Unfortunately for Dot Braden, neither of those tony academic establishments was where she had been engaged to teach. It was Dot’s job to teach—or try to—at Chatham’s ordinary public high school, a modest brick structure located a few blocks off the main street, and one that in 1942 was suffering from any number of maladies and hardships, chief among them a near-total personnel turnover and full-fledged chaos among its teaching staff. In this, Chatham High was not unusual: America had been at war for nearly a year, virtually all able-bodied men of military age had signed up to fight, and schools around the country were coping with chronic teacher shortages. Male teachers, never in great supply, had mostly vanished. So had many female ones: The war set off a national rush to the altar, and many female schoolteachers quit their own jobs to marry the men before they shipped out. The upshot of so much upheaval and personnel reallocation was that at the beginning of the 1942 school year, all of the teaching at Chatham High School had fallen, or so it felt, on twenty-two-year-old Dot.
Fresh out of college, Dot Braden had never taught before she took the job in Chatham. In her first week she found that she was now the high school’s eleventh-and twelfth-grade English teacher, its first-and second-year French teacher, its ancient-history teacher, its civics teacher, its hygiene teacher, and its calisthenics teacher, assigned to enforce a new exercise program the government had put in place to encourage fitness among young people. The latter responsibility mostly entailed marching the senior girls back and forth from lunch. She had to suppress a laugh at being called “General Braden” during this exercise, but Dot—blue-eyed, brown-haired, five feet four inches tall, determined, forceful—did all she was asked. When the physics teacher departed, there was another panic and scramble: During one faculty meeting Dot unwisely mentioned that her graduation certificate qualified her to teach physics, and lo and behold, she became the advanced physics teacher as well. Five days a week, eight hours a day, Dot Braden ran from classroom to classroom, teaching, lecturing, grading, marching. For her pains she was paid $900 a year, or about $5 a day.
Dot was accustomed to hard work, but if anybody had asked her—and nobody did—she would have said that teaching anybody anything while America was at war in this way was impossible. The school’s sophomore class (whose own ranks fell by half over the next two years, as even teenagers took full-time work to serve the war effort) later noted in their graduation yearbook, The Chat, that the 1942–43 year was “the most confusing” of their educational careers. “It was terrible,” Dot recalled later. “I mean to tell you, they dumped everything on me.”
The straw that broke the camel’s back occurred at Christmas. Dot and another female teacher were boarding with the sheriff and his wife. Halfway through the year her roommate also left to get married—just up and quit—and Dot inherited her English composition classes. This happened at about the same time that the restaurant where Dot was taking her meals closed down, a victim of worker shortages and the rationing of meat, coffee, butter, cheese, and sugar—most anything a person would want to eat or drink. The sheriff’s housekeeper began preparing her meals and Dot ate alone in her room each night, exhausted.
Why she did not quit, she would have had a hard time explaining. Persistent and tenacious by nature, she was resolved to do her job come hell or high water. And she did her best: Dot’s composition class beat the boarding school, Chatham Hall, in a themed essay contest—an unheard-of occurrence—and the mother of a girl in her physics class came to thank her for all she had done, saying that the girl planned to study physics in college. But when the year’s final dismissal bell sounded, Dot Braden packed her skirts and sweater sets and saddle shoes and went home to Lynchburg, Virginia, some fifty miles away.
“I am never going back to that school,” she told her mother. “I am not. It will kill me. I’m just through with teaching and all that.”
The two women were standing together in the modest wood-frame Victorian that Dot’s mother rented at 511 Federal Street in Lynchburg, at the top of a steep hill in a residential area not far from downtown. Dot’s mother, Virginia—they called her Meemaw—was raising four children on her own, and Dot’s income helped. There were few other good jobs available, even for a young woman as hardworking and well educated as Dot. Local classified ads seeking female labor mostly wanted telephone operators, waitresses, housemaids, and—always—schoolteachers. But Virginia Braden didn’t want her oldest daughter doing work she hated, so they agreed Dot would look for something else.
Sometime after that conversation, Dot’s mother came home and said that some government recruiters were set up at the Virginian Hotel, an imposing yellow-brick Classical Revival edifice that stood at the corner of Church and Eighth Streets in the center of town, about a half mile or so from their house. Word had it the recruiters were looking for schoolteachers. Her mother didn’t know what the job was, exactly. She made it sound mysterious, maybe a little bit like spying. The job was in Washington, D.C., and it had something to do with the war.
Washington, D.C.! Dot Braden had never been to Washington, though the nation’s capital was only a little more than three hours to the north. Like most people she knew, she had rarely left the state she lived in. She did not take vacations, except to visit family members, and seldom traveled. The only time she could remember leaving Virginia was when she and some friends had gone to West Point, in New York, for a dance with Army cadets. Apart from that, the bulk of her life had been spent in two places: Lynchburg, where she lived now, and Norton, a small coal-mining community that had the distinction of being the westernmost city in the state. The family had moved to Norton when Dot was a girl and her father got a job as a postal carrier for the railway, but the marriage had not worked out, and Dot’s mother relocated with the children back to Lynchburg, where she had relatives. Dot, as a girl, had sat in her school classroom reading a book with an illustration showing a happy family gathered around a dinner table and felt ashamed when the teacher walked behind her and saw the tableau she felt transfixed by. Things like marital disharmony were not spoken about, even though many families were suffering under the hardships and dislocation of the Great Depression.
Lynchburg was not a big city, but it was bigger than Norton. Some forty thousand people lived there, and a number of railway lines—the Norfolk and Western, the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Southern—rattled into the city’s train station. A hilly city, Lynchburg at one time had been the largest tobacco market in the South. It lay along the James River, and in its early days, tobacco had been transported in hogsheads to Richmond by slaves poling bateaux. Then the canals were built, and the railroads, and more industry came: a shoe factory, foundries, paper and flour and lumber mills. Dot’s mother worked as a secretary at a factory that made work uniforms. Money was hard to come by. In some ways Dot hardly noticed the Depression, because it didn’t seem different from ordinary life. She was born in 1920, and the stock market crashed when she was nine.