This week I realized that to properly revise chapter three, I needed to make some additions to chapter two. So, I’ve been reading more about the role of the YMCA in World War I to more fully explain what was expected of Jane Grant during her overseas posting and how she delivered on those expectations. That means I’ve been toggling between those two chapters to add context and additional details to sharpen the descriptions of Jane’s experiences.
I’ve made progress that seems incremental, especially when I look at how much—or little, really—the word count in each of the chapters has increased. Keeping an eye on the word count is important because I don’t want the manuscript to get bloated. Telling Jane’s story doesn’t require a Big Book in terms of the number of words and pages.
The 1918 poster below features the artwork of Neysa McMein, who also went overseas during the war to entertain the troops. She and Jane were friends.
What I’m Reading
I’m more than halfway through Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness. It had a strong start, but now I find it very uneven. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up.
I’m almost done with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. Stein has died and Toklas, in her grief, is trying to carry out her wishes for her unpublished work and trying to protect her reputation as a pathbreaking author. I really like this book.
Wednesday night’s Vanity Fair Zoom book discussion was fascinating. I can’t wait to find out what the 2027 novel will be.
What I’m Watching
Nothing new in the rotation of Starfleet Academy (Paramount+), Grace and The Game (BritBox), All Creatures (PBS), and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix). Down to one episode left of both The Game and All Creatures. It kind of seems like The Lincoln Lawyer may never end, but I’m only at the halfway point. Last week’s Starfleet was one of the better episodes, and I hope this week’s can at least match it.
What Else I’ve Been Doing
I finished my review of the book proposal for an academic press and submitted it before the deadline. So yay me, and yay for the press that will be getting a good book—if that’s how the rest of the process works out.
The weekly bowling took place, the usual two games. Once again it was two pretty mediocre games for me. But this week’s bright spot was that twice in one game I picked up a spare from a split. That was quite astonishing.
A couple of days after I switched out my winter walking boots for regular sneakers (thanks to warmer temperatures and nearly snow-free streets) to take my daily walks, winter sent about 6 inches of snow as a reminder that it’s still, well, winter. Not that I actually packed away the boots for the season….
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for next week: Are chapters two and three finally revised? Are the winter walking boots still out?
Today is Valentine’s Day, so it’s perhaps fitting that in chapter three of my book about Jane Grant, she meets Harold Ross. He becomes her first husband, and together they create The New Yorker. But that comes later.
In this chapter, Jane is overseas with the YMCA in 1918-1919 doing war work. Both adventurous and practical, she couldn’t wait to get to France. She knew that a few female journalists had managed, despite military restrictions, to get across the Atlantic and file stories about World War I. But the New York Times wouldn’t send her as a reporter, so she applied to one of the government-sanctioned service organizations that hired women for clerical work, nursing, and entertainment. Jane figured she was qualified for two out of those three, and she believed that whatever her posting entailed, it would somehow further her career.
[Jane Grant, c. 1918-1919, Jane Grant papers, University of Oregon]
The Y sent Jane to Tours, France, but her friend and colleague from the Times, Alexander Woollcott, pulled strings to get her to Paris. He had been in the army since 1917, and now, as a sergeant, he worked in Paris on the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces’ Stars and Stripes. Jane easily fell in with that newspaper crowd, and it was Woollcott who introduced her to Ross, editor of the publication. It was not love at first sight, but the attraction was strong enough to induce Ross to take a job in New York City after the war to be near Jane.
This chapter revision is ongoing. There is less to weed out, and more to weave in.
What I’m Reading
I started a novel, The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy. Good so far. I read her first, The Turner House, back in 2016, and I noted this on Goodreads: This is a lovely, lovely novel. Set in contemporary Detroit, it tells the tale of a large family still dealing with the death of the patriarch and with the rapid decline of the matriarch. The fate of the family home, which has fallen into considerable disrepair, is a point of contention among the 13 siblings. And there’s a haint. Wonderful.
I’m continuing with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade and Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake. I can’t renew the Stein biography, so I have to make sure that takes precedence during my reading time. I’m pretty sure the only thing of Stein’s I’ve read is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and probably only selections from it, a long, long time ago. I doubt that I would have much patience for her modern, experimental work.
I finally finished Vanity Fair, and I’m very glad. I’m participating in a Zoom book discussion this coming Wednesday night.
What I’m Watching
Starfleet Academy (Paramount+), Grace (BritBox), All Creatures (PBS), and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) remain in rotation. I still like Grace the best—good storylines and an efficient use of the 90-minute format. I also started The Game, also on BritBox, which has more thriller elements than I like, but the acting is good and there are only four episodes, so I think I can see it through.
What Else I’ve Been Doing
I made progress on my review of a book proposal for an academic press, so I remain on track to meet the deadline.
The weekly bowling took place, the usual two games. Overall, I rolled pretty mediocre. But there was a bright spot: I made three spares in a row, which I kind thought might be referred to as a chicken. It made sense to me since three strikes in a row is a turkey, and I figured a chicken was the next bird down, size-wise. When I finally remembered to look it up, I learned to my absolute delight that three spares in a row are called a sparrow. Perfection!
Happy Valentine’s Day! (to those who celebrate)
Thanks for reading. Check back next week to see how far the chapter three revisions have progressed.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, in less than two hours dropping bombs that killed over 2400 Americans and destroyed a large part of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific. This act of aggression brought the United States into World War II.
(National World War II Museum)
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt gave a brief radio address that day, part of it directed at “the women of the country.” She acknowledged the tough times ahead and encouraged women to take care of themselves, their families, their communities. “Whatever is asked of us,” the First Lady said, “I am sure we can accomplish it.”
Peggy Utinsky probably did not hear Roosevelt’s words, but she did not need them to spur her into action. Peggy, a nurse, had been living in the Philippine Islands since the 1920s and had married Jack Utinsky, an engineer working for the U.S. military there. As tensions escalated between the United States and Japan in 1940 and 1941, Jack worried about the safety of the Philippines, located about 1900 miles from Japan.
Jack tried to send Peggy back to the states earlier in 1941, but she refused to go. While Jack was working to fortify the Bataan peninsula, Peggy rented an apartment in Manila and split her days between working at the Red Cross and a soldiers’ canteen.
The Japanese bombed the Philippines the same day they hit Hawaii–though because of the International Dateline, it was Monday, December 8 in the Philippines. Unlike their attack on Hawaii, this was a prelude to invasion and occupation. Peggy Utinsky didn’t wait until anyone asked anything of her. She kept working. Wounded civilians and military personnel crowded into Manila hospitals and emergency medical facilities. Peggy worked until she couldn’t stand up anymore. Then, nearly sightless in the blacked-out night, she picked her way back to her apartment along bomb-ravaged sidewalks. After a few hours of rest, she headed back to the hospital.
As the Japanese occupied the Philippines in early 1942, Peggy Utinsky undertook the dangerous work of smuggling supplies into the prisoner of war camps in the island of Luzon. She lost much during the war: her husband Jack died as a POW, she sold or bartered away her possessions to raise funds for her underground network, she suffered from physical and psychological ailments in the aftermath of her arrest and torture by the Japanese.
(NARA photo)
I wrote about Peggy and three other remarkable American women in Angels of the Underground, and I still remember them every year on this anniversary.
*Note: This is a revised version of a blog post from December 2016.
On August 25, 2023, with modest fanfare, the U.S. Army’s Fort A.P. Hill, located south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, near the town of Bowling Green, became Fort Walker. Dr. Mary Walker, who served the army as a civilian surgeon during the Civil War, remains the only woman to have received the Medal of Honor. Now she is the only woman to have a military installation named solely in her honor.*
(photo: Fort Walker on Facebook)
But that honor originally belonged to Ambrose Powell Hill, Jr., a native of Culpeper, Virginia. Born in 1825 to a family that held enslaved people, Hill graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1847 and served competently enough to earn a promotion to first lieutenant in 1851.
As politicians in Virginia debated secession following Abraham Lincoln’s presidential victory in 1860, Ambrose Hill resigned his U.S. army commission. He signed on as a colonel with the 13th Virginia Infantry Regiment when Virginia seceded from the United States. He became a brigadier general in 1862 and was promoted to lieutenant general in 1863. During the battle of Petersburg, a week before the end of the war in 1865, Hill was shot dead by a soldier of the United States army.
(photo: U.S. National Park Service)
A.P. Hill did a lot of things in his military career before and during the Civil War. Several websites provide details of his service, there is a lengthy YouTube documentary that labels him the Confederate Warrior, he appears in numerous books about the war, and he is the subject of at least two published biographies.
But the most important thing to know is that A.P. Hill served the Confederacy. He chose to renounce his allegiance to the United States and to make war on its people. Yet some eighty years later, his name was attached to a U.S. military installation. This was made possible because, as historians such as Karen Cox and Adam Domby have shown, white southerners successfully promoted the myth of the “lost cause”—that their forebears nobly fought the Civil War to protect their homes and families.**
Another eighty years later, in response to waves of racial justice activism, Congress established in 2021 the Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America to oversee the removal of Confederate names from property owned or controlled by the Department of Defense. The Naming Commission solicited recommendations for the nine designated military installations and narrowed the suggestions to ninety names. Several women appeared on the list, but it was dominated by men.
Still, Dr. Mary Walker made the final cut, and it is particularly fitting that an army post in Virginia now bears her name. In 1861, during the first year of the Civil War, Mary Walker, an 1855 graduate of the Syracuse Medical College, shuttered her private medical practice in New York and traveled to Washington, D.C. She failed to convince the secretary of war to commission her as a surgeon in the U.S. army, so she volunteered at the city’s Indiana Hospital, run by Dr. J.N. Green of the 19th Indiana Volunteers, who recognized her medical credentials and gratefully allowed her to work as a doctor.
Dr. Walker expanded her services into Virginia, tending to General Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac in the wake of the 1862 fighting at Fredericksburg. She treated men at Gettysburg and Chattanooga in 1863 before receiving a contract as a civilian surgeon for the army.
Confederate soldiers in northern Georgia arrested Mary Walker in 1864. She was posted at the time with the 52nd Ohio Volunteers at Lee and Gordon’s Mills and had been out in the surrounding countryside tending to sick civilians. The enemy soldiers found her activities suspicious. (Indeed, she was also gathering intelligence.) Dr. Walker spent several months as a prisoner of war in Castle Thunder in Richmond, Virginia, and gained her release through a prisoner swap.
(image: F. Dielman, artist; F. E. Sachse & Company, lithographer)
She went right back to work for the army, accepting an appointment at the Female Military Prison in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Walker may have expressed sympathy over her patients’ medical ailments, but she meted out punishment for their disloyal talk about the United States and their insistence on singing Confederate songs. During her final contract weeks at a refugee hospital in Clarksville, Tennessee, in the spring of 1865, Mary Walker caused a scene during Easter Sunday at the Episcopal Trinity Church when she interpreted the color scheme of the minister’s holiday decorations as too Confederate.
A few months after the Civil War ended, guided by the recommendations of the secretary of war and the judge advocate general who lauded her contributions to the army, President Andrew Johnson awarded Dr. Mary Walker the Medal of Honor.
(photo: Library of Congress)
Dr. Walker’s opinion of Confederates did not soften with their defeat. While in Paris attending the 1867 Exposition Universelle—a world’s fair—she was physically ejected from one of the United States exhibition halls. She resented a display of photos of Confederate generals, especially the one of Robert E. Lee. Its caption, she believed, was entirely too flattering. The American organizers ignored Dr. Walker’s complaint, so she tore down the caption card, prompting her swift removal.
It’s not hard to imagine how Mary Walker would have reacted to seeing the U.S. military name some of its installations after traitors of her country. She would have had no truck with “lost cause” sentimentalities. She would have known that those Confederate names did not belong on those establishments. She would have known that her name did.
(photo: see below)
*The former Fort Lee, also in Virginia, was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams, to honor Lieutenant General Arthur Gregg, the first Black man to achieve that rank, and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams, the first Black woman officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.
**Anyone interested in the history of the “lost cause” myth and how it has reverberated through history should read Karen Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture as well as her No Common Ground, Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice; and Adam Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory.
Margaret Coalson Sherk Sams was born in Oklahoma in 1916 and grew up in California. She aspired to be a wife and mother, but she wanted to experience something of life outside her family home first, so she enrolled at Riverside Junior College in 1933. There, Margaret renewed an old high school friendship with Bob Sherk, who was studying to be a mining engineer. They started dating and fell in love before Bob decided to seek his fortune in the Philippine Islands. He left California in January 1936 to start a job in northern Luzon; she followed several months later and they married. Their son David was born in 1938.
The Sherks were living in Suyoc, a gold-mining town in the Benguet region, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and then Luzon in the Philippines in December 1941. Earlier that year, concerned about deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Japan, Bob had wanted to send Margaret and David back to California. Margaret was reluctant to split up the family, so when officials in the U.S. High Commissioner’s Office in Manila assured her she was safe, she and David remained.
The Sherks evacuated Suyoc mere steps in front of the invading Japanese army and ended up in Manila. Bob did his patriotic duty and joined the U.S. military forces as they headed to the Bataan peninsula to defend the island. Margaret and David ended up interned with thousands of other Allied nationals on the campus of Santo Tomas University in January 1942. They had been told to pack enough food and clothing for three days. They remained prisoners until 1945.
Margaret struggled to provide for David in the camp. She knew few people there and didn’t have much money to pay to have goods brought in from the outside. The Japanese provided little food and restricted Red Cross operations. Several months later, Margaret met Jerry Sams, an electronic engineer with a wife back in the states. He was kind to her and helped secure food and other necessities for David. They quickly fell in love and began an affair. Margaret pushed for a physical relationship because she wanted Jerry to feel tied to her. And despite the perilous conditions of the internment camp, she knew that having Jerry’s baby would cement their relationship and guarantee their survival.
In the years following their dramatic rescue in 1945, when Margaret was safely in the United States, she wrote about her experiences. She wanted to explain what happened in the camp and why. It’s an astonishing story that reveals much about how women of the mid-twentieth century were expected to conduct themselves. Margaret got on with family life; she waited more than thirty-five years before seeking a publisher for her book.
Lynn Z. Bloom, then Professor of English and the Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, learned of Margaret’s story. In 1980, Bloom, a specialist in women’s writing, autobiography, and memoir, had published an edited version of the diary of another American woman, Natalie Crouter, who was interned with her family in the northern Luzon city of Baguio. Bloom turned her editing skills to Margaret’s memoir, which was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1989 as Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, 1941-1945.
I came across both Natalie Crouter’s diary and Margaret Sams’s memoir in the 1990s when I was researching my first book. Masterpiece Theater’s dramatization of A Town Like Alice, about British women in Malaya during World War II, had sparked my interest in civilian women caught up in active conflict zones. That first book, published by the University Press of Kansas, was called Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific. I included the experiences of Margaret Sams, Natalie Crouter, and dozens of other American women—those interned and those who managed to evade the Japanese.
It inspired me to dig deeper into some issues, resulting in the publication of two more books, to create a kind of Philippines trilogy: Citizen of Empire: Ethel Thomas Herold, an American in the Philippines and Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II. Then I was finished with writing about the Philippines, but not about American women. I subsequently wrote two biographies of very different women. (There are plenty of blog posts here about those books.) Since the publication of my Dale Evans biography nearly a year ago, I have been slowly moving toward a new biography project. The subject is still mostly a secret. It’s taken a long time to figure out the focus of the book—what I think this one woman’s life has to say about larger issues in twentieth-century America. I have to figure out how to get all the necessary research done. I have to estimate how long it will take to write the book. All of that is to come. And I’ll take it one step at a time.
Theresa Kaminski 
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