The First WAVES

In a Navy building across from Arlington Cemetery swiftly labored last week the first ruler of the WAVES, Lieut. Commander Mildred Helen McAfee. Her job: to organize and boss 11,000 Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service. The job was big: Director Oveta Hobby had spent eleven months planning the WAACs, had training well underway at Fort Des Moines. Miss McAfee was starting almost from scratch.

"Miss Mac" is no career-type Amazon. Alert, bright-eyed, jaunty, she leavens a business-like matter-of-factness with quick wit and brisk speech. She is trim, well-dressed, efficient and, as she puts it, she has fallen for the Navy.

To a task only begun the Wellesley College president brought a sense of humor which had become legend in more than two decades of educational work. As dean of women at Oberlin College (Ohio), her post before she went to Wellesley, she had to enforce a rule that women students must not leave town without permission. One day she spied six Oberlin undergraduates--three men, three women--standing on the outskirts of town trying to thumb a ride. "Hop in, boys," she called, stopping her car. "I'm sorry I can't take you girls along too--but you know the college rules."

Once at Centre College of Kentucky, where for five years she was dean of women, measles prevented her delivering a speech in chapel. She wrote it out, had it read in her absence, signed it "Your Measley Dean."

A B.A., M.A., LL.D., L.H.D., Wellesley's Miss Mac is a graduate of Vassar, attended Columbia University and the University of Chicago. She thinks colleges (in which she has spent all her adult life) are the place to start to right wrongs in a post-war world.

Her first contingent of 60 women, candidates for officer appointments, will arive in Northampton, Mass. for schooling next week.

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