By Pam Janis
Chris Maloney would like you to meet the Greatest Generation’s women from Rye.
Their stories of World War II service were hidden in family scrapbooks and newspaper archives until Maloney brought them to light on his website.
Created for Women’s History Month, the page is part of Maloney’s larger project, Ryevets.org, which ultimately will include 2,100 biographies of all Rye veterans currently listed on the town’s WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam Honor Rolls.
For years, “I’d go to Memorial Day events where they read off a bunch of names of the guys who were killed,” Maloney said. “I’d ask, ‘Hey, does anybody know anything about them?’ and nobody did, so I took it upon myself [to find out].”
More than 1,450 Rye residents served in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Merchant Marines, and Women’s Army Corps during World War II.
Fifteen years ago, Maloney began writing the biographies for the Rye men who didn’t come home. Since then, he’s expanded ryevets.org to include the town’s veterans of World War I, Korea, and Vietnam.
Why?
“My motto is, ‘If not me, who? and if not now, when?’” he said simply.
The 55 women vets profiled include Rye’s Elizabeth Hazen Eyre, one of the first women in history to fly American military aircraft. She was a Woman’s Airforce Service Pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Her training included 560 hours of ground school and 210 hours of flight training before she went overseas. She also knew Morse code, meteorology, military law, physics, aircraft mechanics, and navigation, among other subjects. She received the highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, for her service.
Leila Anne Lewkowicz (McKay), who served in the Women’s Army Nurse Corps, introduced music therapy for convalescing soldiers at Colorado’s Fort Logan.
“The veterans had what was called combat fatigue,” Maloney said. “It wasn’t diagnosed as PTSD back then. The Army started doing her music therapy program throughout the country.”
And there is Alice Dorothy Scott, who served as a radio operator in the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve and came home to teach for many years at Midland School. In 1963, she led a parents’ and teachers’ panel that addressed the effect of parents’ expectations and behavior on student self-esteem — almost 30 years before the term “helicopter parenting” was coined.
Each woman’s page contains biographical details from birth to death, so the reader can appreciate her life both before and after her service. Schools, marriages, children, hobbies, and snapshots from a fully lived life dress the page, as do newspaper articles about the women and links to their service branches and interests. Every item is a door to history.
Why so much detail?
“Because their military service is just a portion of who they are,” Maloney said. “They didn’t just serve in World War II. They came back to Rye, they had lives, they had kids. They did a lot for our community. The thing that I really wanted to get across is, these are real people.”
He pored over the old Rye Chronicle and the Port Chester Daily to learn as much as he could about Rye’s servicemen and women. He studied records from the National Archives and Ancestry.com.
“Between everything, I was able to piece together a pretty good narrative on each one of these guys and gals,” he said.
His efforts have drawn community support from the Rye Historical Society, American Legion Post 128, and Rye High School and Middle School, along with numerous volunteers.
Though his father and cousins both served in the military, Maloney, who is 66, did not. Yet, he said, ryevets.org and its compendium of women’s bios, are deeply personal.
“Crazy as it sounds, when you sit and research them over and over, you feel like you know them and it’s like you owe it to them,” he said. “They made the sacrifice, they did the service, they deserve to be remembered.”
And, he added, “It’s important to the community not to forget its past, especially at [America’s] 250th anniversary. Service is certainly part of that anniversary.”
Rye’s women vets served in the Army, Army Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Red Cross. One woman served in England’s Royal Air Force; another served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. They were combat nurses, plane mechanics, meteorologists, pilots, and Red Cross “Donut Dollies,” who served coffee and donuts from traveling “clubmobiles” to soldiers on the British and European fronts. Four of the women lost brothers to the war.
Maloney wants also to recognize other women of the war years. “The 55 women who are honored by no means diminishes what all the other women in Rye did during the war,” he said. “They held blood drives, they volunteered as nursing aides when the nurses all left for the war, they did iron scrap drives. They did everything, they ran the town.”
Maloney, a retired paper and printing broker, became web-savvy by putting his products online in 1998. The married father of three young adults, he has been active in the Rye Historical Society for more than three decades and would love nothing better than to inspire other towns to replicate his tribute to local vets.
“My hope is that people take advantage and use it as an educational tool for generations to come,” he said. “And that we get the word out to people’s families [via ancestry.com] so future generations can enjoy what their relatives did as veterans in the service.”
To that end, Maloney encourages Rye’s residents to volunteer to reach out to veterans’ families. (He can be reached at chris@ryevets.org.)
You can get to know the women from Rye who served their country in World War II by visiting: ryevets.org.
