In honor of Veterans Day, we’re talking about the women who served in World War II in a Navy outfit called the WAVES. Specifically, their commanding officer, Mildred McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton). When the war started, she was president of Wellesley College, but before it was over, she would be the first woman to become a commissioned officer in the US Navy, commanding a force of nearly 100,000 people.
Continue reading Miss Mack, from Wellesley to the WAVES (episode 106)
If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ll know that the Boston Harbor Islands are one of our favorite local destinations. This week, we’re sharing three stories from the Harbor Islands, all of which originally aired within the first 20 episodes of the podcast. We’ll hear about the zoo shipwreck, a hermit who made her home on the harbor, and the secret Harbor Island base where Nazis were smuggled into the country after World War II.
Continue reading Classics: Holidays on the Harbor (Episode 60)
The 1942 fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub killed a staggering 492 people, making it the deadliest fire in Boston history and one of the deadliest fires in US history. For Boston, it is the deadliest modern disaster of any type. Only the smallpox epidemics of the early 1700s and the 1918 Spanish flu rival it for loss of life.
At the end of World War II, the Allied powers raced across Germany, competing to capture technology related to Nazi super-weapons and the scientists who developed them. The US military operated a secret program that located high-value scientists, smuggling them into the US and falsifying their wartime records. For many of the scientists who went on to work on the Manhattan Project or the space race, their first stop in America was a secret base in Boston Harbor.
