The urge of patriotism

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HURON – She was a 20-year-old Iowa gal in the Navy, working in a Washington, D.C., office in World War II when Gladys Haggar’s sister, May, gave her the thrill of her military career with just a phone call.
“She called me up one day – and she always called me ‘sis’ – she said sis, if you could get away, there’s an airplane here that’s going to the air base in Sioux City, you can get a ride on it,” Haggar said.
May worked for the government, also in the nation’s capital, although the passage of 74 years has clouded Haggar’s memory of which department she worked in.
But the call and the gift her sister was offering her has stuck with her.
“I said, I can?” Haggar asked May.
“She said, ‘yeah, it’s going back to the air base today if you could get away.”
“So I talked to my C.O. And I knew if I couldn’t get a flight back I could get a train back and be back in time for Monday morning,” Haggar said. “I really wanted to go. Just to get that ride,” she said with a laugh.
The airplane was a B-17 Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber the United States flew primarily in Europe to cripple German industrial and military targets during the war.
A daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Haggar’s family settled in Sioux City after coming to America because it’s where relatives lived.
“My dad had two sisters that lived there and my mother had one sister that lived there,” Haggar said. “And so I had a lot of family and, to this day, family is so important.”
The man she would marry after meeting him at a Lebanese function in Sioux City was from Sioux Falls, where John Haggar was in the poultry and egg business with his father and two brothers in a company they called Haggar Produce.
Gladys and John married in 1948, and a decade later they moved to Huron and continued running the business.
Her interest in serving in the Navy took root a couple years after she graduated from high school. She was working as a bookkeeper in Sioux City and paying attention to her world around her, which, of course, was dominated at the time by the war.
Her future husband served, too.
“We both were in the Navy, but we did not meet in the Navy,” she said.
“When I was 20 years old my girlfriend and I both wanted to sign up,” Haggar said.
Why would a young lady, embarking on her career, think about the military?
Patriotism.
“I think this is a wonderful country,” she said. “I sit out on my swing and I just look out there and it’s beautiful.
“My mother and dad, they both worked hard; they loved this country,” Haggar said. “They chose to come here. They met in this country.”
It was 1944 when she approached her mother about her desire to serve. A couple years earlier, the United States Naval Reserve – known as the WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service – was established by Congress and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Army equivalent was the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
Haggar said her mom was so proud that her daughter wanted to sign up.
That is, until the day came when she had to sign the papers allowing Gladys to enlist.

“She didn’t want to sign,” Gladys said. “She always said, ‘I’d love that,’ but when it came right down to it, this is my daughter, and I don’t want her to go.”
But Haggar said her mother eventually relented, and she was off to boot camp in Queens, N.Y.
Where she was immediately homesick.
Her first week was spent with the other young women undergoing a battery of medical examinations.
“I just hoped and prayed they’d find something wrong with me, send me home, I was so homesick,” she said. “I’d never been away before, except to Girl Scout camp and my sister always went, too.”
When her training was over, Navy personnel told the women their options at the shore stations in the United States.
“None of the girls wanted to go to Washington, D.C., because it was said there were 10 women for every man,” Haggar said.
But her sister had a civil service job there, so that’s where Haggar chose to go.
In Arlington, Va., they lived in barracks, four to a cubicle. They wore uniforms and ate in the mess hall.
“Just like everybody else,” she said. “But went to work in an office.”
“The WACs could go overseas,” Haggar said. “They sent you overseas. But the Navy, you had to ask to go overseas. Didn’t have to go unless you wanted. That’s how I remember it. And, of course, I didn’t want to go.”
She fondly remembers a girlfriend who wanted to be a nurse in the Navy.
“And I knew that they would have her work in an office because that’s what they had me do,” she said. “And I said, if you really want to be a nurse, just go to school for nursing or you’ll never get it. And she did, and she got married, and was out in California and she was the head nurse at one of the CBS buildings out in Los Angeles.”
On weekends there were dances. She remembers taking her turn working in the mess hall kitchen. But she said it wasn’t so bad.
“I don’t remember having to peel potatoes, though,” she said with a smile. “I might have. I don’t remember that though, you know.”
Haggar left the Navy in May 1946. “In those days, you signed up for the duration of the war,” she said.
But as she talks about those two years away from her mother and father and other relatives in Sioux City, the military terms can’t help but spill out in her stories.
Like mess hall, and C.O.
“Well, you know, what kind of brought it back, because Johnny and I never talked about it much, you know, was when they had that Quilt of Valor,” Haggar said.
She is one of the recipients of beautiful quilts presented to veterans by the Huron Area Quilt Guild.
“I had to give a little report,” she said of the presentation. “And I thought, well, you know when I went in it was so different in those days than it was when men went in, so I thought I should tell about boot camp and training.
“And all that stuff kind of came back,” Haggar said.
Peace was declared and the men and women were coming home and she was part of that, too.
“In the office I was in, we did the mustering out, when the war was over,” she said. “You brought your papers in, and we went over all your papers so you could be discharged.
“The boys were all so happy,” she said. “Some of them were quite young, and some of them were older. They all were happy because the war was over.”
But the most thrilling experience of her time in the Navy came on the day that May called her sis.
“He let me have the time off, that weekend off,” Haggar said of her C.O. when she approached him with her request, most certainly very nervous.
They took off from Andrews Air Force Base at about 7 p.m. on a Friday evening.
“It was summer time. It was just a beautiful sunset,” she said.
She also remembers the guys putting a parachute on her.
Her folks knew she was flying home, and so there were a lot of family and friends at the airport waiting for her arrival in that B-17 bomber.
“I was just absolutely thrilled to fly in that Flying Fortress,” Haggar said. “It was a highlight of my service. I was on cloud nine.”
But as it would turn out, there was turbulence ahead when she got ready to go back to Washington, D.C.
She couldn’t get a flight out of Sioux City in order to get back to work by Monday morning. So she boarded a train to Chicago. They were late getting in, so she missed her connection. She tried to get a service flight, and couldn’t, and was $10 short in paying for a regular ticket.
Haggar’s only option was to take the train, but it didn’t pull into the station in the nation’s capital until just before noon. Her sister had called her C.O. to tell him Haggar was taking the train.
“I was there before noon, but still I was late and that just really bothered me because it was nice of him to give me the time off,” she said.
The years have flown by, but Haggar said the friendships she forged during the war have remained a big part of her life since then.
The Haggars have two sons and a daughter. They lost one son in 1964.
Her beloved Johnny died in July 2015, just a few months shy of their 67th wedding anniversary.
She is grateful for her days of good health and feels blessed for all she has been given.
While she remembers much of her time in the Navy, she acknowledges that the passage of so many years means she can no longer recall some specifics.
“I figure I’m 94,” Haggar said with a smile. “I’m entitled to forget certain things.”

ROGER LARSEN/PLAINSMAN
Huron’s Gladys Haggar relaxes with her Quilt of Valor, presented to the WWII Navy veteran by the Huron Area Quilt Guild. She said she enjoys her quilt every day.