The family was never quite sure how Ruth had found out about the job at Arlington Hall. In the chaos of many brothers shipping out to military service, Ruth managed to slip away without attracting as much notice as the boys did, making the two-day train ride from nearby Leland, Mississippi, to Washington. Her mother had not finished altering some clothes before she left, and sent them along behind her. Her brother Clyde was surprised when investigators called to inquire after his sister’s background. The agents called her mother to find out if she’d had childhood diseases like mumps and measles, and her mother reported that her children had contracted—and fought off—every childhood disease you could imagine.
Apart from her skill at keeping secrets, the other good thing about Ruth Weston was that you could tell her anything and she would not judge. For Dot, this was a relief from the snobbery that prevailed among old-line Virginians, and even among branches of her own family, who tended to keep close track of which members were doing better than others. Ruth knew that Dot’s parents were separated. She knew that Dot’s father was a good person, as was her mother. After her own father’s stroke, family struggles were familiar to Ruth. The Depression had been hard on people. Hard on families. The two young women confided to each other as they lay in their shared bed. Yet certain things they did not share. Close as they were, Dot and Ruth confided nothing to each other about their work, even though they sometimes had lunch together in the Arlington Hall cafeteria and were, in fact, working on different areas of the same Japanese Army code-breaking effort. They went around terrified that they would let something slip. “We were scared to death,” as Dot put it.
Ruth’s full name was Carolyn Ruth Weston. Sometimes she went by Ruth, sometimes by Carolyn. One day the milkman delivered the bill to the new Arlington apartment and addressed it to “Crolyn,” and Dot thought the misspelling was the funniest thing she had ever seen. “Get the bill, Cro-lyn!” she implored, laughing. She started calling Ruth “Cro-lyn,” and over time the nickname shortened into simply “Crow.” The name stuck: Crow. At least, that’s what Dot called her. Nobody else did. It was somewhat like a secret code name.
The apartment became more crowded. Crow’s older sister, Louise, wrote them six months after they moved in, saying she too wanted to come to Washington to look for government work. Crow was not happy to hear this. She had been glad to get out from under the thumb of Louise, known in the family simply as Sister. But what could she do? Crow and Dot went to fetch Sister from Union Station, a trip that involved several, as Crow would put it, transfuhs.
They arrived amid a downpour to find Sister, who was tall and fair and redheaded, standing bedraggled outside the arched facade of the train station, near the plaza fountain with its statue of Christopher Columbus, having been caught in the rainstorm. She was wearing a lacy hat and looked very much like somebody from Bourbon, Mississippi. Her dress, which was linen, had shrunk, and her slip was showing. “Look at that,” muttered Crow. They were city girls now, and Sister looked unspeakably country. They showed her how to navigate the bus and the streetcar and took her back to Fillmore Gardens, where she would sleep in the living room on a daybed. (Liz had a cot in the bedroom.) But there were advantages to the Mississippi influx. The women cooked for one another, and Sister would make red beans and rice. Dot had never eaten Cajun food, and it was a treat on a cold day after finishing an eight-hour shift and walking a mile and a half home from work in the rain.
The women paid their own bills and cooked their own food. At any given time there might be five or even six women in the one-bedroom apartment. Sister stayed; Crow’s little sister, Kitty Weston, came up for the summer. Dot’s mother often took the bus up for visits, as did friends and family members from home. Crow’s brother Clyde was stationed with the Navy in New York and came down to see them. He would flirt with Dot, who he thought was “a real cute girl,” “outgoing,” and a good friend to Crow. Having all those people in one small place did not seem hard. None of them was used to being coddled—or “sitting on a cushion and sewing a fine seam,” as Dot put it. They ate Sister’s red beans and rice, and frozen peaches, which was the kind of thing you had for dessert when you couldn’t get sugar. They would laugh about how their mouths froze and puckered from the peaches, and they would sit around the apartment talking with frozen lips.
Liz’s mother visited from North Carolina and made green beans using fatback, which was a method Dot had not heard of. Liz’s mother then fished the fatback out of the beans and wrapped it up to use again. “I’m saving it,” she explained. That too seemed very country to Dot and Crow, and “I’m saving it” became a mutual joke. “I’m saving it!” they would say, and fall over laughing.
Dot and Crow got along perfectly in every way. They became part of each other’s routine. Crow was slow in the mornings, so Dot would fix her breakfast, usually just coffee and toast, or cereal. Crow would wait for her to make it, and then they would go on together to work.
At Arlington Hall, the presence of so many code-breaking girls from small towns presented a challenge to their bosses. The women came from remote places where their own experience of the war effort had consisted mostly of enduring rationing, listening to the radio, and worrying about the fate of boyfriends and brothers. Local newspapers were rich in war news, but even so, the top brass felt the women needed educating and motivating. And so emissaries were brought to Arlington Hall to school the young women in the geography of the world and impress upon them the realities of the fighting and their own contribution to it. The goal of the lecture series, This Is Our War, was to expose young ex-schoolteachers from Durham, North Carolina; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Bourbon, Mississippi, to the full contest they were now part of; to sketch out just how large the theater of World War II was and the important role that coded messages played in it.
It was heady stuff. One of the first dignitaries to address the young women was none other than Rear Admiral Joseph R. Redman, director of Naval Communications (his brother John was also a naval communications officer and headed up the code-breaking unit; the two were often confused), who graciously agreed to cross the Potomac to address the code breakers of the other service. In his lecture, “The Navy Attacks,” which he gave on September 7, 1943—a bit before Crow and Dot arrived—Redman tried to evoke the sheer enormousness of the Pacific, which was bigger than anything the women had seen or could imagine. Newspaper reports, he told them, gave the impression that ships from opposing navies were always just somehow finding each other and commencing to shoot. “I don’t believe you can visualize how much water there is out there,” Redman told them. “You take a fast ship and it takes about three weeks to get from San Francisco over to Japan. And that’s a lot of water and you don’t see many people on it.” The point was that the task of locating an enemy ship was a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.