It was an ordinary day. Reading a Sunday News column written by Jack Brubaker whom is known as "The Scribbler." Jack recently was a guest speaker at Woodcrest Villa where my wife, Carol and I moved a bit over a month ago. Jack's column appears every Sunday in the Lancaster newspaper and is titled "The Scribbler." His column for this past Sunday was titled "After Pearl Harbor, a teenage girl decided to go to war!" Jack's story began with...On December 7, 1941, Sylvia Klinestever Shellenberger and six other teenage girls were listening to pop songs on a radio when a man interrupted the music to announce that Japan had bombed the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. "This means war!" the man said to those listening to him on the radio. The girls looked at each other and asked..."Where's Pearl Harbor?" Wasn't long before they scurried for their homes in Columbia, PA. Sylvia was crying big tears since she knew her brothers were going to go to war! She told a newspaper reporter many years later that she too wanted to go, but the Navy rejected here since she was only 18 years old at the time. She was rejected once again when she turned 19, but in 1943 she finally was old enough to become a WAVE which she became on her 20th birthday. She was one of the first females to join the armed forces. She didn't go overseas, but worked with doctors caring for wounded sailors in the states. She told a local reporter that she led the way for stateside females who assisted doctors caring for wounded sailors. Sylvia was born in Columbia in 1923 and attended schools in Columbia. She married Jim Shellenberger and raised three children in Columbia before they eventually moved to Manheim Township. One of their children was Kurt who supplied "The Scribbler" with the information for his recent story in the Sunday News. Her husband Jim died in 2016 and Sylvia died two months ago. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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