One Sunday afternoon more than sixty years ago now, my mother, Helen Smith, caught a crowded trolley on Georgia Avenue with her roommates, Sally and Jean. The three called themselves the Madison Girls because they were living with Mrs. Trundle on Madison Street for the summer and working for the war effort.

            
            While Helen's friends were pushed to the back of the trolley car, Helen found a seat in front beside a young tanned Marine in uniform named Joe, who was stationed at Quantico. Having joined the Corps at seventeen, Joe would celebrate two birthdays for the rest of his life, his real one and the one he lied about to make himself old enough to join the Marines. 

            
            Like Joe, Helen rushed at life. While living at home in Glade Spring, Virginia, she'd gone through an accelerated program at Emory and Henry College, seven miles away. At twenty she was already a college graduate who had taught a year of high school English. Yet she had never been away from home before the summer of '44, which is the way her strict mountaineer father, Emory, a supervisor in Saltville, Virginia's salt mines, liked it.

            
            Helen's mother, Pearl, took care in breaking the news to Emory that Helen, their eldest, had passed the Army's test and had accepted a job in Washington. This was May of '44, before D-Day. All winter Allied planes had been dropping tons of bombs on German munitions factories, yet the outcome of the war was far from certain. Emory Smith understood that America needed more manpower or in his daughter's case, woman power. So while he carried his daughter's suitcases to the depot and put her on the train for D.C., he admonished her to be careful in the city.   

            
            In D. C. Helen discovered that her job was three blocks from the White House working for the Surgeon General of the Army, processing records of men wounded in battle. In the summer of '44, these wounded men were mostly from Anzio Beachhead.

            
            When a man was wounded in battle, an envelope was pinned to him. Inside the envelope, a piece of linen, three inches wide and about 2 feet long, contained the man's medical record, telling in code what had been done for him. He might have been taken to a field hospital, then sent back to battle or sent on to a hospital in England. Sometimes he was KIA or DOA. Helen found her work sad but engrossing. "When the man's record was long, I could get lost in his story," Helen has said. From this record she took statistics about him. She did this job six days a week.

            
            That's why that Sunday in June when the Madison Girls boarded the trolley for the National Gallery, they sought well-earned fun. What transpired between Helen and Joe on their first meeting is family lore. Joe started a conversation with her, asking if she was visiting Washington or if she lived here. Washington would remain special to them throughout their married life. Annually they would bring us kids to D.C. for Washington's birthday, and we would all come for JFK's inauguration.

            
            After Mother got off the trolley that day, she did not tell her friends that she had given her name and phone number to a Marine. Recalling her father's warning about the city, she decided she had done a dangerous thing in talking to a stranger. That summer the Washington Post and Washington Star had reported on a story about a young woman strangled in Rock Creek by a Quantico Marine.

            
            But in the end this did not stop Helen from going out with Joe. A few days later when he called Mrs. Trundle's house, Helen insisted they go out in a group. Joe, who would prove to be more gregarious than Helen during their married life, agreed and brought along two friends for Jean and Sally.

            
            By the next summer, Joe, who had been on Pearl Harbor the day of the attack, had orders to return to the Pacific, where the Marines were experiencing tremendous casualties as they went island-to-island, closing in on the Japanese. Before he left for the West Coast, he and Helen became engaged, so he took the train to Glade Spring to meet her family.

            
            By this time he had heard a great deal about her fierce father, Emory. The morning he arrived at Glade Spring's little train depot, Helen met him. The couple kissed for a while in the shady depot before summoning the courage to start walking to her white house on the hill and the tall, lean man who was waiting on the porch.

            
            With Helen's arm through his, Joe whispered to her that he would rather face the Japanese than this Emory Smith. Yet the meeting between the salt miner and the Marine went well. What began on a trolley in the summer of '44 between a pair of kids barely out of their teens lasted 45 years when Joe's heart gave out.