High heels didn't slow women of WWII Navy

The uniform is stashed in the basement somewhere, a perfect size 8 with stripes on the shoulders and white anchors on the collar.

Bettina Black plans to dig it out of storage someday as proof to her offspring that their grandmother really wore Army boots.

Well, Navy high heels, anyway.

Bettina, 86, was proud to wear that uniform 63 years ago, when she signed on the dotted line to become a Navy WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during World War II. Now that she's about to become president of Salt Lake City's WAVES of the Wasatch club, she thought it would be a good time to share a Free Lunch of soup and salad and pay tribute to the thousands of women — past and present — in military service.

"There aren't many WAVES left — we're a dying breed," she says, settling into an easy chair in her Salt Lake home to flip through old snapshots of her and her comrades. With Memorial Day a few days away, "we should take a few quiet moments to remember them."

Bettina was 21 and going to law school at Ohio State University when a student burst through the doors of the law library with news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.

"For a long time, there was complete silence," she says, "then everybody snapped their books shut. Every young man in the place got up and walked out. They knew they'd be needed."

About a year later, Bettina decided to do her part, too. When she spotted a poster announcing that women were needed to help with the war effort, she immediately signed up to become one of the first WAVES.

From the day she and other female recruits got off the bus for basic training in Southampton, Mass., "we were marched everywhere and trained just like soldiers and sailors," she recalls.

Except that male sailors weren't measured for designer uniforms and ordered to wear hose and high heels. It's probably a good thing, says Bettina, that WAVES weren't allowed to serve aboard ships. "There would have been a number of sprained ankles, or worse," she says.

Instead, Bettina was sent to Washington, D.C., where she was assigned to decode messages from Navy ships, which were then sent to President Roosevelt and high-ranking officers.

"They were all pretty important, but you just typed them out and forgot them," she says, recalling the posters plastered around her workplace: "Loose lips sink ships." But there was one dispatch that she and her friends couldn't forget.