My mother, my mentor
By Lila Munsey
Peg Garvin was only 11 when the Great Depression struck. So, there were a few years then that she and her six siblings (all born at home in Nutter Fort, West Virginia) didn’t even get an orange in their Christmas stockings as they did during the good years. They lived through the good times and the bad, and, because of that, Peg — my mother — grew up to be a very industrious woman.
After she finished high school, Peg worked in potteries in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Cleveland, Ohio, and then moved to Chicago to work as a secretary. She sent some of her earnings home to fund a kitchen expansion and put an inside bathroom in her family home. When she decided to return home to Nutter Fort, she made the 540 plus-mile trip on her bicycle, camping out along the road on the way.
Back home, she went dancing with her brothers and their wives, and soon fell in love and married a friend of one of her brothers. They set up housekeeping a few houses away from her family’s home. But Peg’s husband was an alcoholic and couldn’t hold a job. Peg went back to work in the Clarksburg pottery and then Hazel-Atlas Glass Factory.
One day in 1944, Peg saw a sign of Uncle Sam which urged women to enlist in the Army. She told her husband about the sign and he laughed at her, telling her they’d never want her. That was all it took. She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
She served in Europe, including England, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and finally, after the fall of Berlin, in Germany. She was discharged with the rank of technician 5th grade (TEC 5). This rank was addressed as corporal or tech corporal. Technicians who possessed specialized skills were rewarded with a higher pay grade but had no command authority.
Following her discharge, she returned to the states and, in September 1946, with the help of the GI Bill, she entered West Virginia Business School. After completing her studies, she headed to Reno, Nevada; began working for an attorney there; and was able to pay for a divorce — something that just didn’t happen in that day and time.
In 1948, after returning home to West Virginia, friends introduced her to the man who would become her second husband and the love of her life, my dad, Bernard “Barney” Post. Later that year, they were married and moved to Ohio, where they had four children.
During the early 1950s and the Korean War, in answer to the Soviet Union’s detonation of its first nuclear bomb and the Cold War, Mom was one of those recruited by local civil defense authorities and the United States Air Force to watch the sky for enemy aircraft intent on attacking our homeland. If spotters saw something suspicious, they were instructed to run to the nearest telephone and warn the filter center, staffed by mostly Women’s Army Corps volunteers, who would cross-reference the reported plane with scheduled civilian flights.
Meanwhile, at home, Mom not only maintained the family’s household and helped her husband build their home, she baked bread and sold pecan rolls each week. Later, she cleaned others’ homes, worked as grade school janitor, sold pianos, took in washing and ironing for others, worked the elections, was a precinct official, helped plant and maintain a garden, canned fruits and vegetables to keep her family in food throughout the winter, was the church financial secretary, and helped with missionary projects. She was up when we all went to bed and awake before we were. She made sure Dad had a healthy breakfast before he headed off to work and that we all had packed lunch boxes. She was amazing.
The day before she died at age 85, she bowled in the morning league, then went to see my dad’s heart specialist. At that appointment the doctor scheduled her for a heart catheter the next morning just to make sure everything was OK. She never made it through the procedure. The aorta was ruptured and although the surgeons tried to repair it, her heart was so damaged the stitches wouldn’t hold.
At her funeral, so many people told us how she helped others over the years. A neighbor shared how Peg drove her to her doctor’s appointment when she was very pregnant and too scared to drive herself. Another remembered her aunt who lived with us when she had to give up her own home. Then there was the neighbor who came back to clean out her parents’ house when they died. Peg insisted that neighbor stay with us all summer, so she’d be conveniently close to her parents’ house.
Peg was a friend to everyone she knew. And she’ll always be an inspiration to me.
Pearl Virginia “Peg” Garvin Barker Post
Feb. 21, 1918 – Sept. 26, 2003