Julia Parsons was born March 2, 1921 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father was an instructor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and her mother was a kindergarten teacher. Julia recalls her childhood as being a traditional one, as dictated by the Victorian mores of the time. The family was not heavily impacted by the Depression, as her father kept his job, but Julia does remember the economic realities that so many others faced. For children – who didn’t really know the difference – the positive memories mattered: the parties, and the movies. Julia continued her education too, eventually attending the Carnegie Institute herself. It was while she was there that the attack on Pearl Harbour occurred, and with that Julia’s life would change direction. She began to do war work for the Army Ordnance Corps, but then made the change to the navy, where she became a WAVE. Initial training took place at Smith College, and after a few months Julia and her fellow WAVES were dispatched to Washington, D.C. and the Naval Communications Annex, where she would take on her decoding role. It was Julia’s task to work on the German Enigma machine, decoding the U-Boat signals that were so critical to a Battle of the Atlantic victory. And this she did for the balance of the war, contributing to the Allies’ ultimate success. Along the way she made friends and even met her future husband too. As the war drew to a close, Julia had just become pregnant, and she left the WAVES; her husband had just been deployed overseas, to New Guinea. Julia recalls that the time after the war was something of a letdown for her and many women who lost the kinds of opportunities presented by the war. She did fall into the rhythms of civilian life, raising her family and travelling the world with her husband, and she did return to school to earn her teaching degree, a career she pursued for a number of years. We met Julia at the Veterans’ Breakfast Club in late 2020, and she joined Mr. Masters’ Grade 10 history class for an interview via zoom in December 2020.
