March 2, 2020 • 23 mins
World War II transformed women’s service both in the U.S. Armed Forces and in their stateside communities -- millions would serve at home and abroad as nurses, clerics, drivers, front-line food peddlers, and even pilots. The work wasn’t easy. To survive the shifting job market, they had to work twice as hard for half the pay. They had to suffer how society could look up or down on them at any given moment. They had to adapt, grow, and endure.
Army Nurse Victoria Louise Kambic found when tempting wounded soldiers and fussing children, a bag of sweets in her pocket helped, too.
Victoria became Sister Melanie Kambic, and she shares her World War II war and food story with us from the Sisters of Divine Providence convent in Allison Park, Pennsylvania.
Learn more about Sister Melanie and women’s contributions to World War II at her page at ServicePodcast.org. There, you can also share your Service stories and leave messages for all of the veterans you hear on Service. And we’re always sharing extra audio and nerdy food history on social media - we’re @servicepodcast on Instagram and Facebook.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Who are tuning into service Johnny, the strict private first
class that are in stories of hunger and war. They
joined the service women Mapperel harder Pell Harbor, a production
from my heart radio. We used to just give these
people the food from our miskits. You ain't what you
could get, and be thankful for what you were getting.
(00:24):
I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo. So I appeal to the
owners of plants, to the managers, to the workers who
our own government employee, to put every ounce of ever
into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint. We must
(00:50):
be the great awesenal of democracy. Throughout the Great Depression
and into the start of World War Two, the Pennsylvania
steel mills fired around the clock just outside of Pittsburgh.
The towns of Rankin, Graddox, Swissville, and Regions Square spread
around the mills to feed the men feeding The furnaces,
(01:13):
restaurants and shops stayed open deep into the night, employing
more and more women. As the depression lingered on Teenager's Neck,
Don hilltop slit by the firework like smoke stack display
the asthma and emphysyma. They eventually caused keeping busy peddling
local doctors and nurses. There was plenty of work for
(01:34):
those in this great, steel bending, back breaking arsenal of democracy,
a world that required workers, a world that welcomed women
in rolls they'd never been allowed to play before. In
ninety one, the Women's Army Corps was established. Excepting what
(01:55):
would become three hundred and fifty thousand women serving as clerics,
lab technos, drivers, and even pilots. Five thousand women would
become Army nurses. Within six months of the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, over seven million women red Cross stations, Countless
salvation army soldiers served overseas. Six million women would enter
(02:16):
factories in fields to free the men up to fight.
When she became a Baltimore shipyard welder, single mother, Meta
Montana Hallieber and faced judgment from friends and women on
the trolley skirted away from her tired work, boot clad body.
But Meta remembers taking pride in what her hands could
make with a little rod and a little bit of welding,
(02:38):
and the prayers prayed into the ships they sent off
to war, and the careful rebuilding of the bombed vessels
that returned to them. Career Army nurse Francis Liberty recalled
nurses being scorned as the lowest of the low at
the start of the war, right along with the evening ladies.
That didn't stop them from landing in Normandy only four
(02:59):
days after D Day or pulling wounded men from the
battlefields in Italy. It was the world into which Army
nurse Sister Melanie Cambeck was born. At the time when
Sister Melanie was going to nursing school, there was no
financial support offered to women becoming war nurses. There were
certain employment rules for mothers of children of a certain age.
(03:23):
Women entered the workforce at double the rate of men,
yet often made less than half the pay men would accept.
And as this was a segregated world, last hired, first fired,
made it even harder for African American women to get ahead.
How would the young woman who would become Sister Melanie
Cambeck from the Sisters a Divine Providence Convent in Alison Park, Pennsylvania.
(03:48):
Let's slow down and sit to hear what she has
to share. M h. My name was Victoria Louise Cambick
(04:09):
and I was a second lieutenant in the Second World War.
I came from a family that came to e Croasia
in response to that cry for people to work in
need steel mills. They treated the foreigners very miserably. Most
(04:29):
of the areas had two room row houses. Our family
moved into two rooms. We eventually had six children, enormous
now in their small two rooms space. They had a
small playground. There was a fence around it, but some
(04:52):
bad children got in and they tore everything up. They
broke the swings and the merry go around and all
the things that were there. The slying board. So they
put a magnetized fence around it so that anybody who
tried to break in would get a little shock. The
(05:15):
Croatians knew how to cook only three vegetables, cabbage, corn,
and tomatoes. Those are the only three vegetables my mother ever,
because that's what they learned in Europe, and cabbage was
a horrible thing. Our shoemaker had a race where he
made milkshakes or a nickel. We could buy a milkshake
(05:36):
from the shoemaker. It would last for a week sometimes
because with zip on it. We didn't have very many
treats like that. That was very loveliest things for us. Nevertheless,
I never experienced any shortage of food because we were
raised to eat those three vegetables. We had cabbage every
(05:57):
day for lunch. We had a stove in the kitchen
and it was awful smelling that cabbage. I bringing up
was very, very poor because of our circumstances. Although my
father had a good job at the mill. He was
in charge of the place where they melted the steel
logs to make war material out of it, but I
(06:20):
hardly ever saw him because he was worked three shifts. Nevertheless,
I was my father's favorite child. We were very close.
One time, my baby was being born to three years
younger than I was. He put a stool, my brother said,
made at the foot of the stairs, and he said,
now you sit there until I tell you to get up.
(06:43):
So the people were running up and down the stairs
with all kinds of errands. And when the doctor finally
came after delivering the baby, he looked at me said,
my you're a good girl. You sat there the whole
time without moving. I was very proud. I was a
(07:03):
middle child, you know, middle child or left to do
their own thing. I got attention because I helped people,
so I wanted to be helpful. I always wanted to
be a nurse. I guess I saw it on somebody's
TV or I saw the nurses going around helping people
in the neighborhood. I was seventeen when I graduated from
(07:25):
high school. I took a job in a small store
where the wealthy people had their clothes dry cleaned. I
got five dollars a month for working there year a day.
I used to give some of it to my mother
because she always needed money. It took me about five
(07:46):
years to save enough money to go to school to
become a nurse. I was older, and because of that,
they gave me all the hardest patients. I had to
work extra hard to keep my position in the whole spill.
But my mother was very proud of me when I graduated,
because then I could get a job and earn a
(08:07):
little more. We are mobilizing our fitzenship will. We are
calling on men and women and property and money to
join in making all the plants affective. When I graduated
from nursing, they were so in demand of nurses that
(08:30):
I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's
go join the army. And he did. Money ways stop
there was a young man in the hospital who apparently
(08:52):
had some sort of back injury, probably a fratchur in vertebrae.
He was in a flat bed and I went to
try to rub his back a little because I felt
he needed a background from lying flats for so long
without any care. He didn't want any female to touch him.
Eventually I coaxed him into getting a background to made
(09:14):
him feel better, and he let me take care of
him after that. And there was an elderly gentleman who
was dying because he required so much attention. Our leader
put him some back alley where he was not going
to bother anybody. She wouldn't let me go back there
too often because she said he takes too much time
(09:36):
to spend on that kind of person. Because these other
people need more attention. That's why she kept me in
the big place. In the big ward. All I did
was carrying plateful of golf medicine. That would the only
nursing we did at that time. I never heard him
complain too much about the food. They were fond of sweets,
and I always tried to make sure that they had
(09:59):
something sweet to satisfy their appetite for sweets. Even in
my own apartment, I ate very sparingly, and even at
the officers club and and normal food, I received enough food,
and I found everybody else. Did I find it hard?
But I find it satisfying because that was my nature
(10:19):
to help people. And I even want to visit that
dying man without letting my supervisor note. I walked back
one time to visit him. He was uttering phrases like
dying people do unconscious already. I just felt that I
had to do that for these people, because they needed it.
(10:44):
Six hundred and seventy one thousand wounded troops returned home
to hospitals like nurse campbacks at Camp Lee, Virginia. But
so skilled were the nurses that had treated them on
the field that fewer than four percent of them later
died as a result of their war wounds. Or does
he ease overseas? The slack clad nurses had worked in
(11:04):
unsanitary field hospitals. They had kept up morale by helping
to distribute backed up v mail. They'd fed starved patients
and concentration camps, and tended free prisoners of war on
the roadside. Seventy seven nurses were notoriously taken Japanese prisoners
of war themselves, continuing to treat patients while also cooking
(11:25):
weeds into cold cream to stave off their starvation. By
the end of the war, fifty nine thousand women, including
five hundred African American women, had become Army Nurse Corps nurses.
Sixteen were killed in direct action, sixteen hundred received commendations
for outstanding conduct. The Women's Army Corps disbanded when the
(11:46):
armed forces integrated in nineteen It wasn't until two thousand
and fifteen that the Department of Defense opened all combat
jobs to women. Today, women make up about of the
Air Force, of the Navy, of the Army, and almost
nine percent of the Marine Corps. We'll be right back.
(12:23):
You're listening to service that are in stories of hunger
and war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacquelin Proposo, and
we're here with Army nurse Victoria Louise Cambec at the
Army Hospital in Camp Lee, Virginia. One of the many
things I love to ponder as I sit with our
World War two veterans is how much our population has
(12:43):
grown since the time of the stories they're sharing, and
how much they've had to adapt to this changing world.
In the U S population was just under one forty million.
Today it's over twice that much. Cities that had become
industrial giants would fall to international trade. Suburban sprawl set
(13:05):
nails into factory town coffins, malls would replace corner stores,
medical centers, the local doctor, computers, nearly everything. This would
take time, though these veterans would be a part of
the change, and when World War Two ended, the women
who had worked in the factories and fields and hospitals
(13:26):
would each have to find her part in it. After
her discharge, Nurse Cambeck would earn a Bachelors of Science
and Nursing Education and then a Master's of Science and
Administration in nursing education. Then, at thirty three years old
in nineteen fifty four, she would take a new kind
of order entirely. I was in the army for three years.
(13:58):
I was accustomed to making do what I had to do,
and what I had to do at that time was
to get a job, and I found one. It was
a transitory position, walking the field, working in homes people
that were jobless, taking care of patients who were homeless,
or people who needed food. We had a job making
(14:22):
sandwiches for the jobless. There were a lot of stores
that were selling bread sheep down by the riverside. Our
home was near the riverside. I collected a lot of bread.
I got the bread at a cheap rate, and I
parked my car close to the edge of the river.
When I was coming home after shopping around in those
shops down there, asked a man who was walking by.
(14:45):
I said, would you get my car down there? So
he walked down and I had all that bread that
I purchased. He said, my you're going to have a
big feast with all that bridge or carrying. I said, oh, no,
we're making sandwiches for the jobless. He's don't ask for
the poor. Well here and he gave me fifty dollars.
He said, that's for the poor. But I did a
(15:08):
lot of home nursing. And one of the nurses that
was doing home nursing the upper edge of rank and
there was some wild people up there who had lived
there for years and years, and it would easily rob
anybody of any money they had. And this nurse was
doing house nursing up there, and they told her that
(15:29):
she would have to keep a gunman walk along with
her to protect her. So she quit her job because
she said, I'm not going to work with a gunman.
They never bothered me in the house that I occupied
up there to serve the people, because they knew that
if they did anything to me, the people would all
(15:49):
have to go down to the hospital to get treated,
whereas now they could just run to my office and
get something to take care of their problem. So I
was safe up there. H I didn't know much about
religion because we didn't have any real religious training at home,
(16:11):
except to know that you have to go to Mass
on Sundays and they have to not eat meat on Fridays. Nevertheless,
I really was a religious person. When I was sixteen,
the sisters in rank And, where I was born, wanted
me to join their convent, but their mother house was
on Staten Island, and I thought, if I go to
Staten Island, I will become so homesick, I'll come home
(16:33):
and I'll never join any convent again. I tried to
keep to my religious ideals, and I tried to read
articles that would keep my faith alive, and listening to
these articles made me feel that I need more religious training.
A chaplain had a Mass near the Officers Club, and
(16:57):
I went to Mass on Sundays and on Holy Days
down to Chapel. Then, when I left the Army, my
mother had fallen and fractured her hip. My youngest brother
was very sick. So when these two people died, then
I joined the Sisters of Divine Providence. When I came
(17:19):
to this convent, I always felt they needed somebody. Their
need came before my need. They never sent me to
become a partition. They have me sleeping on the second
floor in a department where everyone else goes to work
except myself. They all had a job, either in the
convent or some of them worked outside, either in the
(17:40):
post office or something. I just knew the ones who
worked around the house. Some of them took care of
the cleaning, some took care of helping get patients in
and out of the bathtubs. One sister had charge of
the laundry in our big laundry that we had, and
she would come up and I recognized her. Another one
had charge of the young sisters. She was always aware
(18:03):
of me, but she never participated too much with me.
I just was aware that they were there, and I
never conversed with them. Too much. That leaves me a
lot of time for prayer. Jesus. Sitting at a table
with a group of nuns who had different pursuits. They
(18:23):
would discuss their pursuits and I just sat and listened.
I very seldom enjoyed or participated in their conversations. Our food,
I thought it was acceptable. When I came to the
corner and I saw the cabbage on the menu, I snorted.
I thought, oh, I'll never eat that. Oh they're serving
that again, and I can't stand it. And I tasted
(18:46):
it once and it was really good, and after that
I was a Cabby's lover. I never have feeling that
we were being cheated out of any food. I always
saw our guy. It was satisfactory. I was allowed to
eat anything I wanted. I always felt that children needed
(19:11):
special attention because they're eventually going to become as old
as I am, and they'll have needs. If we meet
their needs properly, they'll grow up the right way. And
if we don't meet their needs, they'll grow up to
be criminals or some other undesirable trait. There was a
period of time when I was interested in the schools.
(19:32):
I tried to treat the children that are coming to
contact with in a way that would make me look
favorable in their eyes, rather than to be hostile, because
sometimes the nuns are very cruel to children and they
develop a hatred of anything religious. So I tried to
be as pleasant as I could. I got a bag
of candy weighing about a hundred pounds, and I could
(19:55):
share it easily with these children sometimes to get their favor.
In infants, the baby doesn't respond to anything excepting being fed.
As they grow older, they still want to be fed properly.
If you hand a piece of candy to a toddler,
they accepted willingly, and the older they get, the more
(20:16):
they respond. I think that being kind in any way
makes children different. The kinder you are to people, the
more likely you're able to get their undivided attention. If
we slought them off real casually, they'll respond in the
same manner. They won't panny attention. But if you're kind
(20:39):
to them and treat them kindly, I think they will
respond by following you more closely. As a nun sister,
Melanie taught children and taught nursing and worked as a
nurse practitioner all around Pennsylvania and to Maryland and for
(21:01):
a few years in Puerto Rico. She retired from nursing
in returning to making sandwiches for the homeless as one
of the Peanut, Butter and Jelly Brigade of Sisters working
with Operation Safety Net outside of Pittsburgh. She became an
early proponent of recycling. She celebrated her jubilee that's sixty
five years with the Order in two thousand nineteen. Today
(21:25):
she most often meditates on forgiveness and kindness and leave
a place better than you found it and everything I
did I pointed to that in my work because of
our poverty, I had to struggle to maintain my own personality,
in my character, and I think that struggle keeps on going.
(21:47):
I try to please people as much as possible. If
I find things that needed to be changed and changed
to the best of my ability, and if I couldn't
do anything, I prayed over it. If I ever get depressed,
I could read my letters that the people that employed
me had given me for all the jobs that I
(22:07):
had after I graduated from nursing. They were so wonderful,
what a wonderful nurse she is. Every letter was so
upbeat that I said, if I ever feel depressed, I'll
just read all those letters from the Chief of Staffs
and I can raise my spirits with those letters. I
can't imagine anything else I'd rather do. You can find
(22:33):
more about Sister Melanie Cambec and the women of World
War Two at her page at Service podcast dot org.
There's also a form on our main page where you
can send a message to Sister Melanie or any of
the veterans we featured the season. We watched a few
incredible interviews of other women who served during World War
Two who have since passed away, and we'll be sharing
(22:54):
some more from them on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
Were at Service Podcast So join us are if curious.
In our final episode this season, authors Mike Cole and
Anastasia marks Decel say, though help us pull together how
combat and cuisine most changed during World War Two, affecting
the lives of service members and civilians going forward until then.
(23:17):
Services a production from My Heart Radio, where our supervising
producer is Gabrielle Collins and our executive producer Christopher hascotas
Avery Keatley was our on site engineer for this episode
and we'd like to thank Sister Roseanne and Susan Ron
from the Sisters of Divine Providence for their help coordinating
this episode. Thanks for listening, and thank you to those
serving and those who have served.
Who are tuning into service Johnny, the strict private first
class that are in stories of hunger and war. They
joined the service women Mapperel harder Pell Harbor, a production
from my heart radio. We used to just give these
people the food from our miskits. You ain't what you
could get, and be thankful for what you were getting.
(00:24):
I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo. So I appeal to the
owners of plants, to the managers, to the workers who
our own government employee, to put every ounce of ever
into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint. We must
(00:50):
be the great awesenal of democracy. Throughout the Great Depression
and into the start of World War Two, the Pennsylvania
steel mills fired around the clock just outside of Pittsburgh.
The towns of Rankin, Graddox, Swissville, and Regions Square spread
around the mills to feed the men feeding The furnaces,
(01:13):
restaurants and shops stayed open deep into the night, employing
more and more women. As the depression lingered on Teenager's Neck,
Don hilltop slit by the firework like smoke stack display
the asthma and emphysyma. They eventually caused keeping busy peddling
local doctors and nurses. There was plenty of work for
(01:34):
those in this great, steel bending, back breaking arsenal of democracy,
a world that required workers, a world that welcomed women
in rolls they'd never been allowed to play before. In
ninety one, the Women's Army Corps was established. Excepting what
(01:55):
would become three hundred and fifty thousand women serving as clerics,
lab technos, drivers, and even pilots. Five thousand women would
become Army nurses. Within six months of the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, over seven million women red Cross stations, Countless
salvation army soldiers served overseas. Six million women would enter
(02:16):
factories in fields to free the men up to fight.
When she became a Baltimore shipyard welder, single mother, Meta
Montana Hallieber and faced judgment from friends and women on
the trolley skirted away from her tired work, boot clad body.
But Meta remembers taking pride in what her hands could
make with a little rod and a little bit of welding,
(02:38):
and the prayers prayed into the ships they sent off
to war, and the careful rebuilding of the bombed vessels
that returned to them. Career Army nurse Francis Liberty recalled
nurses being scorned as the lowest of the low at
the start of the war, right along with the evening ladies.
That didn't stop them from landing in Normandy only four
(02:59):
days after D Day or pulling wounded men from the
battlefields in Italy. It was the world into which Army
nurse Sister Melanie Cambeck was born. At the time when
Sister Melanie was going to nursing school, there was no
financial support offered to women becoming war nurses. There were
certain employment rules for mothers of children of a certain age.
(03:23):
Women entered the workforce at double the rate of men,
yet often made less than half the pay men would accept.
And as this was a segregated world, last hired, first fired,
made it even harder for African American women to get ahead.
How would the young woman who would become Sister Melanie
Cambeck from the Sisters a Divine Providence Convent in Alison Park, Pennsylvania.
(03:48):
Let's slow down and sit to hear what she has
to share. M h. My name was Victoria Louise Cambick
(04:09):
and I was a second lieutenant in the Second World War.
I came from a family that came to e Croasia
in response to that cry for people to work in
need steel mills. They treated the foreigners very miserably. Most
(04:29):
of the areas had two room row houses. Our family
moved into two rooms. We eventually had six children, enormous
now in their small two rooms space. They had a
small playground. There was a fence around it, but some
(04:52):
bad children got in and they tore everything up. They
broke the swings and the merry go around and all
the things that were there. The slying board. So they
put a magnetized fence around it so that anybody who
tried to break in would get a little shock. The
(05:15):
Croatians knew how to cook only three vegetables, cabbage, corn,
and tomatoes. Those are the only three vegetables my mother ever,
because that's what they learned in Europe, and cabbage was
a horrible thing. Our shoemaker had a race where he
made milkshakes or a nickel. We could buy a milkshake
(05:36):
from the shoemaker. It would last for a week sometimes
because with zip on it. We didn't have very many
treats like that. That was very loveliest things for us. Nevertheless,
I never experienced any shortage of food because we were
raised to eat those three vegetables. We had cabbage every
(05:57):
day for lunch. We had a stove in the kitchen
and it was awful smelling that cabbage. I bringing up
was very, very poor because of our circumstances. Although my
father had a good job at the mill. He was
in charge of the place where they melted the steel
logs to make war material out of it, but I
(06:20):
hardly ever saw him because he was worked three shifts. Nevertheless,
I was my father's favorite child. We were very close.
One time, my baby was being born to three years
younger than I was. He put a stool, my brother said,
made at the foot of the stairs, and he said,
now you sit there until I tell you to get up.
(06:43):
So the people were running up and down the stairs
with all kinds of errands. And when the doctor finally
came after delivering the baby, he looked at me said,
my you're a good girl. You sat there the whole
time without moving. I was very proud. I was a
(07:03):
middle child, you know, middle child or left to do
their own thing. I got attention because I helped people,
so I wanted to be helpful. I always wanted to
be a nurse. I guess I saw it on somebody's
TV or I saw the nurses going around helping people
in the neighborhood. I was seventeen when I graduated from
(07:25):
high school. I took a job in a small store
where the wealthy people had their clothes dry cleaned. I
got five dollars a month for working there year a day.
I used to give some of it to my mother
because she always needed money. It took me about five
(07:46):
years to save enough money to go to school to
become a nurse. I was older, and because of that,
they gave me all the hardest patients. I had to
work extra hard to keep my position in the whole spill.
But my mother was very proud of me when I graduated,
because then I could get a job and earn a
(08:07):
little more. We are mobilizing our fitzenship will. We are
calling on men and women and property and money to
join in making all the plants affective. When I graduated
from nursing, they were so in demand of nurses that
(08:30):
I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's
go join the army. And he did. Money ways stop
there was a young man in the hospital who apparently
(08:52):
had some sort of back injury, probably a fratchur in vertebrae.
He was in a flat bed and I went to
try to rub his back a little because I felt
he needed a background from lying flats for so long
without any care. He didn't want any female to touch him.
Eventually I coaxed him into getting a background to made
(09:14):
him feel better, and he let me take care of
him after that. And there was an elderly gentleman who
was dying because he required so much attention. Our leader
put him some back alley where he was not going
to bother anybody. She wouldn't let me go back there
too often because she said he takes too much time
(09:36):
to spend on that kind of person. Because these other
people need more attention. That's why she kept me in
the big place. In the big ward. All I did
was carrying plateful of golf medicine. That would the only
nursing we did at that time. I never heard him
complain too much about the food. They were fond of sweets,
and I always tried to make sure that they had
(09:59):
something sweet to satisfy their appetite for sweets. Even in
my own apartment, I ate very sparingly, and even at
the officers club and and normal food, I received enough food,
and I found everybody else. Did I find it hard?
But I find it satisfying because that was my nature
(10:19):
to help people. And I even want to visit that
dying man without letting my supervisor note. I walked back
one time to visit him. He was uttering phrases like
dying people do unconscious already. I just felt that I
had to do that for these people, because they needed it.
(10:44):
Six hundred and seventy one thousand wounded troops returned home
to hospitals like nurse campbacks at Camp Lee, Virginia. But
so skilled were the nurses that had treated them on
the field that fewer than four percent of them later
died as a result of their war wounds. Or does
he ease overseas? The slack clad nurses had worked in
(11:04):
unsanitary field hospitals. They had kept up morale by helping
to distribute backed up v mail. They'd fed starved patients
and concentration camps, and tended free prisoners of war on
the roadside. Seventy seven nurses were notoriously taken Japanese prisoners
of war themselves, continuing to treat patients while also cooking
(11:25):
weeds into cold cream to stave off their starvation. By
the end of the war, fifty nine thousand women, including
five hundred African American women, had become Army Nurse Corps nurses.
Sixteen were killed in direct action, sixteen hundred received commendations
for outstanding conduct. The Women's Army Corps disbanded when the
(11:46):
armed forces integrated in nineteen It wasn't until two thousand
and fifteen that the Department of Defense opened all combat
jobs to women. Today, women make up about of the
Air Force, of the Navy, of the Army, and almost
nine percent of the Marine Corps. We'll be right back.
(12:23):
You're listening to service that are in stories of hunger
and war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacquelin Proposo, and
we're here with Army nurse Victoria Louise Cambec at the
Army Hospital in Camp Lee, Virginia. One of the many
things I love to ponder as I sit with our
World War two veterans is how much our population has
(12:43):
grown since the time of the stories they're sharing, and
how much they've had to adapt to this changing world.
In the U S population was just under one forty million.
Today it's over twice that much. Cities that had become
industrial giants would fall to international trade. Suburban sprawl set
(13:05):
nails into factory town coffins, malls would replace corner stores,
medical centers, the local doctor, computers, nearly everything. This would
take time, though these veterans would be a part of
the change, and when World War Two ended, the women
who had worked in the factories and fields and hospitals
(13:26):
would each have to find her part in it. After
her discharge, Nurse Cambeck would earn a Bachelors of Science
and Nursing Education and then a Master's of Science and
Administration in nursing education. Then, at thirty three years old
in nineteen fifty four, she would take a new kind
of order entirely. I was in the army for three years.
(13:58):
I was accustomed to making do what I had to do,
and what I had to do at that time was
to get a job, and I found one. It was
a transitory position, walking the field, working in homes people
that were jobless, taking care of patients who were homeless,
or people who needed food. We had a job making
(14:22):
sandwiches for the jobless. There were a lot of stores
that were selling bread sheep down by the riverside. Our
home was near the riverside. I collected a lot of bread.
I got the bread at a cheap rate, and I
parked my car close to the edge of the river.
When I was coming home after shopping around in those
shops down there, asked a man who was walking by.
(14:45):
I said, would you get my car down there? So
he walked down and I had all that bread that
I purchased. He said, my you're going to have a
big feast with all that bridge or carrying. I said, oh, no,
we're making sandwiches for the jobless. He's don't ask for
the poor. Well here and he gave me fifty dollars.
He said, that's for the poor. But I did a
(15:08):
lot of home nursing. And one of the nurses that
was doing home nursing the upper edge of rank and
there was some wild people up there who had lived
there for years and years, and it would easily rob
anybody of any money they had. And this nurse was
doing house nursing up there, and they told her that
(15:29):
she would have to keep a gunman walk along with
her to protect her. So she quit her job because
she said, I'm not going to work with a gunman.
They never bothered me in the house that I occupied
up there to serve the people, because they knew that
if they did anything to me, the people would all
(15:49):
have to go down to the hospital to get treated,
whereas now they could just run to my office and
get something to take care of their problem. So I
was safe up there. H I didn't know much about
religion because we didn't have any real religious training at home,
(16:11):
except to know that you have to go to Mass
on Sundays and they have to not eat meat on Fridays. Nevertheless,
I really was a religious person. When I was sixteen,
the sisters in rank And, where I was born, wanted
me to join their convent, but their mother house was
on Staten Island, and I thought, if I go to
Staten Island, I will become so homesick, I'll come home
(16:33):
and I'll never join any convent again. I tried to
keep to my religious ideals, and I tried to read
articles that would keep my faith alive, and listening to
these articles made me feel that I need more religious training.
A chaplain had a Mass near the Officers Club, and
(16:57):
I went to Mass on Sundays and on Holy Days
down to Chapel. Then, when I left the Army, my
mother had fallen and fractured her hip. My youngest brother
was very sick. So when these two people died, then
I joined the Sisters of Divine Providence. When I came
(17:19):
to this convent, I always felt they needed somebody. Their
need came before my need. They never sent me to
become a partition. They have me sleeping on the second
floor in a department where everyone else goes to work
except myself. They all had a job, either in the
convent or some of them worked outside, either in the
(17:40):
post office or something. I just knew the ones who
worked around the house. Some of them took care of
the cleaning, some took care of helping get patients in
and out of the bathtubs. One sister had charge of
the laundry in our big laundry that we had, and
she would come up and I recognized her. Another one
had charge of the young sisters. She was always aware
(18:03):
of me, but she never participated too much with me.
I just was aware that they were there, and I
never conversed with them. Too much. That leaves me a
lot of time for prayer. Jesus. Sitting at a table
with a group of nuns who had different pursuits. They
(18:23):
would discuss their pursuits and I just sat and listened.
I very seldom enjoyed or participated in their conversations. Our food,
I thought it was acceptable. When I came to the
corner and I saw the cabbage on the menu, I snorted.
I thought, oh, I'll never eat that. Oh they're serving
that again, and I can't stand it. And I tasted
(18:46):
it once and it was really good, and after that
I was a Cabby's lover. I never have feeling that
we were being cheated out of any food. I always
saw our guy. It was satisfactory. I was allowed to
eat anything I wanted. I always felt that children needed
(19:11):
special attention because they're eventually going to become as old
as I am, and they'll have needs. If we meet
their needs properly, they'll grow up the right way. And
if we don't meet their needs, they'll grow up to
be criminals or some other undesirable trait. There was a
period of time when I was interested in the schools.
(19:32):
I tried to treat the children that are coming to
contact with in a way that would make me look
favorable in their eyes, rather than to be hostile, because
sometimes the nuns are very cruel to children and they
develop a hatred of anything religious. So I tried to
be as pleasant as I could. I got a bag
of candy weighing about a hundred pounds, and I could
(19:55):
share it easily with these children sometimes to get their favor.
In infants, the baby doesn't respond to anything excepting being fed.
As they grow older, they still want to be fed properly.
If you hand a piece of candy to a toddler,
they accepted willingly, and the older they get, the more
(20:16):
they respond. I think that being kind in any way
makes children different. The kinder you are to people, the
more likely you're able to get their undivided attention. If
we slought them off real casually, they'll respond in the
same manner. They won't panny attention. But if you're kind
(20:39):
to them and treat them kindly, I think they will
respond by following you more closely. As a nun sister,
Melanie taught children and taught nursing and worked as a
nurse practitioner all around Pennsylvania and to Maryland and for
(21:01):
a few years in Puerto Rico. She retired from nursing
in returning to making sandwiches for the homeless as one
of the Peanut, Butter and Jelly Brigade of Sisters working
with Operation Safety Net outside of Pittsburgh. She became an
early proponent of recycling. She celebrated her jubilee that's sixty
five years with the Order in two thousand nineteen. Today
(21:25):
she most often meditates on forgiveness and kindness and leave
a place better than you found it and everything I
did I pointed to that in my work because of
our poverty, I had to struggle to maintain my own personality,
in my character, and I think that struggle keeps on going.
(21:47):
I try to please people as much as possible. If
I find things that needed to be changed and changed
to the best of my ability, and if I couldn't
do anything, I prayed over it. If I ever get depressed,
I could read my letters that the people that employed
me had given me for all the jobs that I
(22:07):
had after I graduated from nursing. They were so wonderful,
what a wonderful nurse she is. Every letter was so
upbeat that I said, if I ever feel depressed, I'll
just read all those letters from the Chief of Staffs
and I can raise my spirits with those letters. I
can't imagine anything else I'd rather do. You can find
(22:33):
more about Sister Melanie Cambec and the women of World
War Two at her page at Service podcast dot org.
There's also a form on our main page where you
can send a message to Sister Melanie or any of
the veterans we featured the season. We watched a few
incredible interviews of other women who served during World War
Two who have since passed away, and we'll be sharing
(22:54):
some more from them on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
Were at Service Podcast So join us are if curious.
In our final episode this season, authors Mike Cole and
Anastasia marks Decel say, though help us pull together how
combat and cuisine most changed during World War Two, affecting
the lives of service members and civilians going forward until then.
(23:17):
Services a production from My Heart Radio, where our supervising
producer is Gabrielle Collins and our executive producer Christopher hascotas
Avery Keatley was our on site engineer for this episode
and we'd like to thank Sister Roseanne and Susan Ron
from the Sisters of Divine Providence for their help coordinating
this episode. Thanks for listening, and thank you to those
serving and those who have served.
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