Not all the work to support World War II was done by men.

Elverda Lincoln joined the Navy as a WAVE in 1943 when she was 20. She had moved from Minnesota to Washington to follow her father where the jobs were. She worked as a waitress at the construction camps her father worked at. Eventually, the rest of her family — mother and 11 siblings — followed.

Lincoln remembers embroidering by the radio when she heard Pearl Harbor had been attacked. “I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was,” she wrote in her book “Peeling the Peelings.”

“Since I was a girl and couldn’t join the military service, the news didn’t affect my life any, just the excitement of local boys joining up to fight the enemy in the Pacific and Europe,” she says.

When Lincoln enlisted in the Navy, she was sent to train at Hunter College in New York City. She took a troop train across the country, which took five days. The trains were so crowded with GIs that the women often stayed in the lavatory area.

“None of us took advantage of any GIs’ offer of a seat,” she says. “They were a rowdy, flirty bunch and we were scared of them.”

Boot camp lasted four weeks and then Lincoln was sent to Cedar Falls, Iowa, for three months of advanced secretarial training. Lincoln requested to be assigned on the West Coast and was sent to an aircraft control center in downtown Seattle.

“I climbed ladders to put colored pins on a huge wall map so the officers would know the exact location of ships and planes at sea,” she recalled. “The radioman of each plane called our office at least every hour giving their exact location. The planes were on constant alert for possible enemy activity.”

After a little less than a year there, Lincoln was sent to Tongue Point Naval Air Station in Astoria, Ore. She updated manuals with new coding.

“I clearly remember coding a great number of radio signals in manuals for the battle of Iwo Jima and the possible invasion of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska,” she recalls in her book. “Up to this time I was nonchalantly performing my assigned duties, but it really hit me hard when I found out the importance of what I was doing.”

Next, Lincoln was sent to work with teletypes in Portland, Ore. It was there that she met her future husband, a Marine who ran messages from the recruiting office to Lincoln’s office.

She was honorably discharged after serving 34 months in July 1946. Her husband decided to get out when his time was up that September, but on the day of his discharge, he came home and told her he re-enlisted.

Her husband was finally discharged in September 1949 and the couple decided to move to Alaska in April 1950. They traveled for 23 days over the ALCAN to Palmer.

Lincoln admits her experience serving in the Navy helped her mature.

“I got more patriotic,” she said. “The training gave me confidence. I was just as good as the rest of them since we all dressed alike.”Some of this article is based on stories in “Peeling the Peelings” by Elverda E. Lincoln.