The great “manpower” needs during World War II created openings for women in the U.S. military to replace men who were in noncombat positions. In addition to the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, for the first time women were actively recruited for military branches created specifically for them. The Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now UNCG) alumnae were among those who answered the call and signed up for military service.
One of those alumnae was Charlesanna Fox, from Asheboro, North Carolina, who graduated from Woman’s College in 1930 with a degree in History and later joined the Naval Library Service in November of 1942.
The UNCG’S Women Veterans Historical Project conducted an oral history interview with Fox in March of 1999. Through this oral history we can gain a glimpse of what life was like at Woman’s College in the late 1920s.
Fox: “I was part of the Daisy Chain my sophomore year, and we had societies. We had four societies that we were automatically part of. I was a Dikean and I was a Dikean marshal. The societies elected the marshals…I sang with some choirs. We had music at Christmas and I remember performing in one of those. And we had housemothers. That’s unheard-of now, I guess. But each dormitory was assigned a person, who didn’t really look after us but she was there if we needed her. And we had to keep our rooms clean, which is unheard-of now. We had inspection once a week, and that’s unheard-of… [In our dorm rooms] we had a hot plate and we could make cocoa after hours. We were supposed to be in bed, and we could have been chastised, but we made hot chocolate.”
Walter Clinton Jackson, who later became the College’s chancellor and the namesake of Jackson Library, was one of Fox’s instructors as well as her academic advisor.
After college Fox taught high school for four years in Maxton, North Carolina before deciding to go back to school to earn her library science degree from UNC Chapel Hill. She then worked in libraries in Washington D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee. In May of 1942 Fox took the civil service exam “to do something to help the war effort” and soon afterwards was recruited into the Library Section of the Bureau of Naval Personnel by Isabel DuBois. Fox spent her first three months at Washington D.C. where her job was to select books for Navy ships and stations. In November of 1942, she was assigned to the newly opened Camp Lejeune Marine Base in Jacksonville, North Carolina to set up the base library. Fox served at Camp Lejeune for the next three years.
In November of 1945, Fox was transferred to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to be the 14th Naval District Librarian. She sailed from San Francisco on the USS Lurline troop ship. In her oral history interview Fox recalled that: “We left in a storm, and they sighted mines. They still had mines on the water around San Francisco, so we had to be careful. I mean, it was still wartime…And when I got to Hawaii, there was still barbed wire on the beaches, some of them. The people in Hawaii had had to gear up to do the things that they needed to do to get the war over and now to start cleaning up things for themselves.”
For the April 1947 Woman’s College Alumnae News, Fox wrote: “We have been working very hard here, especially because of the drastic cut in our personnel and because of the back log of work resulting from the end of the war — the reorganization of all our service for peace time. It seems to me like 1942 in reverse!…It has been an interesting experience for me here, and I shall miss many things about Hawaii — its fruits and flowers and beautiful scenery. But it is going to seem mighty good to be back home again.”
In June 1947 Fox’s contract with the Naval Library Service ended and returned to Knoxville where she worked as the group services worker and film librarian in the Lawson McGhee Public Library. After two years, she returned to Asheboro to help take care of her parents. There Fox became the Randolph County Librarian, a position she held until retirement in 1977.
Fox remained involved with her alma mater. She participated in many Alumni events as well as Alumnae Veterans Projects. Fox received the Alumni Distinguished Service Award in 1974 and was awarded The Order of the Long Leaf Pine by Governor Mike Easley in 2008. She died in Asheboro in November 2012.
By Megan Mieure and Beth Ann Koelsch
