Lois Nelson
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Navy
Lois Nelson Callen was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota and graduated from Duluth Central High School in 1938. After graduation she worked as a secretary in a Duluth office. She enlisted in the Navy WAVES on Oct. 9, 1943. She attended basic training at Hunter College in New York City.
She says: "While there I was a member of the glee club, also known as the "singing platoon." We sang as we marched from class to class. I was also a member of the choir. These musical groups occasionally performed at various civilian functions in the area. Two of these will forever remain in my memory.
One concert was held at the Brooklyn Institute of the Blind, where the guest speaker was Helen Keller. I was fascinated by the fact that this woman, who was born with seemingly insurmountable physical handicaps, was standing on that stage giving a lecture. Another time we were sent to sing where Kate Smith was the star performer. I was surprised to see that she seemed very young -- I thought about my age (which was 24 at the time). What a voice she had. From Hunter College I was sent to Yeoman training school at Cedar Falls, Iowa, for two months, where I was promoted to the rank of Yeoman second class.
At the graduation exercise we were told that about 90 percent of the WAVES would be sent to Washington, D.C., to serve out their tour of duty, relieving male counterparts for active duty. For some inexplicable reason, I didn''t want to go to Washington, D.C., but what could I do? I contacted my aunt and uncle there, who treated me to dinner and then took me back to the railroad station. We rode to Harper''s Ferry, West Virginia, a tiny town on the top of a mountain and were dropped off to await the next leg of our journey into the unknown.
Soon an Army truck arrived and we were instructed to climb into the back and then were taken down the mountain at what I thought was a dangerously high rate of speed over a narrow, winding, bumpy road -- the truck swaying back and forth all the while. At one time I said to myself: "What am I doing here and where in the world are we going anyway?" I soon got my answer. We arrived at Camp Detrick in Frederick, Md. (now known as Fort Detrick). After going through official procedures to get settled in, we learned that we were at a germ warfare facility, which housed Army, Navy, and Air Corps personnel.
We were instructed not to discuss anything about the camp or what was being done there -- ever. We were told that experiments were being conducted on certain deadly diseases. I can now discuss these experiments as the secrecy ban was lifted several years after the war''s end. The diseases were psittacosis (parrot fever), undulant fever (rabbit fever), anthrax (from tanning animal hides) and botulinus (food poisoning). My job was to type long Top Secret reports on the experiments, which I did all day long.
Many of these experiments were field tested at Horn Island at Pascagoula, Mississippi and the results sent to us for typing. After the war I was surprised to learn that, while I was at Camp Detrick typing reports of the experiments, my brother, Robert J. Nelson, who had enlisted in the Navy Construction Battalions, was stationed at Horn Island, constructing our testing ground there.
While at Camp Detrick I met the Army staff sergeant who would become my husband a few months later. We have been married for almost 56 years and have a son and a daughter, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
She was discharged on Dec. 4, 1944. After the war, she worked at the University of Pittsburgh and for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass union before retiring.
