Oveta Culp Hobby
1905 - 1995
Colonel Hobby is on the right
Oveta Hobby was born, educated, and married in Texas. Her husband no other than former Governor William Hobby. Between her graduation from UT Law and World War II she held positions as a parliamentarian for the Texas House of Representatives, Assistant City Attorney in Houston, and helped her husband publish the Houston Post.
In 1941 she took a position heading the War Department's Women's Interest Section for a short time before taking over for the Women's Army Auxillary Corps. In her initial post with the War Department she was charged with organizing a chart with ways women could serve in the military. Her philospohy of the newly created corps was "WAACs were to help the Army win the war, just as women had always helped men achieve success." Her initial duties were to set up recruitment drives and training centers.
Congress had been unwilling to make the women's corps an integral part of the army the women in the War Department found themselves in limbo. Some of her initial hurdles were:
1. When Director Hobby sent requests to army engineers for plans for WAAC barracks, the engineers replied that they worked only for the army and that the WAAC was not army. Director Hobby and her staff were forced to draw their own barracks plans.
2. To make the WAAC uniform attractive to large numbers of young women, Mrs. Hobby called in well-known designers. But the Army Quartermaster Corps vetoed the belt as a waste of leather and the pleat in the skirt as a waste of cloth, so the resulting WAAC uniform was a basic design of the Quartermaster Corps.
3. Almost any army sergeant had his own jeep, but Director Hobby had to call for a car from the pool. She often worked all day and all night, went home for a shower, and returned for another day at the office.
4. Some commanding officers were horrified at the thought of women soldiers. One commandant ordered a fence built around the WAACs' barracks on the post and allowed WAACs to go to the post movie only two nights a week, while men went on other nights.
5. The comptroller general's office decreed that it could not pay the women doctors of the WAAC because they were authorized only to pay "persons in military service." Secretary of War Stimson had to ask for a special act of Congress to enable Director Hobby to pay her physicians.
6. She was invited as an officer in the army to use the facilities of the Army-Navy Club. But would she mind, the club official added, coming in by the back door?
Congress had reluctantly agreed that perhaps the women could do fifty-four army jobs. By the time Colonel Hobby was through, they filled 239 types of job. By 1944 WAAC headquarters had requests for 600,000 women-more than three times the total authorized strength of the corps-from commanding generals around the world. The director's hair acquired a heavy frosting of silver during those army years, and the long days robbed her-temporarily-of her youthful look. By July 1945 she was exhausted. She requested permission to resign, and upon her release her husband was waiting for her with a stretcher. He took her to the train and to a hospital in New York for complete rest. In January 1945 she received the Distinguished Service Medal for outstanding service. The citation stated, "without guidance or precedents in the United States military history to assist her, Colonel Hobby established sound policies and planned and supervised the selection and training of officers and regulations. Her contribution to the war effort of the nation has been of important significance." She also received medals from foreign countries, degrees from colleges and universities, and a welcome-home banquet in Houston.
I was familiar with the name before I started moderating this forum, but really got curious when her name kept popping up in my research. She would have been one heck of a woman to know. One of the cool things I read during the research was that she initially kept turning down the military's request for help becuase she felt her family should be first and foremost. Her husband told her it was her duty to serve and she did!