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Tears suddenly began to flow when Betty Bandel, professor emeritus of English, toured the White House while in Washington for a celebration of Shakespeare's 400th birthday. As Bandels colleague Ed Feidner, now a professor emeritus of theater, asked what was wrong, Bandel talked about the feeling of being where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had lived.

Though Bandel, now 92 and frail, is usually remembered here as a productive scholar she published many books and articles on Shakespeare, Vermont history and New England and an energetic and demanding teacher, she was also a successful senior Army officer during the war. The engaging story of a young WAC officers everyday life during an epic conflict, which was almost lost, is revealed in a new book, An Officer and a Lady: The World War II Letters of Lt. Col. Betty Bandel, Womens Army Corps, edited by Sylvia Bugbee, Special Collections assistant archivist, and co-published by Military Women's Press and the University Press of New England.

A life of letters
In 1942, Bandel left her job as a reporter at the Arizona Daily Star and joined the Womens Army Corps (then called the Womens Army Auxiliary Corps). Graduating second in her class at officer training school, Bandel was chosen to serve as an aide to WAAC Director Oveta Culp Hobby. Bandels leadership skills and dependability often found her performing tasks as acting deputy director for Hobby, and she quickly rose through the ranks, leading the WAC Division of the Army Air Corps and becoming a lieutenant colonel in 1944. After the war ended, Bandel left the army to pursue a graduate degree at Columbia and joined UVMs Department of English, where she taught from 1947 to 1975.

But the biographical sketch doesnt capture the texture of the full story. Bandel herself does that in the hundreds of letters she wrote her mother about everything from meeting Eleanor Roosevelt to negotiating the bureaucracy to the cost of taxicabs. Those letters were almost lost and forgotten, however, until Ed Feidner and others around the university started looking for them.

When Feidner, a longtime friend of Bandels, published a collection of Civil War letters, it occurred to him that Bandel had been in the military and was very close to her mother, who had lived with Bandel in the last years of her life. I asked Betty, What happened to all those letters that you wrote to your mother during the war? Feidner says. And she said, Oh, theyre all gone.

But the letters werent gone, as a rummaging raccoon had revealed some years before. While cleaning up the mess left by the raccoon in a storage shed left undisturbed for years, Bandel had found the letters. Her mother had kept them all. With encouragement from Feidner and others, Bandel eventually offered the letters to UVMs Special Collections and solicited Bugbees help in editing and publishing.

Bugbee had recorded pieces of Bandels oral histories as part of an earlier university project on prominent UVM women and people of color, so the story was familiar to her. When the letters came Bugbees way, however, she was consumed by graduate work and her full-time job at UVM, so she began the project slowly, eventually dedicating evenings and weekends to editing and annotating the letters.

The best part was I felt like I got to know all the people, says Bugbee.

The more Bugbee worked on the letters (the book alone contains 250 of them), the more she got pulled in. She credits Special Collections for supporting her in the arduous process as well as the Womens Studies program, which offered a grant for the undertaking. Lilian Baker Carlisle G'86 and Sarah Dopp '68 G'82 also provided major funding for the project.

As Bugbee pored over the letters, Bandel explained the cast of characters, recalling the vivid details of her 1940s WAC days. "Betty recognized the value of the letters historically, Bugbee says. Not a lot has been written about women in the military.

An intimate glimpse
The book traces Bandels gradual maturation from a junior officer to a senior leader, says Bugbee, who believes the books letter format offers a personal view that simple narrative lacks. She admits, though, that some of the original letters were long and wordy and full of tales about dinners, requiring plenty of editorial attention. Betty loved her feed, Bugbee says.

While the letters are at times informal, they also are representative of womens contributions to the war effort. Bandels recollection of joining the army, found on the books first page, offers a revealing sense of the times:

I was sitting at my desk, and Emily Brown was in the [newspaper] morgue getting some stories out, and she called to me and she said, Hey Bandel, theyre organizing a womens army. I said, Who is? And she said, The United States. And I said Well, lets join. So we walked down the street and did. When asked what had prompted her to do so, she replied, Thats a funny question. What else would there have been for an unmarried woman except to be in the service one way or another? Everybody was in something. And so you naturally went in.

Though the book was originally scheduled to be published in July, the University Press of New England made an exceptional effort to get it out for Memorial Day and the WWII monument dedication. The books arrived in the publishers Arlington bookstore one day before the dedication.

Bugbee and Bandel celebrated the publishing of the book close to home on July 8, with a library event featuring the duo along with remarks from Vermont National Guard Adjutant General Martha Rainville.

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