You must meet this woman, Michael Helm was told. She’s been in the American Legion Auxiliary for 70 years.
Helm is from Kansas and Nebraska. He was in Ludlow, Vermont campaigning to be the national commander of the American Legion. Legion politics is retail politics. You slap a lot of backs. You shake a lot of hands. And even for a national office, you court votes in Vermont.
Gladys “Bunny” Strong joined Helm at a small table against the wall in the Ludlow Legion post canteen. Strong was 91 and her hair was white, but she sat straight. As the two chatted, Strong let a few facts slip into the conversation that she rarely revealed, even to friends.
“You’re a veteran,” Helm said, surprised.
The story spilled out. She was a small-town Vermont girl, just a teenager of 18 or 19, during World War II. She left her job in a dentist’s office and joined the Marines. She spent the war as a cook at Camp Lejeune, a Marine base on the North Carolina coast. She was honorably discharged in August 1944.
She came home to Vermont, got married and headed over to the Ludlow American Legion post with her new husband. She was told that, war veteran or not, her place was with the ladies in the auxiliary. She had been there ever since.
Again, Helm was surprised. Even in this short conversation, Strong had shown him that she had grit. Surely, sometime in the past 70 years she could have insisted on her rightful place as a Legionnaire. But it seemed that she wasn’t interested.
“They all smoked and drank,” Helm recalls Strong telling him. “I didn’t.”
“She did many great things with the auxiliary, but she could have done the same great things with the Legion,” Helm remembers thinking. “She was that headstrong.”
Helm won his election. Part of his goal as national commander, he says, is to make sure that not only are women veterans welcome in the American Legion, but that they assume national leadership positions, just as they have in the military. Strong’s story haunted him.
Last winter, he called Linda Perham, the adjutant, or administrator, for the Legion’s Vermont department. “We’re gonna fix Bunny’s little problem before I’m done as the national commander,” Helm says he told her. His one-year term would be up in the fall.
As a veteran herself, Perham understood the paradox of Strong’s “little problem.” Perham remembers going to her first state Legion convention, when she was the only female in the room. A World War I Army nurse had met Perham at the door. “She said to me, ‘You need to know your place,’ which meant the auxiliary room,” Perham says.
Perham, who describes her background as “a little kid from Westminster,” found her place in the Legion. She’s served as a post commander, a state commander, and a national vice commander representing the Northeast. She knows that the Vermont Legion’s 1919 founding document reserved a place on its executive board for a woman veteran.
Some women veterans discount their service because it wasn’t in combat. Until three years ago, regulations barred women from serving in combat positions. “It’s not easy to transition as a woman veteran,” Perham says. “We have to become a wife again, a mother again.” In theory, the Legion in Vermont has always honored women’s military experience. In practice, it was sometimes easier for everyone to ignore it.
Perham called Ned Bowen, the post commander at Ludlow’s Legion Post 36. Bowen had known for 15 years that the woman he saw as an auxiliary president and a faithful sender of troop boxes (care packages sent to military members serving overseas) was also a veteran.
“You’re a Marine,” he had said to her once, in amazement at how she broke his stereotype of that branch of the military’s “big man grunty thing.”
“A lady Marine,” she corrected him.
For 15 years Bowen and other members of Post 36 had asked, begged, nagged and requested that Strong take her place as a veteran in the Legion. By then, Bowen says, the post not only had female veterans as members, those women also held leadership roles. But Strong turned down the offer of membership every time, Bowen says.
But now, the national commander had requested that they make it so. And, as luck would have it, the state Legion convention would be held in Ludlow in late June.
Bowen says that Strong’s children made sure she attended the convention. He thinks they suggested that her husband, Richard, would be recognized there in some way. On June 26, Strong and Richard sat side-by-side in their wheelchairs in front of a group gathered in the Okemo base lodge for the state convention. Strong held her husband’s hand.
One Legionnaire describes the look on Strong’s face when she realized that she was the one being honored as priceless. Bowen initiated Strong into the Legion and presented her Legion membership card.
One by one the 20 or so women veterans in the audience came up to the front of the room and saluted Strong. She saluted them back. One gave her flowers. Another gave her a hug. Perham saw it as more than a chance to make things right for one woman. “For me it was validating for all of us, for all women.”
Then, also one by one, the officers of Ludlow Post 36 welcomed her.
“You tricked me,” Strong said when Bowen bent down to give her a hug.
Helm and Strong, now 92, met for a final time on July 2. Perham says that Helm rushed to Ludlow when he found out she had become a Legion member.
Strong was not well enough to meet Helm at Post 36. There, a forum on women in the Legion with female Legion leaders from all over the country and a reception in her honor were waiting. Helm went to Strong’s home first. She wore a flag-patterned scarf and had a blanket depicting the Capitol Building draped over her legs.
“It was the closing of a chapter,” Bowen says.
Strong died five days later, on July 7.
All military veterans have the right to certain honors at their deaths. Strong received those honors. It’s hard to say if she would have, though, if there hadn’t been so much attention paid to her status as a veteran just a few weeks before.
A crowd gathered in a hillside cemetery under blue skies after a funeral mass. Post 36 provided a color guard bearing five flags. As the honor guard commander, Bowen got down on one knee to present an American flag to one of Strong’s daughters. The post also provided a firing party of three rifle bearers, who shot three volleys. A great-grandson played taps. Post 36 would have done this for any veteran, Legion member or not.
Only the families of Legionnaires, however, hear these words, as the Strong family did: “Another Legionnaire has been called to the High Command, and has gone to report to the Commander of us all.”
Three days after Strong’s funeral, Helm took time out from overseeing a national high school shooting championship in Colorado, eager to talk once more about what he hoped to accomplish by fixing Strong’s little problem. He said, “I wanted people to see that a female veteran was being recognized for the great things that they do.”
Photo courtesy of the American Legion.
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