Sally Scott of the WAVES
tell me which category you’d like to try for the sixty-four dollar question. Now, listen carefully and tell me when to stop. Here they are: Secretarial Work, Typing, Bookkeeping, Aviation Ground Work, Parachute Rigging, Operating a Link Trainer—” To all this Sally shook her head. But when the examiner read, “Communication, including radio,” she sat up with a start to exclaim:

“That’s it!”

“Yes,” Marjory Mills agreed. “That, beyond a doubt, is it. Ultimately you’ll go to a special school for perfecting your training. You’ll need to know about sending and receiving in code, blinker signaling, flag signaling, and a lot more.

“But first,” she settled back in her chair, “you’ll have to stay right here in Mt. Morris College, learning; for the most part, things that have nothing to do with communication.”

“Oh, must I?” Sally cried in sudden dismay.

“You’ll love it.” Marjory Mills’s words carried conviction. “When it’s all over you’ll agree, I’m sure, that we’ve made a real sailor out of you and that you would not have missed it for anything.”

“And after that, special school?” Sally asked eagerly.

“After that perhaps you’ll find yourself in an airplane directing tower, saying to the pilots of great Flying Fortresses: ‘Come in, forty-three. All right, sixty-four, you’re off’, and things like that. Thrilling, what?”

“Wonderful, and after that perhaps I’ll be on some small airplane carrier in a convoy crossing the Atlantic.”

“Yes, just perhaps. There is a law before Congress now which, if passed, will permit us to send WAVES on sea voyages and to service overseas. The WACS are already there.”

“Oh! Congress must pass that law.” Sally half rose in her chair. Again she was thinking of her secret in the black box. “They just must pass that law.”

“Don’t hope too much,” the examiner warned. “‘Ours not to reason why—’”

“‘Ours but to do or die’,” Sally finished in a whisper.

And so her interview came to an end.

In the meantime Nancy McBride was going through her examination with much the same result. She too was a radio bug. She and her lame brother had been radio hams since she was a dozen years old. Though she had lived in another small city, she and 
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