Keating Show Segment

Captain Kay Keating, RET, USN

Representative for WIMSA at AARP Biennial Convention - Denver, Colorado 1996

Q: Tell me what kind of things you're hawking in Denver.

A: In Denver what we're hawking is to get women to acknowledge the fact they served in the armed forces. You know they're an invisible empire and if all of your, if everybody would walk out on their porch one day and Gabriel blew his horn and said, "Every one of you women ever served in the armed forces step out in the middle of the street." Every person viewing this would know at least four women who served and they never knew it.

Q: Last year we had a groundbreaking in Washington D.C. is that correct?

A: That's right. Right at the gate to Arlington Cemetery where they're building the Women's Memorial and we will try to have every single woman's story that we can find. It's long overdue in history and at this point, it'll be told in our own words.

Q: Isn't there a special sculpture that was made?

A: Well that sculpture was just done for the women who were in Vietnam and see, everybody's forgetting that women were around even in the Revolution. Some of them were disguised as men and some of them just went to war because they were needed. So there have been women serving ever since this country was founded.

Q: For World War II they didn't necessarily want women in active in, I mean, the Women's Corps and those sort of things, how did they develop?

A: Well what, what actually happened was in World War I they realized that they couldn't put as many ships at sea as they needed without having the shore billets filled and so they actually recruited women to serve in the Navy and the Marine Corps in World War I. The Army did not take any women in the service but what they ended up doing was when Blackjack Pershing was trying to find some telephone operators, you have to remember we didn't have radio in World War I and so they, they wanted French speaking telephone operators so they sent some contract women to France. They did have Army and Navy nurses in World War I.

Q: Did they actually go out into the field?

A: Yes, they were in the field then, and World War I they even had some trains that had hospitals in the trains where the nurses were. But in World War II, of course, they used women in a lot of places no one had ever dreamed of because in World War II they originally were not going to let anyone except the Army women go overseas but they eventually decided that they needed them in forward areas in many many other ways so they actually served in combat areas in World War II.

Q: Now you originally wanted to be a flier right?

A: Well, they were, before the war started, before World War II started, they started a civilian pilot training program which was ostensibly to form what eventually became the civil air patrol but they really were training pilots because they knew that they were going to get sucked into World War II but they didn't want it to be too obvious and so they, most of them were trained at junior colleges because they weren't, didn't have the high profiles the universities did and also they were using women pilots as well as men as flight instructors so it wouldn't be obvious either. So the junior college I was in started one of these civil air patrol things and so I thought, "Gee whiz, I think I should do that." And the third time I barfed on the instructor, he said, "Keating, I don't think you're going to make this." So I ended up joining the Navy later when they organized and let the women in the Navy and I ended up going to sea which, at least I was barfing elsewhere, not on the instructor.

Q: Do you come from a military family?

A: Well, my father had served in World War I and my mother worked in the war department in the casualty section as a civilian until he came back from France at the end of World War I and then in World War II my brother and I were both in the service.

Q: You got shipped out to, out to Hawaii. Can you tell us about what you did there?

A: Well we were radio operators and the largest fleet radio unit in the Pacific was a place called FRUPACK, Fleet Radio Unit Pacific, and it was all underground in the, right out in the middle of a Pineapple field so we lived in pineapple sheds for barracks and we went to and from work standing up in the back of steak trucks wearing dungarees so we all looked like pineapple workers and you go out in the middle of the pineapple field and then there's this big hole in the ground and you climb down a ladder and in you're in this underground complex. So the first night I was on watch up there seemed like every mosquito in the world had come down through that open hole and was attacking me so the chief came by and he said, "Miss Kate, looks to me like you need a friend." And he came back in a few minutes and he brought me this beautiful, big, fat, toad and he had a string tied around his leg, he tied it to the chair leg, and the toad would sit there and go bloooooop, bloooooop, and I carried the toad to and from work with me everyday in my dungaree pocket with an aluminum soup bowl over him so nobody would squash him after they smashed me in the truck. And when I left to come back to the states I auctioned him off for $25 dollars but he was the best friend I ever had.

Q: Now was the Pacific your first assignment?

A: No, we were at a Fleet Radio Unit for the West Coast which was, what the heck was it called. It was called Patrol Fleet, and we took care of all the traffic for the patrol ships that took care of all the expense from Northern Washington state to Mexico and all the way to the Hawaiian Islands and we had a lot of small craft out there including all those yachts that they had commandeered from the movie stars and used them for station ships and for weather guessers and what have you so they could keep track. And we handled all the traffic coming and going from those through the radio station where we were.

Q: Now you started because you knew the difference between a....

A: Dot and a dash.

Q: How did you get to be a pharmacist?

A: Well I was a third year pharmacy student at the university when I joined the Navy and I thought, of course, they'd put me in the Medical Department but when we arrived in Boot Camp, there were two thousand of us and their most critical need at that point was for radio operators so they sat everybody down and tested them and if you could tell the difference between a dot and a dash, you went off to be a radio operator and that's how I ended up in the,

Q: The Radio Corps.

A: Radio Corps.

Q: But then after, didn't you get back into medicine?

A: Well yes. At the end of the war, we were all swept out with a large broom because, under the law, we were supposed to be out of the service within 180 days of succession of hostility and suddenly they looked around and discovered that there were an awful lot of women sitting in those jobs that still needed to be covered. I went back to college to get my degree in Pharmacy and I'd been there about six months and I got a notice one day saying if I would come back into the Reserves, and I could have a choice of, oh, about twenty duty stations and one of them was Buckley Field, Denver which was only 35 miles away from where I was in school. So, I thought, "Well, I could still help, and might do it." So I went down and I signed on as a radio operator and went ahead, I worked nights so I could stay in school and I got my degree and then it was just, I graduated in August of '48 and they passed the law making the women part of the regular armed forces in June so three months after I, after they made them part of the regular Navy, why I was able to ship into the regular Navy and this time I got into the Medical Department and so as such I served aboard ship as Pharmacy Officer on a hospital ship during the Korean War and they, for many years I was the only woman Pharmacist and as a result, anyplace I went I was replacing a man so when I went to the hospital ship, I literally became the first woman to replace a man at sea. Everybody said, "Oh, I bet you took a lot of flack." and I said, "Nope, he's the one they crucified. Every time he'd come to dinner and they'd say, 'Oh Tommy, we see you're going to be replaced by a skirt.'" He could hardly talk to me when I arrived but we're very good friends today.

Q: Is there a difference between the way men and women were treated back then?

A: Yes. Very different and our whole culture has changed over the period of time. When I came in the service, if one guy got out of line, twenty guys cleaned his clock. Then we got into the mindset which I think started about in the '60's where people thought, "He's doing his own thing, I have no right to interfere." That's when it started to fall apart. But if you get in with a group of men who appreciate your presence, they take no flack from anybody when you're around.

Q: You served in three different conflicts in, after Korea, what happened?

A: After Korea, our hospital ships were sent home, after the prisoner exchange, except the first two made it all the way home. We got as far as Japan and they diverted our ship and sent us to Saigon to pick up the French Foreign Legion survivors from Dien Bien Phu. So this was about 8 years before we got into the war in Vietnam so it was an interesting trip because we picked up these Foreign Legion Troops which were made up of all kinds of nations and we took them home to North Africa where their headquarters was and we went to Marseilles, France and ended up with around the world cruise across the equator and became shell backs in the initiation and then we got the Magellan certificate and we got back to the states so it really was a wonderful time and I might add, since you asked me about my sea sickness, when we were coming in to Long Beach Harbor, I was standing up on the Bridge with the ship's Captain and he said, "Well Kate, if you never earn another distinction, you're probably the only woman in the Navy that ever fed the fish in every ocean." I said, "Yes sir, but they don't give medals for that."

Q: Now at the opening to the Memorial, what happened to you there?

A: At the groundbreaking, I was privileged to be seated next to a POW from World War II, most of the nation doesn't realize that we had 89 women who were POW's in World War II and she was in civilian clothes but she was wearing her POW medal and I was in uniform and I was wearing all my ribbons from my, the three conflicts that I served in and we were in the front row and after all the speeches were made and they were ready, taking the shovels to break the ground for the Women's Memorial, why, the people on the dais came down and walked across the front and introduced, let us introduce ourselves to them and so when the President came along, he took a hold of both my hands and he zeroed in on my ribbons and he said, "Young lady, you were in three wars?" and I said, "Yes sir." He says, "Well this nation certainly owes you a lot." I said, "Well Mr. President, this is the lady you need to speak to," and I handed his hand over to her. He zeroed in on her medal and he said, "Oh, you were captured in the Philippines." And she said, "Yes sir." He says, "Well I must ask you, why was it that those women," and there were 89 of them, "all survived," and they even were on the Death March, the Baton Death March. He said, "How is it that they survived?" And she said, "Well sir, the men were demoralized and humiliated to have to surrender. It broke their spirit and they were weakened from the combat and many of them had wounds and all of them had diseases. But MacArthur had told us specifically that our job was to keep as many of those men alive as we could and that was our mission and because we were responsible for them, I believe that's why we all survived."

Q: When will we see the completion of the Memorial?

A: They have targeted October of '97 which is a little more than a year away and we're very excited about it because a lot of us are a bit over the hill and we'd like to be around to see it when it's finished.

Thank you.