WW II: Making W.A.V.E.S.

ALBANY - Like the old World War II song by her idol Bing Crosby, Commander Jane Barton wasn't about to be fenced in.

She was born in 1918, coincidentally the last time the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, which would have made a nice timeline to the present day, if Barton was having any part
of it. Which she wasn't.

'I'm not a baseball fan,' she said on a Tuesday afternoon when more than 100 million people were picking the next President of the United States.

Born just two years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment however, Barton made sure she exercised her civic duty.

'I wanted to go there early and beat the crowd,' said the retired U.S. Navy commander.

"You want to physically beat them?" she was asked.

'That depends on how the election turns out,' laughed Jane Barton, whose military past is on display as part of the 'Greatest Generation' exhibition at the Albany Institute of History & Art.

Barton lives nearby, on a 120-acre farm in Esperance, where she has been since 1956.

She was born and raised in New York City, in a section of upper Manhattan where the George Washington Bridge now crosses. From the time she was a kid, she became enamored with the radio personalities of the day.
At a young age, she remembers writing letters to radio artists - those talking and singing celebrities in the era before television.

'I fell madly in love with Bing Crosby,' she said.

When she reached her teens, Barton would go to the Paramount Theatre in Times Square
every week. After the show, she would hang around at the backstage doors hoping to meet some of the stars. She also started dropping by the radio station, providing tidits of news.

'I ended up hanging around the studios, meeting people and picking up all sorts of information. Then I would feed all the gossip I would pick up to the (radio director),' she said.

That news would make its way across the country, but her youth and lack of credentials limited her role to working in an unofficial capacity.

So she went off to Hunter College and earned a degree in journalism. It took two subways and a bus in either direction to get back and forth to the school, but the education gave her the credentials she needed, and she soon started officially working in the business.

'My first day job was for Radio Guide Magazine,' Barton said, remembering the popular
weekly magazine. With a flair for public relations, she later opened her own Manhattan public relations firm, where she represented some of the popular stars of the day. It was 1941.

'That's when Japan attacked. I wanted to do my part,' she said. 'So I enlisted.'

The Navy was expanding and ratcheting up for what would later be called World War II. They established the women's reserve branch with a deliberate accent on the temporary nature of the service written into its name: Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

Barton was a member of the fourth class of WAVES and the first class to attend boot camp. During her three years of active duty in World War II, she was stationed in Washington, D.C. Being one of the first WAVES brought with it special challenges.

'Originally, the Navy didn't want us,' Barton explained. There was the initial intimidation
of the women having to show the name of the Navy person they were replacing. 'The man I replaced was Mason Peters III, I'll never forget that name,' she said.

There were limitations placed on rank and how much military command women could have. They were also prohibited from serving at sea and confined to service within the continental United States borders. Once they were in and word began to spread of their effectiveness,
things changed quickly.

'Afterwards, when it became known that women weren't going there for fun, they proved to be valuable. Then the men started specifically asking for the women. The men went on to sea, and the women worked together (in America) doing all sorts of work,' Barton said.

By the end of the war, there were more than 75,000 enlisted WAVES who had erned full partnership in the Navy.

'In 1948, Congress passed a bill making women a part of the regular services,' said Barton,
one of the first 200 women officers to be offered commissions in the Navy.

Despite the early difficulties related to gender, there was one area which Barton remembers that the women were dealt the better hand.

With women coming into service, new uniforms for the WAVES had to be created. The wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy got involved and saw to it that popular designer Mainbocher was called in to create the uniforms for the women.

Mainbocher was a Paris fashion editor for French Vogue, known for designing black lace and silk-lined ball gowns and costumes for Tallulah Bankhead. From his Paris couture house, the designer created uniforms for the WAVES.

'We were very lucky to have beautiful Navy uniforms that were designed by Mainbocher. The men got stuck with khaki uniforms and those funny hats - and they just were not complimentary at all,' she laughed.

Three of Barton's World War II uniforms - a service dress white, service dress navy blue and a blue summer work uniform - are on exhibit at the museum in Albany, a region to which she relocated to in 1948.

She would be the program director of the New York State Radio-TV Motion Picture Bureau for a quarter century following her tour of duty in the WAVES. For most of those years, she remained active in the Naval Reserve as the senior WAVE reserve officer in the Capital Region.

'I decided the job in Albany utilized my past experience (in radio and journalism). It was what I wanted to do. So that's how I got up here,' Barton said.

A few weeks ago, Barton attended a ceremony to open the exhibition at the museum. Many of the artifacts on display date back to World War II.

Barton's remembrances of that era and her service in the WAVES are outdone only by her affections for Bing Crosby, whose casual, breezy baritone can still be heard echoing through the farms of Esperance:

'Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above/
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love/
Don't fence me in.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences/
And gaze at the moon 'till I lose my senses/
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences/
Don't fence me in.'

All these years later, the affection for her childhood hero is still strong, not to say competitive.

'Not only do I still love Bing Crosby,' she said, 'but I'm mad as hell at all the fuss people make over Frank Sinatra.'

You go argue with her.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian Nov. 7, 2004