![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ww2-0\/files\/2017\/09\/servicemen-dancing-338x210.jpg\")
American soldiers dancing at a servicemen’s center in Minnesota, similar to the one where Edna Newby works. Photo by Jack Delano (from Library of Congress).<\/p><\/div>\n
After months of pestering, the program finally moved her to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where her intelligence and kind heart were truly put to good use. She was placed in a log cabin, with a large central room that housed a piano and a radio, a small office in which she and her secretary work, a big kitchen and an \u201cimportant locked closet\u201d.<\/p>\n
Newby says that most Marines are about 16 or 17\u2014they would lie about their age in order to enlist. When they come into the towns, they buy bottles of liquor and attempt to finish the whole thing in one go, which causes them to be dangerous. This \u201cimportant locked closet\u201d is where the confiscated bottles go so she can allow the Marines to drink them in moderation, mostly at the dances they hold in the large central room.<\/p>\n
Newby\u2019s favorite part about her job in Jacksonville is the family dinners that they have for the boys. \u201cSo I go to Wilmington, 50 miles, to buy the food, because we don’t have any big stores in Jacksonville that have as much food as I need, and I go and get the food and they come and cook and they love coming in to cook, of course. Those boys that like to cook love doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cboys,\u201d as she continuously calls the Marines that come in and out of her building, love to listen to her bang out songs on the piano.\u00a0 She sometimes sits there for six hours straight, playing \u201chorrid tunes\u201d and singing even though she “can not quite carry a tune.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newby attempts to make every holiday at the center an extraordinary event for the Marines who are there during that time: \u201cAt Christmas time, I remember, we decided we’d get a big tree and [my secretary] Miss Gilligan got the fellows to make the decorations to put on the tree, and I can remember this one Marine coming in and saying to her, ‘Miss Gilligan, if you ever tell any of these other guys that I am making angels, I’ll never come here again.'” She laughs at the thought and goes on to describe how grateful the Marines are for even the littlest of normalcy after coming back from the battlefront.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, we do the simplest of things, but they love it,\u201d says Newby.<\/p>\n
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Author\u2019s Note: \u00a0Some of Edna Newby\u2019s quotes were changed from past tense to present tense.<\/p>\n
* Later renamed the Douglass College at Rutgers New Brunswick<\/p>\n
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Sources:<\/p>\n