As the oldest of four siblings, Dot was what amounted to the assistant mother. She and the next-in-line sibling—a brother, nicknamed Bubba—often paired up, ruling the younger two with an iron fist and making sure chores got done. Dot’s siblings called her Dissey—pronounced Dice-y—because one of them at some point had been too young to pronounce Dorothy. To her younger brother, who went by Teedy, Dot was an intimidating whirlwind of accomplishment, always busy with school and extracurricular activities.
It was clear to Teedy that his older sister possessed a highly analytic mind and a literary sensibility. There were not a lot of books in the Braden household, but the ones they did own, Dot read over and over. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for instance: She was given a copy one Christmas and probably read it twenty-five times. The family had a leather-bound volume of Keats and the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, Dot’s favorite author. As a schoolgirl, whenever she was assigned to do a presentation, she liked to act out a Poe poem or story—“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore’”—in an attempt to terrify her classmates. She had a histrionic streak and a tendency to drop words like “forthwith” and “epistle” into everyday conversation. She and her siblings also savored adult detective fiction, which they checked out of the public library. Her mother would come home and find them all inside reading, and cry, “I have to get you children out in the sun!”
Dot was very close to her mother, who was spirited and unsinkable. Virginia Braden had grown up without much in the way of financial advantage and was resolved that her children would have better opportunities. Virginia had foreordained that Dot would attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, a four-year institution located in the heart of Lynchburg, some two and a half miles from their house, with a hundred acres of manicured campus and eighteen redbrick buildings overlooking the James River. Randolph-Macon was one of a number of private colleges established in the nineteenth century to educate young women in Virginia, a state in which no public university had been willing to fully admit them until 1918. Of the state’s many well-regarded private women’s colleges—including Sweet Briar, Hollins, Westhampton, and Mary Baldwin—Randolph-Macon was said to be the most rigorous and demanding.
Dot was happy to follow her mother’s orders. Money presented a problem, however. A local businessmen’s club awarded her a scholarship that covered tuition, but there was book money to pay as well, and they didn’t have it. Dot shut herself in her closet and cried. A generous uncle came to the rescue: He would lend them the book money under the condition that Dot not tell his wife. During her college years Dot worked at a florist shop and earned extra money grading physics papers; while her well-to-do classmates made their debuts and went to football games in their free time, Dot was taking the streetcar between her home and her job and her college classes. At Randolph-Macon, she found she had an aptitude for languages. She had begun taking Latin and French in the seventh grade and continued both in college. Speaking French was a challenge—unlike some of her classmates, she had never been able to take a continental tour—but writing and reading it came as easy as sleeping.
Dot presented herself at the Virginian Hotel on September 4, 1943, a Saturday. War by now had taken over her city: All that summer, Lynchburg’s morning and evening papers—the News and the Daily Advance—had been full of news about the state of the conflict in places like Rome and Sicily; about Allied bombing campaigns; about the condition of the German rail system and Hitler’s European empire; about the bravery of “young American fliers” who “grin in the face of death”; about the newly important status of faraway locales like Rabaul, a Japanese stronghold in the South Pacific; and, closer to home, about local black markets and price ceilings; butter supplies; the coal situation; a cotton textile shortage; the issuing of extra shoe ration coupons for children, with their growing feet; and the recent arrival from Norfolk of the first oyster shipment, “those inevitable heralds of fall,” and the lack of workers to shuck them. Display ads urged citizens to buy war stamps; food columns advised how to make wedding cakes in a time of hasty ceremonies and sugar rationing; a local store, Millner’s, advertised “the perfect dress for your public life—when you want to look your best at committee meetings, charity drives and other patriotic activities.”
In such an environment, the presence of war recruiters in a hotel lobby did not seem at all strange. Entering the doorway, Dot found the two recruiters—a man and a woman—standing behind a table in the lobby, beneath its glowing chandeliers and thirty-foot barrel-vaulted ceilings. The recruiters seemed very interested in Dot’s facility with languages and asked her to fill out an application giving her name and address, education, and work experience. They told Dot to provide character references and to state whether she had family members serving in the military. Both brothers by now were in the service. Bubba—his real name was Boyd Jr.—was stationed at Scott Field in Illinois, where soldiers were being trained as radio operators and mechanics for the Army Air Force. Teedy—or John—was at Camp Fannin, a huge new Army training camp in Texas. The application included a line for enumerating clubs she belonged to, so Dot wrote down “National Honor Society” and “Quill and Scroll.”
The recruiters told her they would be in touch. Dot made her way out onto the street and allowed herself to hope. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of working in Washington and doing her part. Like every other American family, the Bradens were gung ho about helping the war effort—so much so that Teedy had asked Dot to write a letter volunteering their dog, Poochie, and they had received a polite letter from a War Dog Reception and Training Center, declining the dog’s services. For Dot, working in the nation’s capital would be a break from the life that had been lovingly planned for her, and that part—the unknown—was exciting.