Ellen Herbert

I have lived the story of The Last Government Girl.

In the summer of 1944, my mother, Helen Edward Smith, boarded a train in Southwest Virginia for Washington, DC to work for the war effort. She was twenty, a graduate of nearby Emory and Henry College and had taught at Saltville High School for a year. Yes, you read that right. She was only twenty! Yet she had never left home before, even when she attended college. She had been a day student and had taken the bus home every night. So that train ride with her former student, who was also a close friend, was her first great adventure.

All my life, I heard the story of her summer working for the Department of the Army. I heard it from her point-of-view as well as for my father’s because she met him there. For them, Washington DC was the city of love.

This is how they met: on a June Sunday, Helen and some girl friends boarded a streetcar on Georgia Avenue for the National Gallery. A tanned young Marine stood and offered Helen his seat. This young man hung onto the strap in front of her, swaying with the movement of the streetcar traveling through Washington and talked to Helen.

“You have the deepest Southern accent I’ve ever heard,” she told him. He admitted this was true and told her he was from Alabama.

That day fortune smiled on my dad, Joseph Atkins Klarpp, again.

He had dropped out of the University of Alabama to join the Marines when he was seventeen years old. In order to do that, he lied about his birthday. Henceforth, Dad celebrated two birthdays, his real one and what he called “his Marine Corps Birthday.” He also celebrated the Marine Corps Birthday, November 10, when the corps was founded. Yes, Dad loved to celebrate.

After Basic Training, Dad got orders for Wake Island, but as his ship went through the Panama Canal, it was scraped. While the ship was repaired, the Japanese took Wake, so he would have been a prisoner-of-war. I’ve seen the movies about prisoners-of-war taken by the Japanese. I doubt Dad, a man picky about his food, would have made it. So I owe my existence to a clumsy pilot navigating the Panama Canal’s locks.

Once the ship was repaired, Dad and the rest of his shipmates headed to Pearl Harbor. That is where Dad was the morning of December 7, 1941. Not until I was older and saw movies and read about the attack did I know that anyone was hurt that morning. Dad insisted on seeing the world through funny glasses. He never dwelled on disaster, hardship, death. Later he had my mom to do that for him.

Mother loved the darkness she saw around her. She loved to read about crimes and discuss them. She even liked Nancy Grace, the cable queen of crime.

Before the streetcar arrived at the National Gallery that day, Dad handed Mother a matchbook and asked for her telephone number. I feel as if I am standing behind him, holding my breath. Is she interested in him? Will she go out with him? She almost didn’t because that morning she’d read about a murder in The Washington Post. A young woman had been strangled by a marine in Rock Creek Park.

So not only do I owe my existence to the Canal pilot, but also to Mother overcoming her suspicious nature and accepting Dad’s invitation to go out. She insisted they go in a group. Gregarious Dad had no problem with that. He brought buddies along from Quantico, and Mother introduced them to her friends. Everyone had a swell time.

So you see where I got the origins for The Last Government Girl, which is based on a true story or truly based on a story.