If you go
o What: Vancouver’s Veterans Day ceremony.
o Where: Armed Forces Reserve Center, 15005 N.E. 65th St.
o When: 11 a.m. Tuesday.
On the Web
Gulfport WAVES veteran proud to be part of the war effort in WWII
Mary Sparks was at a slumber party in the Officers Row home of a girlfriend, Mickey Ostrander, on Dec. 7, 1941.
Mickey’s father was an Army officer; a soldier broke up the party with — as Mary still remembers — news of “something awful.”
“An orderly banged on the door: ‘Mickey! You and your friends get dressed. Something awful has happened,'” Sparks said.
The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
As the girls looked across the street at Vancouver Barracks, Sparks said, “We could see all the men running.”
Those soldiers were heading into World War II.
It took 18 months, but the Vancouver High School graduate — who became Mary Nelson after the war — turned 20 and was able to join the effort.
“I said I was going to join the Navy,” she said. “I was adamant. My father thought that was all right. My mother had a fit about it.”
She comes from a notable local family. Her grandfather Marshall Sparks started a hardware store that eventually became Sparks Home Furnishings, which shut down recently after 132 years as a family business.
Although she wasn’t from a military family, Vancouver’s Army heritage was all around her.
“All my friends were ‘Army brats.’ When I’d leave a friend’s home, they would be taking down the flag on the Army post. The bugle would play and the flag would come down,” Nelson, 91, said.
Married a pilot
All those hometown ties have faded over the years. She met military pilot Lawrence Nelson in Washington D.C. They married and raised four daughters on his family farm in Iowa. She now lives in the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Miss.
Patrick Ochs, a reporter for the Sun Herald in Gulfport, recently wrote about Nelson and mentioned her Vancouver roots.
In a follow-up phone interview, Nelson described her WWII duties. As one of the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, or WAVES, she worked at a code-breaking center in Washington D.C.
“It was highly secretive,” Nelson said. “They sent someone to my hometown, investigating me.”
Investigators found that the 1942 Vancouver High grad was second vice president of the student body, and had been freshman class president and sophomore class president.
She wound up working in the Navy Code and Signal Laboratory.
“It had been the Mount Vernon Seminary, a private school for girls,” Nelson said. “We took over the campus. We were in the center, with barbed wire all around. The officers carried guns.
“Marines who guarded our building had been brought back from the Pacific. They usually had malaria and were recuperating. To give them something to do, light duty, they guarded the gate. Every now and then, we would look out the window and see a fellow just drop; someone else would replace him.”
Mum’s the word
By February 1944, nearly 3,000 WAVES were stationed in the Navy cryptography center. Most of them didn’t know what their jobs were about. Nelson turned rotors in a machine, but didn’t know why.
And since it was part of a code-breaking process, the WAVES weren’t allowed to share even the most minimal information. If someone asked, they were supposed to describe their job as “screwing in light bulbs.” And the question certainly came up — particularly on payday.
“We would get our pay and go have a spaghetti dinner. Every single time, we would go to pay our bill and some gentleman would pay it,” she said. “They would ask, ‘What do you do?’
“It was surprising that they would think we would tell them in the first place,” she observed.
Looking back on it now, Nelson doesn’t see any pivotal moments in her war effort.
“I didn’t do anything that shook the world or anything. I was just one of many, like a little grain of sand,” Nelson told Ochs in the Sun Herald story. “It takes so many to get the job done. I really can’t say I did anything of great importance, but there were enough of us.”
