Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio.
My grandma was like, the only female on the debate team in the 1940s when she was in high school. She was a pretty cool chick. And anyways, when she’d graduated from high school, you know, she was 17, and she desperately wanted to get away from her stepfather. And so that’s why she joined the Marines. And I guess to join the Marines, you had to be 18. But, um, she lied. She lied on her thing and said she was 18, but she was 17. And they didn’t check. She just — they just were like, “Alright.” So she joined the Marine and then, uh, when she joined into the Marines, she got put in, um, what was it, Communications? She ended up learning Morse code and got to do stuff like that and she was — she had a typewriter. I still have her typewriter that she used in the war, World War Two.
And, um, there was a moment where they had, they asked, they were — okay, so they were gonna be deployed overseas. She didn’t want to do that. She wanted to stay here. And the other place they were going was, I believe it was Hawaiʻi. I could be wrong, but I believe it was Hawaiʻi or some, somewhere, some island in the Pacific. I think it was Hawaiʻi. And she said, “Oh, that, that sounds better.”
And so they, they asked — basically, the only thing that they needed from her was whether or not she could drive a jeep or, um, some vehicle that they had. Like a, an army vehicle. And if she could drive it then she didn’t have to get shipped out. She — or she didn’t have to do whatever she didn’t want to do. Gosh, you know what, I wish I knew the exact details of this. But basically there was something she didn’t want to do. And the place that she wanted to go was Hawaiʻi. And so she lied again, and said “Yeah, yeah, I can drive, I can drive that. I know how to drive that.” And so they were like “Alright.”
And so she like got into the car or the vehicle and just like totally bullsh***ed her way into, like, figuring out how to do it like on the spot. And like she got in because she had the confidence of a, um — she had the confidence to just, to do it and she just did it. And then, so she got in. And then that’s where she met my grandpa. He was in the Marines, too. And then they, you know, got married and whatnot. Um, so, yeah, that seems crazy to me that my grandma lied to get into the Marines, and then lied to be able to have a good job in the Marines that she wanted, um, and then just like, bullsh***ed her way through it.