Test Single (deleteme)

Participant Info

Membership Number
4895
Salutation
Mrs
First Name
Mary
Middle/Maiden/Previous
Magdalene Weber
Last Name
Konen
Address 1
300 8th Ave SE #506
Address 2
City
Little Falls
State
MN
Zip Code
56345-3570
Phone
320-632-2245
Code
RO
Work Code #
1
State Membership
MN
Status
1
Date of Birth
04/13/1924
Date of Death
02/14/2023
Deceased At Join?
No
Comments
Mary Magdalene Konen died on February 14, 2023, Valentine's Day. I will forward her obituary. I interviewed Mary for a story in Rosie the Riveter Stories: How They Did It! Her story appears on pg. 93 and is called "Passing Tests". It was a pleasure to meet her. She lived a long and meaningful life. --Helen Sullinger
Name/Location of Company Worked
Boeing Aircraft, Seattle, WA
Dates of Work
Type of Work
“I went to Seattle and worked for the Boeing aircraft plant on the B-17s,” said Konen. “And I enlisted in November 1944 in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) Air Force.” “I took my training at Fort Des Moines, basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa,” she said. “Six weeks training and then I was sent to Walker Air Force Base, Victoria, Kan. And I was assigned to the hospital there as a worker, I guess because I had taken care of my grandmother so long. I wanted to be in the control tower so bad, but this other girl that transferred with me had no aptitude toward medicine, so I worked at the hospital there. More or less got my training, you should say, there. Konen said there was a long ward with beds on each side and four or five private rooms to keep patients they didn’t want to expose anyone else to. “I took temperatures and whatever else nurses do,” she said. “Then I was transferred to Jefferson Barracks, Mo. and I worked at a dental clinic,” Konen said. The base, just south of St. Louis, held a different atmosphere for the WACs, she said. “The colonel didn’t want WACs on the base,” she recalled with a laugh. “His welcome speech was ‘I didn’t ask for you to come. While you’re here you can do the best you can.’” Sleeping arrangements were a second sign of the colonel’s feelings about the newcomers, she said. “There were three barracks and they were condemned to a certain extent,” Konen said. “And they would not put the German prisoners-of-war in them, so they put the WACs in there. The doors were hanging by one hinge, there was sand all over in the building and we got hammers and screwdrivers, we put the doors back on.” The women tried using a garden hose to clean the sand out of their second-floor rooms, but had to stop when colleagues downstairs complained that the water was cascading onto their personal property. Obviously a group of non-coms had little recourse against the base commander, but the women did what they could to make a point. “Whenever the colonel’s staff car was coming,” she said, “we’d be walking and the colonel would be coming down the street toward them, we all turned our backs and walked the same direction so we wouldn’t have to salute the staff car. He saw more backs of the WACs.” As an assistant in the dental clinic, Konen took X-rays of teeth for both leaving and returning American GIs. “Then toward the end of the war we were doing the German prisoners-of-war’s teeth,” she said. “And for a long time I didn’t let them know that I could understand German. One day they were talking and I had to laugh out loud and then they realized I could understand them.” Later she was asked to take over receptionist duties for just that reason. “I could speak German, so I could ask German prisoners-of-war information, about where they hurt, or what their names were and all that stuff.” She noted that the POWs were rarely under heavy guard and there was no animosity between them and the base staff. “From Jefferson Barracks then I was transferred to Fort Sheridan, Ill., more or less looking for our discharge because the war was over by that time,” Konen said. She again worked in a hospital as a nurse for a few months. “I got my discharge in August of 1946. And I came back to Pierz to my parents,” she said. Konen was glad for good teachers in the service, since she felt unqualified as a nurse. One of her favorites was a male sergeant who was a registered nurse (RN) but wasn’t made an officer like the female RNs. “I thought that was so wrong,” she said. “But he was a good teacher. He taught me a lot, because I was green as could be. The only thing I knew how to do was give my grandma insulin shots.”
Rosie Name if Rb or Rv
Is/Was Rosie a member of ARRA?
Yes
Contact Name (Deceased Rosie Contact)
Contact Email Address
Contact Phone Number
Contact Relationship