Along with 63 years of marriage, Walter and Joan Hobbs have something else in common: they both served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
The two 62-year Mineola residents are also both 90 years old, but they still have sharp recollections of those war years.
Walter enlisted in December 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Walter had been attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and living in a hotel at the time.
“I was studying upstairs,” he recalled, but came down to the lobby that Sunday morning, Dec. 7. He said he immediately knew something significant had happened when he heard the buzz of excited conversation in the lobby.
He remembers walking past anti-aircraft placements outside the MIT campus and got friendly with the sergeant on duty there who kept asking him when he was going to enlist.
“I felt I had to volunteer. I wanted to do something. So I volunteered for the Naval Air Corps. I became a pilot,” he said.
Joan was living in Brooklyn and doing her part by helping out at USO gatherings, but decided she wanted to be more involved in the war effort.
“After a while I thought there must something more I could do,” she said.
So she joined the Navy in 1943, just a year after the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) was created.
“I looked better in Navy blue than I did in khaki,” she recalled, smiling.
Joan was expecting to be shipped to some exotic post like Hawaii, but her first stop was a posting to basic training in upstate New York.
“We were the first WAVES to go for training,” she recalled.
Joan said her training in Samson, NY might have been the most challenging part of her war experience. The first night she attended a movie on base as one of 20 women among several times their number in sailors. She said she remembers the thunderous sound behind them as the sailors clamored to catch up with them after the movie ended.
Joan then spent the duration of the war sorting mail in a post office on an island called Manhattan.
“I took the subway like everybody else,” she said.
Meanwhile, eager to start flying after he signed up, Walter recalled asking, “When do I get to fly?”
“You don’t get to fly,” an officer told him. “We don’t have any planes.”
Relocated to New York City after enlisting, he finished his bachelors degree in marketing at New York University in 1942.
After basic training in North Carolina, Walter started flight training in Pensacola, FL in World War I vintage bi-planes nicknamed “yellow perils.”
The Navy then shipped him to land-locked Oklahoma flying training patrols as a cover for a top-secret – but short-lived – project developing drone planes for action in the Pacific Theater.
“That ended when we did a test out in the Pacific. One of the drones did a wind-up an went toward the cruiser that launched it,” Hobbs said.
His training revealed that Walter didn’t have the physical ability to endure high altitude flying in fighter planes. So he was assigned to flying PBY amphibious planes with the crucial mission of bailing out pilots who’d crashed or ditched their planes in the sea.
“What we did was search and rescue,” Hobbs recalled. “You’d be looking for the enemy and anytime a plane would go down, we would go and rescue them.”
At the end of the war, he saw the aftermath of horrific battle sites on Iwo Jima and Pelailiu while flying missions escorting planes being stationed in Japan. He flew his plane back to Hawaii and took what was called a “magic carpet” on a ship that landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the dead of winter.
“We arrived on Feb. 6. We were in tropical uniforms and it was freezing,” he recalled.
Hobbs returned to the Whitney estate in Manhasset where he grew up and his father was caretaker.
He and Joan first met at a polo match – a popular sport on Long Island then – but no sparks flew until they met again at a wedding where she was maid of honor.
“And here we are, 63 years later,” he said.
The couple raised four children in the intervening decades and had fulfilling working lives as well.
After working for more than 20 years in marketing for companies including Lily Tulip Cup and American Machine and Foundry – which created the first “bowling centers” as they were then known on Long Island – Walter became a college professor.
He started teaching management, marketing and finance at Nassau Community College in 1972 and went on to teach at C.W. Post until he retired in 1988.
Along the way, he served as commander of the Adolph Block VFW Post 1355 in Mineola. Hobbs also became president of the local New Line Party, formed when state Sen. Jack Martins was elected mayor of the village.
He still holds that position and has served three terms on the board of directors of the Mineola Public Library.
Joan worked for the Mineola-American for several years, writing a social column called “Bits and Pieces” and proofreading. She eventually moved on to become a proofreader for a variety of authors she describes as “Damon Runyon characters” including oddsmaker Nick the Greek.
“We’ve been very lucky,” Walter Hobbs said.
Reach reporter Richard Tedesco by e-mail at rtedesco@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204
