Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 11, 1993 TAG: 9311110156
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"What do you want me to do?" Fielden asked. "Stay out here and watch these men sleep?"
After 95 years, she has perfected a directness that is the privilege of age and experience.
So when she is recognized today as the only living Roanoke Valley woman to have served in World War I, Fielden isn't likely to turn mushy.
"I'm ambivalent," Fielden admits. "It's been 75 years. It's a little too late."
She, along with about a dozen other World War I veterans, will be honored in a 10:30 a.m. ceremony today at William Byrd High School.
Still, she maintains the discipline of her early Navy training even in retirement.
"If you keep on going, you don't think old," she said. "You can be 90 and think 30."
She could pass for 70, and nursing assistants know they had better be careful not to muss her makeup when putting in her eye drops. When offered a ride in a wheelchair, she declines.
"I won't be needing that," she says.
She reads 10 books a month, despite having implants put in her eyes to correct vision impaired by cataracts.
"I couldn't envision myself as a blind person," she said. "I don't know if I could cope with that."
Her love of reading - which developed from her mother's bedtime stories - and corresponding with her two daughters and eight grandchildren keeps her busy until midnight. Then she sleeps for six hours.
"I never really retired," she said. "I'm just gone from the office."
Navy offices in 1918 weren't equipped to deal with women, Fielden admits.
World War I was the first time that enlisted women were officially recruited.
Only 35,000 of this country's 4.7 million military personnel in World War I were women. About 1,400 survive, 100 of them from Virginia.
"They didn't know what to do with us," she said. "That's the first time they had women in the Navy."
She remembers vividly that Navy brass had little idea of the cost of off-base living. Women in those days didn't have barracks on base or a place to eat.
"I brown-bagged a lot," she said.
Her room and board cost $9 a week, which was a pretty hard financial hit for someone making a $20 monthly salary sweetened only by $30 for room and board.
Actually, it was not her idea to join the Navy in the first place. Some girlfriends convinced her if she wanted to travel the Navy may have been the only way.
They boarded a train in her native Bristol and headed to Roanoke to get sworn in. They were armed with a 25-cent government meal ticket, which was good for a generous helping of roast beef, mashed potatoes, apple pie and coffee.
Soon, Fielden, then 20, was headed to Norfolk, where she joined 25 other women in a secretarial pool. They became known as Yeomanettes, the first enlisted women to serve in the U.S. armed forces.
While her career never reached the front lines of battle, she remembers when flu ravaged the United States during her military career.
"Do you know that flu killed more people than the war?" she asked.
She finally landed a permanent job as secretary in a military communications office, where she worked until the end of the war. She later worked the same job as a civil service worker before years of working as a secretary in civilian life and retirement in Franklin County.
"We felt it was an important job we were doing," she said of her wartime duty. "We released men to do other jobs."
That was pretty racy stuff for the youngest of seven daughters of James and Alice Burton, church-going parents who tended to keep their well-disciplined children close to home.
In her teen-age years, Fielden and her sisters were allowed to date only in pairs. Curfew was 10 p.m.
"After I got away from home, I got out from under their thumb, so to speak," she said. "I still didn't do anything I wasn't supposed to do."
It's not as if the Navy provided those kind of opportunities for its newest recruits.
Dances were held on ships, but the woman had to go with a chaperone, known to Fielden only as "Mrs. Smith."
"I wondered if that was her real name," Fielden said. "She was hard-boiled, really strict."
To even prepare for the dances, Fielden remembered, she had to take lessons and worried about what her parents would think.
"Back then people didn't dance," she said. "I felt a little guilty most of the time."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB