Some people thought you were a bad girl if you went to the USO

By Mary Long   born  1930

I was too young to go into the USO canteen, but I did hang around to see what it was all about.  At our USO in Portland it was mostly sailors.  The girls who did go said that they were nice.   Some were afraid of going overseas and wanted a girl to write to them.  My friends, Marie and Claire, would get their names and a bunch of us would write to them.  Sometimes we would get letters back from sailors we hadn’t even met.

When the war was over they all went home and the letters slowly stopped coming.