Just as the roaring twenties rolled around the corner, my great-grandmother, Hattie Simmons Bush arrived in the world on May 10, 1922. Growing up the middle child of nine children, Hattie was an easy going girl, who worked hard and played harder. She grew up on a farm in Pisgah, Iowa, where her family raised sheep, pigs, and cows. When Hattie was small, she and her older sister, Delores, loved to ride their pony, Dixie, who had a crippled foot, but still gave the girls plenty of excitement. Before Christmas, they would go out to the pasture and pick out a tree, which they would decorate with candles.
Hattie graduated with a class of eighteen students from Pisgah High School in 1940—one year before the United States joined the war—with aspirations of becoming a hair stylist. The next year, while she was attending beauty school in Sioux City, Iowa, she met Frank Bush at a social dance in town. Before the year was out, they were planning to get married. However, when tragedy struck at Pearl Harbor and the United States jumped headlong into World War II, Frank was drafted into the Army Air Force Ground Troops and sent to California to the Air Base in the mountains near Victorville.
Loathe to be separated from her newly found beau, Hattie packed her bags and made the long trek to California to live with her aunt. In Victorville, Hattie met Joellen and decided to move out of her aunt’s house and rent an apartment with her new friend. Not long after, Joellen informed Hattie of a job opening at an airplane factory. When I asked my grandmother why she chose this job, she answered with a laugh, “Well, I had to support myself!” Hattie and Joellen worked there for good wages, in a group of women assigned to put parts on the lower section of the airplanes. Because many men were drafted into the army, there were many opportunities for women to acquire jobs that were usually reserved for men. Who would imagine that twenty-year old girl from a small farm in Iowa, who had graduated from high school only two years before, would be in California helping to build airplanes?
Too soon, news came that Frank was to be deployed to England were he would be stationed at an Army Air Force base. Before he flew out, Frank and Hattie were married in January of 1944. They made their vows before a priest in the chapel on Sheppard Army Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, a decidedly non-frilly affair, with only one other friend of Frank’s present and without any wedding dress or veil. My great-grandmother reminisced that she wasn’t disappointed by the ceremony, but was simply ecstatic to be married before Frank left. It would be two years before she saw him again.
The newly-named Mrs. Hattie Bush moved back to Iowa, and because of her experience at the factory in California, was lucky to get a job working at another airplane factory in Sergent Bluff. She passed the time while Frank was in England by keeping busy. She still went to dances with her girlfriends, where there were plenty of soldiers to dance with. Hattie also went to the movies, although she was always disgruntled that the films were so often about the war that she was trying so hard to forget. She worked hard to support herself while Frank was away and waited impatiently for his return. Like many women, she waited for news of the war’s end, listening closely to her radio and watching every headline. When the news arrived in September, 1945, Hattie was overjoyed. It wouldn’t be long before her husband, Frank, would be home, and they could begin their marriage together, unfettered by war any longer.
The course of my great-grandmother’s life was significantly altered by World War II. If America had never joined the war, Hattie almost surely would never have moved to California, worked in an airplane factory, or been married on an Army Air Force Base, but like so many women of the 1940s, she established her independence during the war by joining the forces of “Rosie the Riveter.”
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