Zibby Mag

By Alix Rickloff

Family stories were a large part of my childhood. After heaping holiday dinner plates were replaced with coffee and dessert, the adults would begin to reminisce: the outspoken grandfather who was run out of town over his strong temperance issues, the tragic great-aunt whose young husband died of the Spanish flu, the great-great-grandmother who went through Confederate war veterans like a veritable black widow. I was fascinated by this oral history and would listen rapt as names and dates were repeated, familial connections were dissected, and the veracity of some of the wilder tales was debated.

My maternal grandfather occasionally showed up in these anecdotes. He died the year before I was born, but I knew all about the big house on Baltimore Street where generations of the family lived together during the lean Depression years, his work with the B&O railroad, his Sunday afternoon ritual of listening to Orioles games on the radio, marking the box score play-by-play. My mother repeatedly told me about his hopes that she’d finally have a daughter after four boys; how he would have spoiled her rotten, how proud of her he would have been. Unfortunately, we never got to meet.

In photographs, he was a stern-looking man in a suit and tie, with thinning hair that was gray at the temples, and a cigarette between his long fingers. This was the image I carried for years until I came across an old sepia picture of two young men posing proudly for the camera in the dixie-cup caps and bellbottoms of the US Navy—my grandfather and his cousin; new recruits in 1917. Both were assigned to the naval hospital in Annapolis before my grandfather shipped out on the USS Comfort. That was as far as my curiosity and our long holiday dinners took me—until the summer of 2020.

None of us will forget that year—no matter how much we wish we could—caught in a worldwide pandemic that dragged on month after month, and desperate for anything to fill the endless quarantine hours. Some people baked sourdough or adopted puppies. I put together a proposal for a new book.

The Girls in Navy Blue is based around the experience of WWI’s U.S. Navy “yeomanettes.” Inspired by an article I’d read about Captain Joy Bright Hancock, a powerful force within the U.S. Navy, I began gathering research about the nearly 12,000 women who enlisted to help “do their bit” for the war effort as everything from secretaries to mechanics to cipher experts. I brainstormed a rough outline for the story I wanted to tell, setting my book in Norfolk, Virginia, where my main character Viv works as a clerk at the naval hospital. I hadn’t been this excited about an idea in a long time, and I was eager to pull it all together and send it along to my agent. Then my mother called.

He might have been wearing this tag in that old photograph, carrying it on a chain next to his heart throughout the war as he sailed back and forth across the Atlantic as a pharmacist’s mate. I was holding something he held. Touching something he touched.

My father passed away a few years earlier, but only now had she gotten around to sorting through his dresser. She asked if I could help her look through the trinkets and treasures he’d stowed away there. Countless handkerchiefs and tie clasps. Mismatched cufflinks and old watches on cracked leather straps. Every report card his kids brought home from kindergarten through senior year of high school. And in a small box was a flat metal disk with a hole punched through it and engraved on one side with a name, a birth date, an enlistment date, and the letters USN. On the other side, the swirling imprint of a thumb. I was holding my grandfather’s military dog tag.

He might have been wearing this tag in that old photograph, carrying it on a chain next to his heart throughout the war as he sailed back and forth across the Atlantic as a pharmacist’s mate. I was holding something he held. Touching something he touched. In that moment, he became more than a photo of a grumpy-looking man or even a wide-eyed boy standing in his sailor’s crackerjack uniform. He became a real person. Someone who might joke with friends as they sauntered the busy streets of Norfolk, attend Red Cross dances, and flirt with pretty girls. Someone who could very easily have rubbed shoulders with my yeomanettes as they did their work. Finding this dog tag now felt like more than odd coincidence. It felt like a bit of otherworldly encouragement. A good luck charm I wasn’t about to put back in that box.

My agent loved the story, as did my editor, and a book was born. I bought a chain for the tag and began wearing it as a tribute to my grandfather’s service and to his memory. But this didn’t feel like enough, and as the story took shape, so too did the character of Russell. He was a pharmacist’s mate serving aboard a hospital ship, and does all the things I imagined my grandfather doing (plus a bit of fictional heroism because what’s the fun in being an author if you can’t bend the truth once in a while?).

We are all the sum of our families’ pasts; the tales we pass down about the men and women who came before. One generation tied to the next––whether it’s around a holiday table crowded with aunts and uncles, over scrapbooks of old photos of faces that feel oh-so-slightly familiar despite the years that separate us, or with a dusty metal disk worn nearly smooth with use and shoved in the back of a dresser for over fifty years.

Do I believe my grandfather reached from the great beyond to inspire and guide me as I wrote? I can’t say, but it’s enough to know that as long as I wear his tag and he walks across the pages of my book, he’s not completely forgotten.

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Alix Rickloff is a critically acclaimed author of historical fiction. Her previous novels include The Way to London and Secrets of Nanreath Hall. She lives in Maryland with her husband and three children. Her new book The Girls in Navy Blue, is available now.