Connellsville woman's service spanned World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars

PittsburghLive.com: Connellsville woman's service spanned World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars

Virginia Eberharter's Connellsville home is a unique blend of shipshape neatness and the exotic. Her military background accounts for both.

Dedication to rules and regulations can be seen in her carefully arranged furniture and sparkling clean kitchen. The presence of medals and framed certificates of merit echo it. A vast array of foreign objects are a reminder that this is a woman who has seen the world. There are Japanese chairs in the living room, and framed paintings from Italy and other countries adorn the walls. In her family room, there are colorful oriental lamps and a curio cabinet full of dolls from throughout Europe and the Far East. And the photograph albums! There are stacks of them, each filled to bursting with fascinating glimpses of far-flung places.

Conversing with Virginia -- "Ginny" to her friends -- it's easy to imagine her as Nursing Commander Eberharter, the rank she attained while serving as a nurse for the Navy. Her service spanned World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.

At 88, Ginny's gait has slowed (she suffers from a back problem), but her mind is as bright as it was when she put on her first Navy nurse uniform after graduating from Memorial Nursing School in Cumberland, Md. Her brown eyes sparkle when she talks about her career.

Such as how she donned her white dress uniform on VJ (Victory in Japan) Day, Aug. 14, 1945, and rushed to New York City's Times Square. There, she joined thousands of civilians and military personnel in celebrating the end of World War II. "People tried to grab our hats and even our buttons," she recalls. "Everyone wanted a military souvenir."

She relates how inspiring it was to work with top surgeons at top Naval hospitals, witnessing first-hand the cutting-edge medical procedures of the time, such as plastic surgery at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Long Island, N.Y.

A simple wish ...

Her career began with a simple wish. Ginny, a country girl from Mill Run, Fayette County, grew up wanting to help people. She was born in 1923 and lost her father at age 5 when he perished in the 1928 Mather Mine explosion in Greene County. Almost 200 men lost their lives that day, including several from Mill Run and other Fayette County communities.

"We had just moved to Mather. It was closer to the coal mine. A lot of Fayette County families moved there," she said. "Local jobs were scarce." It would get even worse during the Great Depression of the 1930s. "Those were hard, hard times."

An only child, Ginny was raised by her mother. After her father died, they moved back home. Ginny graduated from Connellsville High School in 1941. She entered nursing school in the fall and remembers "like yesterday" when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, catapulting the United States into World War II.

When she graduated in 1945 -- the last year of the war -- the need for nurses was overwhelming. A Naval nurse had talked to Ginny's class at nursing school and she liked what she heard. Soon, Ginny was in uniform as Ensign Eberharter and waiting for a train at Connellsville's B&O Station (which was torn down in the early 1980s), the same station through which more than 500,000 soldiers and sailors traveled to World War II.

Ginny's first assignment was at St. Albans Naval Hospita,l where she saw war's horrors up close and personal. Its specialty was treating burn victims. "We nursed mostly sailors and Marines from the South Pacific. So many of them were terribly burned," she said. "We would put those with second- and third-degree burns in special wire cradles that protected their burned places."

The St. Albans surgeons would use skin grafts to re-form sailors' ears that were damaged or destroyed, as well as other procedures to repair damaged flesh. "Until then, I had never seen plastic surgery performed."

She got a crash course in Naval regulations. "The Marines would make us march in formation. When they called the cadences, we had to keep in step. If we didn't, boy, did they get mad at us!"

That Navy lingo

In addition to walking the walk, she learned Navy lingo in a hurry. A book was a log. The floor was the deck. Scuttlebutt meant water fountain. And 2000 was 8 p.m.

The Navy corpsmen she worked with talked her into drinking her first coffee to stay awake during nightshift. She fondly remembers the corpsmen who were trained in medical procedures to assist the nurses and physicians. "They were just 18-year-old kids whose moms had waited on them hand and foot. We gave them so much responsibility that they grew up in a hurry."

She also remembers when penicillin was discovered. "It was a miracle drug. It saved countless lives."

After World War II, Ginny attended the University of Pennsylvania on the GI Bill and received a Bachelor of Science degree in public health in 1949. She stayed on to work at the university's hospital, where some of the nation's earliest heart catheterizations were performed. In 1950, her grandmother fell ill and she went home to Mill Run to help her mom care for her.

"I needed a job, so I became assistant pediatric supervisor at West Penn Hospital (in Pittsburgh)," she recalled. She was there in 1951 when she was called out of the Reserve and sent to Camp LeJeune, N.C., to take care of sailors and Marines involved in the Korean War. In 1952, the Navy shipped her to Bermuda, where she worked at the Navy dispensary. "It was beautiful there, but I had to go home again that year to care for my grandmother, whose health had worsened."

Settling on another civilian job, she was at Kauffman's Settlement House in Pittsburgh's Hill District, a facility that helped immigrant Jews assimilate into American society, when she decided to make the Navy her career. She re-enlisted in April 1955.

It would open her working life's most memorable chapter.

She was nursing at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Va., when she was sent to Taipei, Taiwan, a banana-shaped island 90 miles off the coast of mainland China. In 1949, the Chinese Communists had forced Chinese Nationalists onto Taiwan, which also is called Formosa, or "beautiful island."

Ginny arrived there in September 1957 to serve with the Military Assistance Advisory Group. In 1955, the United States and Nationalist China (Taiwan) had signed the Mutual Defense Treaty in which the United States pledged to defend Taiwan against communism. "Our task was to teach the Nationalist Chinese how to care for medical equipment and carry out hospital procedures," Ginny explained, a task that was often daunting.

She said the Chinese would listen to the Americans when taught, but would start doing things their own way when left on their own. "We actually had to treat some doctors for ulcers because they were so frustrated with teaching the Chinese."

During her year at Taipei, Ginny heard the rumble of communist bombs being dropped on a nearby island. A couple of times it was a "very close call," she said.

On to Japan

Her tour of duty also included a stint as nursing supervisor at the U.S. Naval Hospital of Yokosuko, Japan, not far from Tokyo. It was there that she collected some of her most beautiful possessions. "They had the loveliest things -- pearls, silks, brocades and Noritake china. They were inexpensive, too. We broke ourselves saving money!"

She saw none of the devastation of World War II as she was not stationed near Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which were leveled by U.S. atomic bombs in August 1945. She recalls Japan as something akin to heaven on Earth. Her most vivid memory is of the pink cherry blossoms -- the same kind that were donated by Japan and bloom in Washington, D.C., each spring. "They were absolutely gorgeous."

Ginny spent two tours of duty in Charleston, S.C., one from 1959 to 1963; the other from 1967 to 1969, as the Vietnam War raged in Southeast Asia. She remembers Charleston as a genteel Southern city. She saw Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started in 1861, and visited Boone Hall Plantation, which served as Ashley Wilkes' Twelve Oaks plantation in the 1939 film "Gone With the Wind."

But along with fond memories linger darker ones of caring for Vietnam veterans when they returned home. There weren't many burn victims at the hospital there. "There were communicable illnesses and a lot of psychiatric problems. Those poor boys really had a hard time of it."

She said the Vietnam vets were just as polite to the nurses as those from the earlier wars. "Sick boys are sick boys. They need to be comforted and taken care of."

In between her Charleston tours of duty, she served again at Portsmouth, where she attained her highest rank of commander, a noteworthy achievement. Today, naval nurses' ranks go all the way to admiral, but not in the early 1960s.

From Portsmouth, she was shipped to Naples, Italy, serving as chief nurse at the U. S. Naval Hospital there. During that time, a new hospital was built and dedicated. Because the North American Treaty Organization was in Naples, the hospital cared for all branches of the military.

Ginny learned to enjoy Italian foods such as pizza and sampled fine wines. She visited many cities, including Rome, Florence, and Paris -- and managed side trips to several other countries including Spain and France, where she toured Paris.

Unique cultures compared

Asked how Italy compares to Japan, she said both are beautiful in their own, unique ways. While her strongest memory of Japan is the pink cherry blossoms, her most vivid recollection of Italy is of its being overpopulated in Naples with tiny Fiats zipping around the narrow streets. "When I think of Italy, I think of tall buildings on high cliffs."

There are similarities as well. "Both are mountainous. Italy has Mt. Vesuvius; Japan has Mt. Fuji."

Far East people are more reserved than their European counterparts, she added. "The Japanese held in their emotions. The opposite was true of Italians."

While Buddhist shrines dotted the Japanese countryside, Naples had a very strong Catholic presence. "The priests were wonderful to work with."

Ginny's final military post was at the U. S. Naval Hospital in Annapolis, Md., where she worked until she retired in 1972 -- taking all her memories with her. She was no longer in the Navy, but that didn't mean she was finished nursing veterans. As a civilian, she continued working at the VA Hospital in Martinsburg, W.Va. "There's nothing more satisfying than taking care of someone who is ill and helping them become healthy again," she declared.

Home called her back to Southwestern Pennsylvania in 1986, when she purchased her Connellsville house. She has kept busy since retirement, which she said accounts for her youthful disposition. She is active in her church and its prayer chain and corresponds regularly with the many friends she made around the world.

Her military expertise has come in handy; she gave her oral history (and collected an oral history from another older Navy nurse) for "In and Out of Harm's Way," a book compiled by Capt. Doris M. Sterner for the Naval Nurse Corps' 100th anniversary in 2008.

Membership in the national Navy Nurse Corps Association has taken Ginny from coast to coast. She attends its reunions, which are held in a different U.S. city each year. Although she can no longer fly for long distances, when the event is close enough, her devoted neighbor Chip Rowan (another Mill Run native) drives her there. "I couldn't do it without him."

"I've always welcomed change," Ginny said. "I love all cultures."

Looking back on her life, she said it often seems like yesterday that she arrived in Taiwan back in 1957, on philosopher Confucius' birthday. A proverb by that ancient scribe is one of her favorite sayings and is perhaps essential to why she remains vibrant at 88: "Wise is the man and bound to grow who knows he knows a thing or so, but who is not afraid to show the many things he doesn't know."

How apt.

Editor's Note: Some background for this article was taken from "County Chronicles Volume IV" by Ceane O'Hanlon-Lincoln and corroborated by retired Cmdr. Virginia Eberharter.