MASONIC ASSISTANCE
“I think we can all be proud of ourselves,” she says. “Most of
us women who went to work never did that before, but we knew
we were needed.”
Another real-life Rosie is Verna Salcedo, a resident of the
Masonic Home at Union City. When the war began, she left her
job at a shoe store to work in an Alabama munitions factory.
“I worked making gun shells at the Recon Ordnance
plant,” she recalls. “I would fill them with black powder and
seal them up.”
Salcedo left the factory about 18 months later when she
met and married her husband, a first lieutenant in the Army.
When he was deployed to North Africa, she moved to San
Diego to live with her new in-laws. There, she continued to
contribute to the war as a clerk typist at the Naval Air Station
North Island in Coronado.
Nursing in wartime
While some women worked in factories during World War
II, other Masonic Homes residents supported the war effort
through nursing. Indeed, with so many registered nurses
serving overseas, the U.S. had a critical shortage of nursing staff
on the home front.
That’s why Virginia Nash, of the Masonic Home at Covina,
joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, which was created by the U.S.
Public Health Service to accelerate the training of student
nurses. Joining the Corps in 1943, the year it was founded,
Nash studied at what is now the UCLA Medical Center. She
says the training was arduous, but it was a welcome distraction
from worrying about her husband, Jim, who was a Navy pilot in
the South Pacific.
“I was working so much I didn’t have time to worry,” Nash
says. “There weren’t many nurses left in the Los Angeles area,
and we student nurses had to cover all the shifts. Though,
whenever I received a letter, I was jerked back to reality.”
By the time Nash finished her training in 1946, the
war was over, and she was a wife and mother. After a brief
break from nursing, she resumed her career with Kaiser
Permanente, where she worked for nearly 38 years. Though
living through the war wasn’t easy, she says she wouldn’t
have changed a thing.
“When I look back at what a naïve kid I was, it’s scary,” she
says. “I grew up in nurses’ training, and I learned a lot. It was
one of the best times of my life.
Reflections of a War Bride
For Betty Ashfield, a resident of the Masonic
Home at Union City, World War II meant
embarking on a life-changing journey that took
her away from her home of Perth, Australia.
There, during the war, she met Navy sailor
Arthur Ashfield at a dance, and a year later they
were married. But Arthur soon was transferred to
Hawaii, and the couple didn’t see each other for
two years.
“We wrote to each other every day,” Ashfield
says. “But because of delays in the mail, I would
go weeks without receiving a letter and then
would receive them all at once.”
In 1946, the American Red Cross offered to
help foreign-born wives of American servicemen
travel to the U.S. So that spring, Ashfield
boarded a ship in Sydney with 850 other war
brides and 350 children to begin the rough, two-
week sail across the Pacific to San Francisco.
