PART 2: Centenarian Nurse And Veteran Audrey Kent Recalls Memories Of Service

A young Audrey Kent tucked a dollar bill into her pocket, then made her way to the revelry spilling out onto sidewalks and streets in the city. The end of World War II had arrived.

“I was right there in the hospital and so us nurses that weren’t on duty walked down to San Francisco--I mean, to town--and, oh! It was just chalk-full of people. A lot of military. And they were all yelling and clapping and everything.”

She brought the dollar bill in case a purchase would be needed. “I got home and I didn’t have it anymore,” Audrey, now 101, laughed. “Someone picked it!”

Before the war was over, San Francisco offered an escape valve from the pressures felt healing the wounded and sick at Presidio Letterman Hospital, where she was based as a military nurse.

“All us group of nurses that were kind of close and friendly, when we had a night off we would go down to town and go to one of the big hotels.” Like the Sir Francis Drake on Union Square or the Mark Hopkins’s Top of the Mark, its height a bird's eye to the gleaming bay landscape.

“And, you know, we didn’t have to pay anything. We’d go where the dance was and they had all the big bands would come there.”  Tommy Dorsey, Wayne King, Lawrence Welk: Audrey loved the music popular at that time.

“They were really romantic songs,” she described it. “Some were sad, you know, and some were jolly.”

Music was a salve to the bittersweet days of early Forties America, a period Ms Kent observes as unique.

“The atmosphere was so different than it is now, with the people and the soldiers and that,” she said. “Because the husbands and sons and much of the civilians were going overseas, usually right there in San Francisco. I mean, they didn’t know if they were ever going to come back and it was a very sobering atmosphere at times. So they would go to the dances to kind of give them something fun to think about.

"Everybody in the country was for the country, you know, patriotic, it seems like.”

TO BE CONTINUED