After the celebrations that May brings-a May 12th Mothers’ Day concert at the New Jersey State Museum, college graduations, Mercer County Park’s World Food Extravaganza May 17-18th, and the Sensational Soul Cruise Dance Party at Riverview Plaza on May 24th-the month ends by honoring our military on May 25th with a Memorial Day parade from Lawrence High School, followed by a ceremony at Lawrence Veteran Park, 100 Oaklyn Terrace, in Lawrence.
But don’t wait until the holiday to learn more about the role that Trentonians-female and male-played in the military during the Second World War.
We are surrounded by local historians; you just have to know where to look and whom to ask. Many older Trenton bus drivers proudly serve as ersatz historical guides, especially for non-native residents like myself, considering it a part of their job.
Get off at the State House downtown and cross the street to Veterans Park to marvel at sculptor Thomas Jay Warren’s twelve-foot tall, bronze symbol of the soldiers’ motto of “service, duty, and sacrifice”. Created in 2008, “Lady Victory” commands the center of the pocket park, surrounded by six service markers and two-story walls representing the six branches of the military with amphitheater seating that allows visitors to sit, read, relax, and reflect on the rich history displayed on its kiosk walls.
In the early 2000s, curious about the contributions of Trenton’s women to the war effort in the 1940s, I organized a “senior prom” for the senior citizens at my church, with Big Band music, and blue plastic plates (in reference to that era’s “blue plate specials”!). Encouraged to bring (or wear, if it fit) their old uniforms to the party, one congregant proudly wore a white WAVE uniform and brought other uniforms from the era to display!
My research led me to the site of the landmark General Motors manufacturing plant, a major local employer of automobile and aircraft assembly workers in the past. When I moved to this area from New York City in the mid 1990s, the GM plant located across from Marazzo’s, in what is actually Ewing, New Jersey, was a decaying skeleton of its former self, waiting for decisions to be made on how and when to level its remains for the site’s next iteration. But in its heyday, the GM plant received Grumman-designed combat planes at an adjacent Naval Air Facility (“NAF”, to vets) known as Mercer Field. A faded memory even for many older Trentonians, you have to be persistent in your research to find information about Mercer Field today.
But Sylvia Brugger of the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) worked on aircraft for WWII as one of “the Janes who made the planes”, memorialized in a popular song of the time, “We’re the Janes Who Made the Planes”!
Interviewed several years ago, Alice Lain, originally from Detroit and Illinois, was stationed as a WAVE at Mercer Field in Trenton from 1944 to 1946. Drawn to a recruitment ad back home, Lain attended boot camp at what is now Lehman College, receiving training in radio radar restoration as an Aviation Radio Technician, bravely climbing up onto the wing herself to walk inside on the shaky planks that were provided.
A competitive basketball player nicknamed “Red”, Lain and her team of WAVES played against many teams including the one from Camp Kilmer. On her days off she and her friends visited nearby Washington Crossing, Philadelphia, the shore at Asbury Park, and even hitchhiked to New York City!
The middle daughter of a complex, self-contained, young widower and Army veteran (who did not see combat), hearing firsthand the testimonies from military women and men brings my research to life. Save for the time my father told me that he could still count to ten in Japanese, Daddy spoke very little of his Army experience. He did, however, drive my little brother, my aunts, and I one Sunday to Fort Dix, proudly ushering us into the huge “mess hall” dining room for a delicious lunch with very generous portions (I remember the huge slices of ham!)
Many years later, when I returned home in my early twenties to clear out the family house after my father died of a heart attack, I came across an old Army-issued German language phrasebook, with useful phrases like, “Halt!”, and “I am lost”. Someone once gave me an old wallet-sized, black and white photo of my dad as a young man in uniform. overseas, laughing heartily with another soldier. I also have a yellowed Polaroid taken when I was very young of my father in his warm flannel hunting shirt and pants-his fluorescent orange hunting cap off-in the environment where he was always the most comfortable and relaxed: laughing between his old army buddy Mr. McCarthy and McCarthy’s adult son, after a triumphant rabbit hunt. They have all died by now, my dad prematurely, long before the other two.
Since then, at this time of year, I sometimes read from an old paperback copy of a Robert Ludlum western that my father loved, or catch an old John Wayne film, or “The Dirty Dozen” on cable (Daddy was a lifelong John Wayne fan and liked war movies that at the time I didn’t understand), or slow cook a pot of his mouthwatering sausage and peppers, slowly, hypnotically stirring the sauce while I rummage for a crusty roll.
Nearly a lifetime after his death, this is what has remained; no heartfelt, wistful narrative of his army days, with a Ken Burns-like melody echoing in my head. Yet I’m beginning to realize that for hundreds of military veterans-living and dead, male and female-the memorial tribute is actualized in what is left unsaid. I think I get it now…finally.
