Massachusetts Federation of Republican Women - Local Clubs

Former Army Nurse to Receive Veterans Award

State Organizations Honor Women Veterans

By Valentina Zic
Staff Writer for The Needham Times
Thursday, November 10, 2005

Veterans Day is tomorrow, and, as happens every Veterans Day, most of those who will be visible, who will speak and who will be honored will be men. That's in part because most veterans are men and they deserve to be honored. But women did their part, too, and they deserve the accolades, too.

According to the Massachusetts Women Veterans' Network, Needham alone is home 55 women veterans. But that might not be all of them, said Heidi Kruckenberg, women's coordinator for the organization. The federal Department of Veterans' Affairs has 28,000 women veterans on record statewide, while Kruckenberg's database contains just 12,000 names.

"So I may be missing half of Needham,"Kruckenberg said. Jack Logan, Needham's veterans' agent, said that according to a 2000 census, there were 60 women veterans in Needham.

Among them are Central Avenue resident Jean Houghton and Rosemary Lane resident Helen Lee. Houghton traveled all over the world as an army nurse, serving in Vietnam and in Korea. Lee served as a nurse in a general hospital in Rouen, France, during World War II.

Also among them is Greendale Avenue resident Alice Morrison, who served as a nurse for almost a year on the islands of Tinian and Saipan, until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the war ended.

Morrison will be receiving the Outstanding Women Veteran Award today at a "Women are Veterans Too" ceremony at the State House's Nurses Hall. The award comes jointly from the Network and the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women. It is the first such award the groups have given, and it is being given to both Morrison and Kaye Yoon of Brockton, who was an Army combat medic in Vietnam.

"We came up with the idea because we felt that on Veterans Day there were so many other events that were centered on men," said Paula Daddona, program manager at the commission.

Women veterans are honored at the federal level, for example, with an annual women veterans' luncheon, Kruckenberg said, but nothing had been done in Massachusetts itself.

"We wanted to do something on the state level," she said. When the nominations for the award came in, Morrison's from her close friend, Needham resident Emily Salaun, it wasn't hard to choose Morrison as one of the recipients.

"All of us definitely believed she was one of the top people," Kruckenberg said.

Kruckenberg said she particularly liked the part of the nomination form in which Salaun described the environment Morrison had to endure on the island. "The humidity, the stench of monstrous snails, constantly crushed under army equipment, heavy, slimy mud surrounding the barracks, and the daily invasion of wild pigs, created a surrealistic atmosphere for those of us conditioned for efficiency and cleanliness," Kruckenberg read from the nomination form.

Because the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima before an invasion of Tinian could happen, Morrison never experienced or witnessed actual fighting. Morrison, in fact, remembered spending much of her time on the beach and then, in the evenings, dancing and listening to the music. She also remembered some of the silliness the nurses and the male Army personnel on the island engaged in. She remembered shower time, for example. The shower for the nurses had no roof, and it seemed that every time just around the time the nurses would shower, planes would begin to fly overhead.

As Salaun wrote in her nomination form, "The life on the island was, on the surface, serene, but the tension of a possible invasion undermined the so-called 'good life.'"

Alice Morrison, holding the ball, with her fellow Army nurses in the South Pacific.

It's how Morrison described her situation in an interview with the Times as well.

"The Army has an expression: Hurry up and wait. You're either waiting or your in the thick of it," she said. "We knew we were waiting for something really big to happen."

Morrison went into her adventure knowing she would facing danger.

Having grown up on a farm in Indiana, she knew she wanted to experience new things. She went to nursing school and, as soon as she was done, knew what she wanted to do.

"I joined the Army, again knowing the army had its plusses and minuses," Morrison said. The plusses were that she would see the world, meet new people and experience different cultures. "The minuses were what might happen to me," she said.

But she went into the Army because it provided her the opportunities she craved.

Her desire to take advantage of life's opportunities fed her extensive community involvement following her return to the United States.

The nomination form for the "Outstanding Women Veteran Award" also asked the nominator to describe how the nominee has worked "toward the enhancement of the lives of female veterans through community service and participation in veterans organizations." Salaun had plenty to write about Morrison.

Morrison's work has been mostly in the political arena, and largely on behalf of women. She has been - among other things - the president of the Women's Republican Club of Needham, a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976, a press representative for the Republican National Convention in Detroit in 1980, chairwoman of a pre-inaugural ball honoring Vice President-elect George Bush in 1980, and president of the Massachusetts Federation of Republican Women. In 1995, she was appointed by the Needham Police Department to be a member of the Human Rights Committee of Needham.

She also helped resident Anna Meissner coordinate a Support our Troops event in March 2002.

"Once I met her, she was a wealth of knowledge. She just knew everybody. She was like my mother," Meissner said.

Morrison treasures her vast experiences.

"I couldn't imagine anything that I did that would have afforded me that opportunity," Morrison said, describing the influential people she has been able to meet through her community service.

Rep. Lida Harkins and Sen. Scott Brown, who will be presenting the award to Morrison, praised her extensive community work.

"The point is, she's continued to serve since World War II in the community," Harkins said.

Brown, who was also a friend of her recently deceased husband said, "I can't think of anyone more deserving of this award than Alice. She is a true patriot, an outstanding civic minded citizen and a dear friend."

Morrison said she is pleased to get the award.

When she was told about it, she said, "My reaction was, I'd never heard of this, so I was surprised. It's always nice to get an award, and it's especially nice to get an award for being a veteran."

Morrison knows that women veterans haven't always gotten the recognition they are increasingly getting.

When she and Ronald first moved to Needham right after the war, Ronald joined the local veterans organization but she didn't get as involved. "It was definitely a man's organization," she said.

Lee, another World War II Army nurse from Needham, said she had a similar experience with the veterans organization in Dedham, which her husband joined after the war.

"I would've joined, but they didn't have women there," Lee said. "They didn't encourage me to join."

In the 1970s, she received a much friendlier reception in veterans circles in Needham. She's still involved, but still often finds that she is the only woman at many events.

Houghton, however, said she has never encountered any discrimination in veteran's circles.

She said, "I never had a problem with that."