Arthur Peabody '40 and Margaret Braynard Peabody '41

I do: Art and Margaret Braynard Peabody were married shortly after Art was drafted. The newlyweds are joined by their parents as Art prepares to ship out on the USS Argentina in June 1942.

The couple's son, Arthur Peabody Jr. '65, says that his parents, now deceased, got engaged during his father's senior year. At their parents' insistence, they had planned to wait until Margaret's graduation the following year to get married. But when the draft was reinstated in early 1941, they accelerated their plans.

Art and Margaret Braynard Peabody

There was a lottery to determine who would be drafted and my dad drew draft number one. Realizing that he would be in the service soon, he drove from Cleveland, where he had been working, to Long Island, to see my mother on her spring break [in March of 1941]. Since he would be in the Army by June, they decided to get married right away. My grandfather, a doctor, helped walk the papers through—blood tests were required for marriage licenses in those days—and they were married two days later. Their honeymoon was a drive back to Duke down the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Dean [Alice] Baldwin had given my mother permission to stay enrolled, but she was required to move off campus for the rest of the term. After she finished finals and was told she could graduate in absentia, she and her mother drove to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where my dad was doing his basic training. He went on from there to Officer Candidate School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and became one of the many "ninety-day wonders" that those schools turned out. He joined the army engineers as a supply officer.

He was shipped out to England in the early summer of 1942. (I was born almost exactly nine months after his departure.) He didn't return until September 1945.

While in London, he had taken shelter in the Tube during an attack by the German "buzz bombs." The all-clear sounded and he was making his way out when one of the missiles landed and exploded near the entrance. He was blown back down to the bottom of the stairs, landing in a heap of people, none of whom was hurt except for some momentary loss of hearing.

His group specialized in building airfields. Following the landings in Normandy, they completed the first Allied airfield there. A B-25 flew in for a test flight, and my father struck up an acquaintance with the pilot. He was offered a chance to fly back to England on the plane's return trip. He accepted and flew in the nose gunner's position (on a B-25 that is below and forward of the cockpit). The pilot turned out to be a real hotdog, and flew just above the wave tops all the way across the channel. After that trip, we couldn't get my dad in a plane again until he flew down for my Duke graduation in 1965, twenty-one years later.

Jean Wallace White '40

Reared in Newark, New Jersey, White attended public schools and earned academic honors. Her family encouraged her to apply to Cornell, but the day she visited the campus, Ithaca was cold and snowy, with sleet and freezing rain. She started looking south, and chose Duke to be her alma mater—a decision, she says, that she has never regretted. White lives in Chatham, New Jersey.

I was in the class of '39 with good grades, White Duchy, Phi Beta Kappa, and a member of the Kappa Alpha Omega sorority. Unfortunately, I ended up in the hospital because of an East Campus food poisoning that affected more than a hundred students. I was the only one so sick I had to leave Durham without taking any exams. Thus, I lost a semester, and when I did return, I watched my '39 class graduate with tears in my eyes.

I went to work in the Newark Public Library to earn enough for graduate school. I enjoyed working as a children's librarian, but when the war started, I joined the newly formed women's branch of the Navy—WAVES. I was sent to New York City (after three months of training at Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges) into censorship—cable, letter and telephone. The Navy taught me that I could do anything, but I hated the "graveyard" shift—midnight until 8 a.m. However, I met there the man I married some years later.

One very special memory of mine was on "Navy Day" (1945) when I had the incredible experience of meeting and escorting President Harry S. Truman and his wife and daughter as he reviewed the homecoming troops in New York. I cannot describe the pride I had in my small role in our winning effort.

I still meet with my WAVE friends on occasion, reveling in our memories.