VERO BEACH — When Mary Allen was born into a Virginia farm family of nine children 90 years ago, stamina was a key component of success.
Finishing high school at 17 at the end of the Depression, work was an imperative. She moved into a boarding house in Washington, D.C., and found a job.
Not long after, she became the 26th woman to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.
“I thought the uniform was adorable,” she says. The Corps would be her workplace for the next 31 years.
Today, Allen’s stamina serves her in leisure rather than work. At 90, she plays 18 holes of golf in the heat of the summer when even a college kid would balk.
When a patriotic holiday rolls around at Indian River Estates where she lives, she still stands for the Marine Corps Hymn, popping out of her chair without so much as a hand for leverage.
Allen seems to sashay through life with the same can-do spirit that saw her through her ground-breaking role in the Marines nearly 70 years ago.
She keeps a spotless second- floor apartment overlooking a lake. Her sense of community is unwavering .As she gives the tour of the facility, she smartly calls out everybody’s name, one step shy of a salute and an “as you were.”
She points out the amenities – the pool tables, the formal dining room, the bridge room, like a volunteer social director on a cruise ship.
Sadly, it is not the life she envisioned when she moved to the retirement community 14 years ago.
Allen, who lived in the Moorings 11 years before moving here, complains of one let-down: her friends are not keeping up with her in terms of longevity.
Even her husband of 54 years, Richard Allen, whom everyone called Dick, passed away less than three weeks after they moved to the development.
“He had very bad vertigo and double vision, so we decided to come out here. He lived here exactly 17 days and died in his sleep. It was a shock.”
Soldiering on seems to come naturally to Allen. That may be why she had an edge getting in that first batch of “girls,” as she puts it, entering the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve to “free a man to fight,” as the slogan went.
The Marines’ decision, in Feb. 1943, came after the Army, Navy and Coast Guard had all begun recruiting women, and followed a 25-year respite after women served briefly in World War I.
Allen had been working as a civilian in the records section of Marine headquarters in Washington, when she first caught wind of the impending move to let women enlist.
“The minute they set up a recruiting station I went down and enlisted with my girlfriend,” she says.
Along with 700 other women who enlisted, she headed off for boot camp at Hunter College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Unlike the Army with its WACs, the Navy with its WAVES, and the Coast Guard with its SPARs, there was to be no official nickname for women in the Marines.
But one quickly formed: they became the BAMs, an acronym which Allen hesitates to explain: “Beautiful American Marine,” was the polite interpretation; the other had to do with their typically curvier physique.
In Allen’s case, BAM could have stood for Bit of an American Marine; she was barely five feet tall, and weighed 95 pounds.
“Falling out for inspection, I was always the last one because I was so short,” she says.
The female Marines performed more than clerical work. They were trained as parachute riggers, mechanics, map makers and welders, eventually comprising nearly two-thirds of Marine Corps personnel in the U.S. and Hawaii.
When Japan surrendered, the Women’s Reserve was quickly demobilized, though many returned to services under the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act.
By then, Mary Allen was working as a civilian again, still with the Marines, having met and married her husband, Richard Allen, a Marine wounded in Iwo Jima who eventually rose to the rank of captain.
They had first met in Washington, at Marine Corps headquarters. He went away to officer candidate school, while she went off for her own training. Both ended up back to Washington, where he proposed. Just before he went overseas, they were married in Santa Barbara.
“There were loads of people who got married before the men went overseas. They were in love, and they wanted to get married.”
When he was shot in the ankle in Iwo Jima, she didn’t get the news until six weeks after the fact.
“I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know until the Red Cross sent me a telegram telling me had been injured, which really shook me up of course. He’d been in the hospital six weeks on Okinawa.”
Dick Allen spent six months in rehabilitation in San Diego, hobbling on crutches to hitch a ride on airplanes up to Santa Barbara to see Mary, who was in the training department, doing clerical work.
Soon after, the war ended, and the couple moved back to Washington.
Mary Allen moved into the civil service division.
Her husband, who never went back on active duty after his injury, worked in the federal government, editing reports on beach erosion with the Coastal Engineering Research Center.
Mary, meanwhile, worked her way up to records service officer by the time she retired at 52.
In the late 1950s, Mary Allen took up golf. They joined a number of country clubs in Virginia, before retiring to Virginia Beach in 1973.
With their only son grown, they decided to move to Florida, vowing to travel in the summer. They managed a number of trips to the U.K., as well as to Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Iran and Hong Kong. Her apartment is decorated with souvenirs of their travels.
Even now that she’s alone, she still travels. In June, she went to Pasadena, Calif., where her son, Eugene, works as a civil engineer.
“We had a wonderful time. They entertained me 18 hours a day. “
“We played golf adjacent to the Rose Bowl, so I saw that,” she begins, in a rapid-fire recitation of a packed vacation. “Then, we went to the symphony in Los Angeles, of Beethoven and the Beatles, which was terrific. The Monday before I came home, my son drove me up to Santa Barbara to see the old air station. That town used to be so quiet. It’s changed so much it looked like Hong Kong. It was a great getaway, I’ll tell you.”
She still dreams of going to Brazil.
“I’d like to take a boat down the Amazon River,” she says. “I think that would be very nice.”
Back home in Vero Beach, her friends are trying to convince her it’s too hot to play golf, though she hasn’t yet cancelled her Monday morning tee time at Sandridge Golf Club.
“I need to take care of myself,” she says. “I have to make sure nothing happens to me, because I have to take care of my sisters.”
Both live at Indian River Estates.
“I played about the same game I play now. I’ve never been all that good, and I can’t hit the ball as far now,” she says. “But as long as you can move and get out of the cart and keep up with the group, there’s no reason you can’t play.”