THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 20, 1994 TAG: 9408200254
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
I met Jeannine Maria Etheridge seven years ago. I had heard about her heroics as a teenage spy in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France.
The anniversary of D-Day was approaching, and I thought she would make a good story. I hurried to her home in the South Norfolk section of Chesapeake.
A petite, cherub-faced woman, soft-voiced and bright-eyed, answered the door. She sure didn't look tough enough to have resisted anything.
The brick house that she shared with her husband on Haywood Avenue was an enchanted place full of soft lace curtains, knickknacks and baby dolls in bows. It was a combination of country French and country USA.
Tucked away under a bed and in a trunk for years were Jeannine's dusty, yellowed scrapbooks of war. They filled her with a lifetime of reminders of how cruel and how kind human beings can be.
``Because of the Resistance, I was never a child. But I do not regret it,'' she said softly, as if pledging to fight once again.
Jeannine Etheridge died Tuesday at home. She was 69. Her memorial service will be at 1 p.m. today at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Norfolk.
Before the war began, Jeannine was a girl growing up in a convent after her father deserted her mother. Then the invasion.
Soon, Jewish friends began to disappear. A friend asked her to join ``La Resistance.'' She became a spy at 17. She recruited her mother and brother.
Jeannine's bicycle rides became weapons runs. Her angelic face won many unlikely allies. Once an unwitting Nazi soldier assisted her in hauling 24 machine guns through a German air base.
In near darkness, she typed secret documents - sometimes as many as 1,200 a month - as a soldier stood guard with a machine gun.
In 1943, when a double agent betrayed her, Jeannine did not break. Miraculously, as the Gestapo grilled her and her mother in separate locations, they told the same lies.
Once released, they hastened back to the underground.
Jeannine frowned on romantic war movies. For her there was no romance, only work and more work.
In two years, she moved 14 times. She lived off gifts from friends and money sent by submarine and parachute from friends in England.
She lost more than her childhood. Her sister, who suffered from a heart ailment, died. The family emerged from the underground for her burial. Jeannine vividly remembered white horses carrying a coffin.
When the war ended, suddenly there was no great cause to fight for, but there was romance.
In 1946, she married C. Gatewood Etheridge Sr., an American soldier, and moved to the States. In Virginia, she raised two sons and retired from the Naval Air Rework Facility.
She taught French for seven years at the Williams School, a private school in Norfolk.
There she shared her spy memoirs with students. She was a faculty favorite, using puppets to teach French. When students saw her outside school, they automatically spoke to her in French.
She was a tireless volunteer for many years at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, always there to hold babies and inspire.
The time had come, she said during our interview, to write about her coming of age in the Resistance. It was a story she felt destined to share.
Jeannine's gentle toughness stayed with me after that day seven years ago.
We kept in touch, talking two or three times a year by telephone. She would call to discuss progress on the book.
Then the cancer came. Jeannine continued to write. When she stopped by the newspaper last summer for lunch, she was so strong, so energized that the surgery, the chemotherapy, the pain seemed only a minor irritation.
I read her manuscript and was moved. It was a story of real courage that could be instructive, especially for children and teenagers who often have no appreciation for battles beyond a schoolyard fight.
Jeannine agonized over the difficulty of finding a publisher. Rejection letters hurt. Finally, she decided to publish it herself.
When I last visited Jeannine in April, she was still vibrant. Strapped to her waist was a battery-powered dispenser sending potent medicine to the vicious tumors. But she padded about softly, almost an angel, light and bright, full of fight.
The house was as enchanted as ever. A favorite saying hung on a plaque in the kitchen: ``People need loving the most when they deserve it the least.''
We sat in her immaculate kitchen as the early evening sun danced through lace curtains and across Jeannine's face. The noodle casserole was good. And so was the warm conversation about faith, living and dying.
Jeannine was not afraid to talk about dying.
In June, I called Jeannine in the hospital. Her fever was 103.7. She had been put on a new medication. She was too sick to talk.
She died just a few days before her book was to be published. I knew better.
Jeannine Marie Etheridge can never die. Her compassionate, invincible energy pulses on. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Jeannine Etheridge smuggled guns in France during World War II.
by CNB