Jane Hoyt Wade – My Mom, her life

— PART 1 —

July 19 would have been my mother’s 100th birthday but she passed away just over thirty years ago. I miss her and think about her every day.

Jane Hoyt was born on July 19, 1924 in Detroit to George Moses Hoyt (1889-1983) and Mary Alice Coonley Hoyt (1897-1948). She joined older brother Richard (1921-1944) and was later joined by her sister Alice (1928-2005).

Grandma and Grandpa Hoyt both were born and grew up in the area of Troy and Albany, New York. How and why grandma and her two sisters came to the Detroit area, I do not know. Grandpa Hoyt came with his older brother, Almon (1883-1960), in 1915 to work at the Cadillac factory.

Grandpa was drafted into the Army for World War I, completed basic training, and was sent to an embarkation post in New Jersey prior to being shipped overseas. However, because of the Spanish Flu Pandemic, his unit was quarantined and never left the States.

After his discharge, Grandpa returned to Michigan and went to work for Lincoln. He helped assemble their first eight-cylinder engine.

Grandpa and Grandma got married in late 1919 and settled into a home in Detroit. They remained in this home as their family grew. Ford Motor Company bought Lincoln and Grandpa went to work for Ford. By about 1930, he had risen to the position of Midwest Regional Service Manager. His job was to trouble-shoot problems with the car’s mechanics. Richard, Mom and Alice went to school in the Detroit schools.

The mid-1930s saw considerable labor-strife in the auto industry. In 1936, to move the family away from the violence, Grandpa purchased Frank Yoder’s 80-acre farm on the south side of Bordman Road about a quarter mile east of Van Dyke. Grandpa once told me that he wanted to be a “city-farmer”–work in the city on weekdays and drive a tractor on weekends.

Richard was in tenth grade and drove to Almont to school. Mom was in sixth grade and Alice in second grade, so they went to the one-room Smith School on the southwest corner of Kidder Road and 37 Mile Road. Many times, Richard drove Mom and Alice to school but they also walked to and from school.

Richard graduated with the Class of 1939- the largest graduating class of Almont up to that time. He went to live with Aunt Katherine and Uncle George and worked at Ford in Dearborn. After Richard’s graduation, mom took over the driving duties. In 1941, she drove a 1941 Lincoln.

In high school, she sang in the high school choir. Her junior year, her date for the Senior Prom was a senior, Robert Morin Shoemaker. She graduated with the Class of 1942.

After graduation, she and Betsey Shoemaker (Robert’s sister) enlisted in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service–a Naval Reserve unit). I have not been able to determine when she enlisted but her first posting was to a hospital in Idaho. For fear of a Japanese invasion, the hospital was constructed in Idaho instead of on the coast in Oregon.

After the fear of an invasion subsided, a hospital was built in Oregon so the wounded would not have to be transported by rail to Idaho. She was then transferred to the new hospital. She was given leave to go home for about a month before reporting to the Oregon hospital. To get to her new posting, she traveled by train from Detroit to Denver and then would have to change trains to go on to Oregon.

As mom walked through the station in her “dress blues”, an Army communication unit was sitting in the station’s waiting area. One of the service men sitting in the terminal commented on her appearance in some crude manner–a ‘wolf whistle’, saying “Hubba, hubba”, or some other off putting remark. Mom ignored them and continued to walk to the platform and get on the train.

The communication unit was being transferred from Camp Luna–located outside Roswell, New Mexico–to a post in Washington State. This unit handled the communications between the Department of Defense in Washington D. C. and the White Sands Proving Grounds–the “Manhattan Project” (the project developing the atomic bomb).

My father was the one that said the off putting remark. When his unit went to board the train, he was the last one to get on board. He found that the only available seat was next to Mom. It is apparent that mom did not know that Dad had made the comment. He sat down and they conversed all the way to Oregon where Mom got off. Dad continued on to his posting in Washington.

For the next week, Dad repeatedly talked with the men in his unit about the “good looking” WAVE he had ridden with on the train from Denver. His buddies asked him why he hadn’t called her. He replied that he didn’t know her number at her new posting. They told Jim to just call the post and ask for her. Jim, sheepishly, had to tell his buddies that he couldn’t because he hadn’t gotten her name.

Dad finally got up the nerve to call the post and asked for the “WAVES” barracks. When he got the barrack’s operator, he explained his situation and asked if the operator knew who he was talking about. He had not identified himself to the operator, so he was shocked when the operator replied: “Well Jim, you must mean Jane. She has been talking about you all week.”

After the end of hostilities in Europe, Dad was transferred to Breman, Germany and put in charge of loading ships to either return materials to the States or to have the materials taken to the middle of the North Sea and dumped overboard.

Mom was discharged shortly after the end of the war and returned to Michigan. Due to gas rationing during the war, Grandma and Grandpa Hoyt had moved to St. Clair. After Dad had been discharged, Mom and Dad married on August 7, 1946 in St. Clair, Michigan. They lived in Michigan for a short time and then moved to Herington were Jim went to work again for the Rock Island Railroad. They lived in Jim’s grandfather’s home, Henry Marion Wade (1853-1936), which was just across the alley from his parents–Milton Albert Wade (1888-1948) and Maudie Larene Debus Wade (1889-1979).

Copies of the Almont Historical Society’s various books can be purchased by contacting Jim Wade at 810-796-3355 or jrwade49@ gmail.com or stopping by the museum on Saturdays from 1-4 p.m.