Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [44]
Many of the Jessies, now crowded three or four to a room, had mixed feelings about this reverse invasion, as the Waves transformed their women’s college into a battleship in dry dock. But they usually cut their resentment with a grudging patriotism. “We had very little contact with them,” Dr. Elizabeth Knowles Adams has recalled. “Some of us were probably a little jealous because they seemed so glamorous in their uniforms.” For the proponents of the social equality of women, the presence of independent female soldiers on campus could be seen as a bonus. “Woman Power” became essential in the national emergency, and the radical-sounding slogan was adopted for regular use by the United States government, as well as by the Board of Regents of Georgia. Yet even the social feminist Helen Matthews Lewis found their unavoidable presence invasive: “They were always in the way, keeping us from getting to class.”
Mary Flannery skipped the patriotism and went straight for the comedy; in the Waves, she found her most reliable cartoon topic. Not since the nuns she liked to mimic at Sacred Heart had she seen so many single women together in uniform. The first of her series of Waves cuts appeared on January 23, a day after fifteen staff officers were introduced to the students during morning Chapel. The setting is a campus corner, where two girls espy a couple of Waves walking toward them. “Officer or no officer,” says one in a plaid skirt, “I’m going to ask her to let me try on that hat.” There followed two years of girls butting their umbrellas along the backs of marching Waves’ legs; girls clinging to tree trunks, like cats, to escape a drilling platoon; girls sneaking to check if Waves carried gunpowder in their handbags; or using Waves for archery practice.
Not only women, but male soldiers also bivouacked more and more in Milledgeville. Few showed up in O’Connor’s cartoon world, yet they were a force in the town and on campus. Although the only local “base” belonged to the navy women at GSCW, there were many military bases nearby: Camp Gordon, Augusta; Fort Benning, Columbus; Camp Wheeler, Cochran Field, and Warner Robins Field, Macon; as well as a naval hospital in Dublin. On weekends, throngs of servicemen with leave passes crowded into Milledgeville. As there were not enough hotels to house them, or families to take them in, they often slept on porch swings, or in sleeping bags, on campus. “When convoys passed, the soldiers threw down notes for the GSCW students to pick up,” recalls Charmet Garrett, who lived in Ennis Hall across Hancock Street. The military presence in town was dense enough for Bob Hope to broadcast his NBC radio show live from Russell Auditorium, for an audience of Waves and Jessies, on May 18, 1943.
Male soldiers became known to Mary Flannery mostly through Sacred Heart Church, and the USO, or United Service Organizations. A number of Roman Catholic soldiers would show up at her church on Sunday, and the Clines often invited them home for a family dinner. As early as 1941, Aunt Gertie reported to Agnes Florencourt that “two of the soldiers came over from Macon — Louis met one and asked him over, so Mary told Louis to ask him to dinner. . . . they were both at church.” The Clines were just as involved with the USO — Aunt Katie was appointed chairman after the opening of its social club, in December 1943, in a storefront at the corner of Hancock and Wilkinson streets. On Sunday mornings, soldiers who crashed on the campus of GSCW sauntered across the street to the USO to clean up and enjoy free coffee and doughnuts.
While short, solid, gray-haired Katie Cline was a regular presence at the post office, she had known other more engaging moments in her life. As a young woman, she was