Frazier International History Museum

Dorothy Seifert was born in the small farming town of Flora, IN. The attack on Pearl Harbor happened on her 17th birthday. She was dancing the jitterbug at a friend’s house when she heard the news, and ran home as fast as she could. One of her brothers was already in the Army, and two more later joined. After graduating high school in 1943, she moved to Indianapolis and worked in an insurance office. Then an old friend convinced her to go to work at a factory that made engines for fighter jets (it paid more than her office job). For the next year, she tapped the exhaust on motors, and met "a lot of nice ladies whose husbands were overseas ... we weren’t riveters, but we were doing our part on the homefront." Then a routine shopping trip sent her on a different course.

"I was down...shopping and here was this cardboard image of this WAVE in this uniform, and I thought, ’oh man, that’s a sharp outfit, I’m going to join the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service),’ so I went in and signed up."

She quit her factory job and went through the entire enlistment process and training courses, and was ready to be sworn in when officials realized that she was only 19 – she would need her parents’ permission to join. With three sons already in the service, her mother refused.

Disappointed but undaunted, she went to work at Purdue University, took flying lessons, and, after the war, married her late husband, Ray. Ray was in the 4th Marine Division in the Pacific Campaign, and fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Seifert recalls that he would never talk about his experience there – but she still keeps several letters that he wrote to his parents from the battlefront.