by Colin Edmund Grant
January 10, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Colin Edmund Grant

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Part 6  Part 7  Part 8  Part 9  Part 10 

As the 30's passed, life changed little, and the family grew up as families do. Boston Girls Latin High School was an excellent school for high achievers, and required that students take an admissions test. "Daddy and Mumma" thought that Marion, a bright young thing, ought to take the test for Girls Latin, so she did, and she got in.

It was a difficult school, and Marion found it to be a grind. Of the eight girls from the Longfellow School who got in, only Marion finished. Marion, not "as fastidious about completing homework as [her brother] Hugh," often wished she were somewhere else, and much preferred just reading to doing homework. She loved to read and she read EVERYTHING, sometimes to the detriment of her grades.

Meanwhile, at home, things were finally looking up. Daddy had taken a civil service exam, and in 1940 he was hired by the US Customs Service as a "storekeeper." His job was to keep tabs on stored material that was sitting in various locations waiting for inspection. The income was decent, and compared to the previous decade, they felt positively rich. After some time, he became a customs inspector, which was an even better job at a better wage. He was an inspector until he retired, and the family was never hungry again. Indeed, Annie and Albert managed to save enough money for a very comfortable retirement.

Girls Latin was "OK, but not [a] particularly happy" time for Marion. Academically, it was difficult and demanding. Socially, Marion was never really thrilled with many of the Girls Latin girls. She had friends, such as Eunice Bernard and Shirley Katz, but was never in with the IN crowd, as she was "not rich enough to be a social butterfly with the popular gang."

This didn't phase her all that much. After all, there were much bigger things going on in the world. The war was on, and she had to work after school not only to help her family, but because everybody was expected to work, what with the boys off to war. She worked at the Boston Music Company, helping to fill orders for sheet music and instruments and repairs and pianos and such, and later worked at Woolworth's in The Village ("The Village" was the local neighborhood center that had a grocery store and a Woolworth's and a drug store). She was an active member of the local Girl Scout Mariners troop, and loved sailing with them in the Charles River Basin. One summer during the war, she won a Girl Scout scholarship and went to a summer camp for two weeks at Treasure Island, on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Marion still wonders who paid for it, but it was fun, even if she felt she was a bit mature to be attending a summer camp.

As graduation approached in 1943, Marion was uncertain of what she wanted to do next. "A girl could be a teacher, a nurse, a librarian, a sales clerk or a telephone operator," and none of those careers really called out to her. Not wanting to make a career of Woolworth's, and not sure about going to college, she went over to the Boston Naval Shipyard in Charlestown and applied for work, thinking it would be more interesting than Woolworth's and a help in the war effort. She was hired immediately.

She graduated Girls Latin ranked in the middle of the class and started at the Navy yard the following Monday. Her job was called Special Messenger, and her function was to track down parts. When a ship in the shipyard had trouble finding a repair part from the normal sources, Marion would go to work. This usually meant walking around from warehouse to warehouse and office to office looking for rare or unusual parts, or tracking them down via telephone. Once the part was found, she'd carry it to the office and have it sent to the ship, or, if it were too big for her to carry, she'd arrange to have it delivered.

Marion absolutely loved this job, which was part clerk ("Yes, I can get that"), part detective ("I last saw one of those in warehouse D, but I heard it was moved"), part engineer ("Can you use one of THESE instead of one of THOSE?"), and always involved a lot of movement, conversation, and action. Since most of the ships in the yard were destroyers, she became quite an expert on destroyers, and still is.

Every noon they had 30 minutes for lunch, which was marked by a horn blast and followed by music blared over loudspeakers. They always started with Artie Shaw's recording of Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, and Marion is still sick of it.

In addition to a $1,200/year salary, the job came with certain perks. Most important, she was allowed to have a second pair of shoes (they were rationed), which was the height of luxury, and had the delightful side effect that it made her siblings jealous as hell. She was living at home and forking over a healthy portion of her paycheck for the privilege, but still, it was all good.

She had many friends at the Navy yard, some of whom are still friends. There was Virginia Burke (whom she had known since the third grade), and Frances Concemi from Lawrence (practically another planet), and Joyce Sabean, whose husband looked like a scarecrow after returning from the South Pacific. It was a happy time, despite the war. The family was no longer starving, she was free from the drudgery of Girls Latin, and there were sailors everywhere. What more could a girl want?

Marion was soon one of those people about whom you would say, "She really runs the place," and was trusted with quite a bit of information, such as manufacturing plans and schedules, and ship's orders, to which she technically should not have been privy. After almost a year on the job, she made the mistake of telling a girlfriend's beau that he ought not to make plans for a certain date because he would be on a shakedown cruise. Word of her advice got back to her superiors, and she was practically accused of being a spy ("I didn't tell him exactly what or exactly where or exactly when, but boy, were they mad!"). As a disciplinary measure, she was moved to a desk job that consisted mainly of trimming the bottom off paper messages that did not use the whole page (paper was in short supply). She understood the punishment -- loose lips sink ships -- but she hated that job.

She would have eventually worked her way back to the Special Messenger job, but it seemed like that would take forever, and at 18 she suffered from the impatience of youth, and wondered what she should do.

(By the way, Ma told me that if she had it all to do over again, and could have stayed at any job she ever had for as long as she wanted, she'd have stayed a Special Messenger in the Navy yard.)

Click Part 5 below to continue.

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Part 6  Part 7  Part 8  Part 9  Part 10