THE FIRST WAVES

It’s hard to believe Lorraine Chevalier “Chevie” McDonald is 95 years old — she flits about her apartment at Edgemere senior living like it’s a college dorm. But she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, with a degree in political science and was working as an assistant buyer for Macy’s when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“I was insulted, the way everyone else was, that the Japanese would do that,” she says. “I wanted to do something.”

As a woman, her options were limited. She could have become a nurse or entered the Women’s Army Corps, but McDonald had her sights set on the Navy.

“I had a lot of friends in the Navy — boys,” she explains. “One special friend of mine was at Pearl Harbor.”

Luckily, in 1942, thanks in large part to the efforts of Sen. Margaret Smith, Congress passed a piece of legislation, authorizing Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), an all female division of the U.S. Naval Reserve.

“I was determined to go in the first class,” McDonald says, emphasizing the word “determined.”

But enrolling in the Officer Commissioning Program wasn’t easy. Applicants were required to have a letter of availability from their employers and McDonald’s boss didn’t want to cooperate.

“I got a letter [from the president of Macy’s], saying I was unavailable because all the boys were leaving, and they didn’t want everything to be left vacant,” she explains.

Despite this setback, she set up an interview in New York with a recently sworn in female officer. McDonald showed her the disappointing letter, which turned out to be a great decision.

“She said, ‘Oh, I know [your boss] very well — I was head of human resources for Macy’s’,” McDonald remembers. “She took the letter and ripped it up and I was in, so I was very happy.”

For training, McDonald went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. It was winter and she remembers being cold, especially in the mornings. The WAVES had to be in uniform and outside by 6:30 a.m. They studied “all kinds of things” — naval history, military protocol, airplane and ship identification.

“We had to take typing,” she says. “We had all come from good jobs. We had had people type for us and we thought, ‘This is awful. What are we going to do? Then we found out they needed communications officers ... We were coders and incoders of Navy secret messages. We had to put the open messages into code and then the ones that came in from all over the world we had to decode.”

For McDonald and many of her cohorts, this coding and incoding took place behind locked doors in New York City. In the Big Apple, she says the WAVES were “an oddity” but largely well received. However, some of her male counterparts made wisecracks.

“Sometimes they’d say something about, ‘You’re taking my cushy desk job’,” she says. Her response? “‘Oh, and aren’t you happy that you’re going out to sea?’”

While living in the Village, McDonald began dating her husband, Bob, who was also in the Navy. She had known him in college but didn’t consider him a viable partner then because he was a bad dancer. Somehow, he won her over and they were married at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Two years into her service, she became pregnant with their first daughter and had to leave the WAVES. Her departure from military service was bittersweet.

“I was delighted that I was going to have a baby,” she says. “I thought that was exciting. Also, it was exciting because my husband got orders to go to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the baby and I were the first civilians to go on a ship out of New York after [Victory over Japan] Day.”

McDonald loved Cuba. Their house was large and had a beautiful garden. She would have been happy to stay forever, but Bob left the Navy and took a job in New York at a food manufacturing company. Eventually, he got a better offer in Dallas, so they settled in Preston Hollow “because it was full of trees.” She enrolled her 8-year-old daughter at Ursuline and her 11-year-old son at St. Marks — her two eldest children were already in college.

Though they were separated by distance, McDonald and her fellow WAVES remained close friends.

“I guess we were all in this together,” she says. “We had a single purpose. We really were bonded.”