THROUGH THE
Sallyport
Hero on the Line Louise Beraud should have been home, enjoying the rewards of a college degree. Instead, she was busily patching calls through a telephone switchboard in wartime France while the building around her burned. “We just kept on working,” Griggs told the Houston Chronicle in Beraud, who left Rice University after her junior year to attend 1980. “It wasn’t really a matter of bravery. You just do the thing that’s Chicago University, had put off her degree to attend to a more imright. You don’t think of anything else.” portant matter: The War to End All Wars. She was one of nearly 300 At the war’s conclusion, Griggs stayed in France for a time and American women to join the Army Signal Corps Female Telephone worked with the YWCA to help resettle families before returning to Operators Unit, which was formed in 1917 when Gen. John Pershing, Rice to complete her degree in 1920. Although her bravery was never commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, reportquestioned, she and the other Hello Girls returned to the States to disedly ignored orders to keep women (other than nurses) out of the cover that they had never actually been in the Army war and formed the operators unit that became and therefore could not be honorably discharged. known as the Hello Girls. “She said that after the war, something happened in Most of the recruits had been telephone opthe Senate, and they were told they weren’t a part erators, and all were fluent in English and French of the U.S. Army,” Gottschalk recalled. “She and the so that they could translate messages instantly. other women in the Signal Corps had to petition After two weeks of training in communications Congress for their discharge. She wrote those letters and self-defense, they took an enlistment oath and for what must have been 50 years.” were told to buy their own uniforms. The first 233 Finally, at the behest of then-President Jimmy Hello Girls were sent to France in March 1918, and Carter in 1978, Congress passed a law ordering that they quickly proved their worth, working long the status of “civilian volunteers” with the Armed hours to keep command posts wired to the front. Forces in wartime be revisited. In 1980, the year Beraud, who became Louise Beraud Griggs before she died, Griggs received her honorary diswhen she later married her wartime love, had charge and a World War I Victory Medal with a learned French at home. “Her father came over clasp for France in a ceremony at the Texas Army from France as a master chef,” said Shelley National Guard Armory in Houston. This year, on Gottschalk, Griggs’ granddaughter and wife of Nov. 11, Griggs was honored again for her heroic Arthur Gottschalk, professor and chair of composervice in a ceremony at the Rice Memorial Center sition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music. as part of Rice’s 2010 Veterans Day observance. “John Jacob Astor hired him.” Griggs’ parents met Griggs continued to make use of her aptitude in America and settled in Houston, where Griggs’ Louise Beraud Griggs in French after the war; she taught the language father managed the Tejas Club at the Rice Hotel at Houston Heights High School until her marriage in 1924, said her and catering at the Rice Institute. daughter, Belle Griggs Johnson. “She never griped,” Johnson said Various reports indicate between two and four other Hello Girls of her mom. “She made the best of everything. She was a super, were at the switchboard in an Army barracks in Souilly when the buildsuper woman.” ing caught fire during a shell attack in the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, —Mike Williams a bloody, months-long battle that helped seal Germany’s fate. While soldiers worked to put out the blaze, Griggs and other operators refused View photos from Rice’s 2010 Veterans Day celebration: orders to abandon their posts and kept critical lines of communication open. For that, they won special citations from the Army. ›› › ricemagazine.info/ 75
Rice Magazine
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No. 8
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2010
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