BELOW: The original V8s formed in 1942 as a group to accompany a dance number in junior show.
sewed hundreds of hospital gowns, and the knitters on campus united to knit hundreds of items of clothing, including warm clothes for child evacuees. Still others offered help in the form of entertainment, most notably the oldest continuing female collegiate a cappella group in the country. In 1942 a group of student singers convened to accompany a dance during junior show. Immediately successful, they named themselves the V8s—after the World War II phrase “V for Victory”—and soon were performing at nearby Westover Air Force Base and, later, at New York City’s Stage Door Canteen, a popular destination for GIs headed off to the war. In the end, wartime meant immediate and drastic changes, and like everyone at the time, Mount Holyoke women had no choice but to accept these changes and move forward. “My entire life was during the war years, and so I knew nothing else,” says Scherlis. “Doing homework reading in a canoe on Upper Lake is as good as it gets.”
Married on Leave Before World War II, higher education was an acceptable goal for a woman to pursue, but those who went to college were also expected to meet a husband. “Most of us spent time writing to many boys we knew who were overseas,” Barbara (Bobbie) Scherlis ’46 says. Some students dated men from Westover Air Force Base. Martha Stifler Waller ’41 met her future husband as an MHC student and shared with us the story of her wedding, not unusual for the time. In 1943 preparing for a wedding did not involve engraved invitations and planning ahead. Instead, writes Waller, “time depended on when both bride and groom could be present; travel plans depended on availability of space on crowded trains. . .and rationed gasoline. And what to wear depended on what was there.” Martha and her fiancé, George Macgregor (Mac) Waller, became engaged in June 1943. He was a US Navy Reserves ensign at the beginning of his four-month course at Harvard, and she was working as a civilian for the Army Signal Corps in Arlington, Virginia. They planned to wait until the war was over to get married. But, “like many another couple, we changed our minds,” writes Martha. They decided to marry just three weeks after their engagement, when Mac would be on leave for a weekend before being commissioned at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She writes, “I had once envisioned an elegant trailing white satin gown with a billowing veil. . . Such clothing was clearly out of the question.” Instead, she wore her grandmother’s wedding dress, first worn in 1875. “A two-piece affair, white silk taffeta, now ivory with the years,” she writes, the dress had been preserved in “a large trunk in the attic” and consisted of a skirt that reached Martha’s ankles instead of its intended floor length. As for shoes, “In 1943, they were rationed,” writes Waller. “I hastily purchased a pair of white satin, midheeled bedroom slippers, ration-free.” The groom and his attendants wore their Navy blues and arrived the morning of the ceremony. A friend arranged the music and played the organ. And on a cool, rainy day in October 1943 the couple walked down the aisle of the chapel at Amherst College, where Martha’s father was a professor and where she had long felt she belonged. The marriage lasted the war years and then some. “Has everyone heard that wartime romances were fly-by-night affairs, doomed to early crack-up, even if they made it until peacetime? Mac survived the wedding with me, readied USS Uhlmann (DD-687) for its commissioning and shakedown cruise, saw it through a collision and heavy action in the Pacific, and served aboard until his replacement arrived after the surrender. “Reunited at last, we became the parents of five children; we spent sixty years as man and wife.”
Jennifer Grow ’94 is editor of the Alumnae Quarterly. Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly
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