JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas –
Nearly 60 years after their graduation from Navy Officer Candidate School, several women who served in Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES, will gather in San Antonio for a reunion in September.
The reunion is being held for the women who graduated from WAVES Officer Candidate School, or OCS, at Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, in 1964.
Fifteen of the living WAVES OCS graduates are expected to attend the reunion, which will be held at the Drury Plaza Hotel in downtown San Antonio, Sept. 17-19, said Ginny Hallager, a graduate of the OCS class and reunion organizer.
For two years, Hallager and her fellow OCS classmate, Elizabeth Carmack, have planned and put the reunion together. Hallager said the reunion will bring former WAVES members from across the country.
Established in 1942, WAVES allowed the Navy to accept women into the Naval Reserve as commissioned officers and at the enlisted level. By doing this, the Navy was able to release officers and men who were serving ashore, beginning in World War II, and replace them with women at shore installations. The term WAVES continued for women who served in the Navy until the 1970s.
During World War II, some 100,000 WAVES served in a wide variety of capacities, ranging from performing essential clerical duties to serving as instructors for male pilots-in-training.
Of the 43 women who completed the WAVES OCS in 1964, 34 of them are still alive, several of whom served in the Navy for many years, Hallager said.
“We have 16 women who retired with full careers on active duty or in the Reserves,” Hallager said. “We have two who became rear admirals.”
Hallager, who lives in San Antonio, said the idea for the reunion started after she went looking for Carmack three years ago.
After months of searching, Hallager was able to contact Carmack by phone in October 2018. In February 2019, Carmack, who lives in Sumter, South Carolina, flew to San Antonio for the weekend, where she reconnected with her friend and classmate for the first time in over 55 years.
Immediately, the friends started trying to reach out to their fellow WAVES classmates, doing online searches and going to ancestry websites to gather contact information. Carmack said she and Hallager were able to connect with some of their classmates the first weekend they were reunited.
“We almost found everybody, which we were astonished by, and that was the beginning of trying to put this reunion together,” Carmack said.
Over the next two years, Hallager and Carmack made phone calls and sent emails and letters to classmates in planning and setting up the reunion. Plans to hold the reunion last year were canceled by the pandemic, but the two friends did not give up and the reunion is scheduled to be held this year.
The reunion will include a memorial service for the nine classmates who have passed away. Photos and memorabilia of the WAVES OCS class members will be displayed. There will be a Zoom call for those graduates who are unable to attend in person.
The women were in the OCS at Naval Station Newport for 16 weeks, graduating in October 1964.
After completing OCS, Hallager served for one year on active duty at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois, as counsel for the physical evaluation board for Headquarters Ninth Naval District, hearing disability cases. She married her husband of 57 years, Donald Hallager, an Air Force officer and pilot, the same year she graduated from OCS.
She said she is looking forward to reuniting with her classmates in San Antonio, most of whom she has not seen since they graduated together in 1964.
“We went through a lot in those 16 weeks of training,” Hallager said. “Everybody is so excited about actually doing this. We have such a feeling of patriotism and of what we did was very unusual. We were sort of the leading edge of women really coming into their own, entering the service back in the 60s, and many of them did extraordinary work.”
Carmack said the Navy and WAVES gave women like her career opportunities that were not available to them in the private sector in the 1960s. She said they were able to take advantage of these opportunities while serving their country.
Carmack served in the Navy for three years as an administrative service officer at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.
“Being 21 years old and having immediate responsibility to get something done and having people depend on you to do that, that was an extraordinarily character-building process,” Carmack said.
Carmack said she will always have a bond with her classmates because of what they experienced as young women going through OCS and then serving in the military.
“This was an opportunity to do something extraordinary,” Carmack said. “We felt useful and I think we all felt like we had a real purpose. We filled a great need and we did it well.”