard daily news reports of battles from Guadalcanal to Tripoli and Stalingrad, as they worked in the Civilian Morale Service’s Key Center, operating out of Russell Library. But the war came home in a more startling way when Waves began drills on campus, and moved into their dorms and classrooms. Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services were among eighty-six thousand female soldiers pressed into navy service on the home front. With lobbying from the powerful Milledgeville Congressman Carl Vinson, House chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee (who helped Ed O’Connor win his FHA appointment), GSCW was chosen as one of four campuses for on-site training (Smith was the only other women’s college).
The first of four hundred initial “Ripples” (a nickname that never caught on) “weighed anchor” on campus on January 15, taking over the prime dorms of Ennis, Sanford, Mayfair, Beeson, and the top floor of the Mansion, their numbers eventually adding up to a startling fifteen thousand between 1943 and 1945. As regulations required the women to speak navy language, Ennis became the “U.S.S. Ennis,” and its floors, “decks”; its stairs, “ladders”; its windows, “ports.” As part of their training to replace navy men at shore stations, the Waves woke to reveille, marched sixteen miles daily, attended six lectures in Arts Hall,