A Wartime Romance

By Kate Long

In March 1942, at the height of World War II, 20-year-old Carl Guthrie looked out the window of a troop train as it pulled out of the Charleston railway station. “And there was my pregnant wife, Phyllis, running down the tracks after the train, waving her arms, calling, ‘Goodbye, goodbye!’” he said from the couple’s home in Summersville. “I’ll never forget that sight.”

Carl and hundreds of other West Virginia draftees and enlistees were headed for army training in Ohio. “I was only 19, a wartime bride,” the former Phyllis Mobrey recalled. “I knew he had to go, but I could hardly stand it, so I took out running after the train.” Carl is 86 now, and Phyllis is 85. Sixty-eight years have passed since then, “but I remember those war years clear as day,” she said.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On December 27, high school sweethearts Phyllis and Carl got married. They had planned to wait, but the war changed everything. “After the United States got into the war, we didn’t see any reason to wait,” she said.

Carl came from a Charleston family of 10. “There were so many kids, you had to keep your eyes open while Dad asked the blessing, or all the food would be gone before you opened your eyes,” Carl said. His dad owned a grocery store, so Carl grew up delivering groceries. “I just always worked.”

Pearl Harbor was bombed on a Sunday. Carl was working overtime that day, climbing telephone poles for the Chesapeake & Potomac phone company, replacing steel telephone wire with copper between Charleston and The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs. [See, “The West Virginia WWII Home Front: Ashford General Hospital: The Greenbrier Goes to War,” by Louis E. Keefer; Fall 1995.]

They’d been working on that job about a month. “When I got off the truck at the parking garage that night, there were paperboys yelling ‘Extra! Extra!’ out on the street,” Carl said. “It was Pearl Harbor. We were in the war.”

Phyllis heard the news at church. Nearly three weeks later, Carl drove to St. Albans to pick her up. “I was an only child, and we told my mother we were going to Kentucky and get married,” Phyllis said. “And Mom just said, ‘You better know what you’re doing, because this is wartime.’”

They spent their $200 in savings on furniture and set up housekeeping in a South Charleston apartment. Carl knew he’d be going to war, so he had applied for army flight school, but he got drafted first. After he left for basic training, Phyllis moved in with her mother and father to have their baby.

She was worried and depressed, apart from Carl. “Mom said, ‘Phyllis, you’d better go to work and make some money. You’re going to need it when Carl comes back. I’ll take care of the baby while you work.’

“So I got a job at the Naval Ordnance Plant, and I was really glad I did. It made me feel like I was helping win the war and maybe bringing Carl home sooner.”

When Phyllis stepped into the huge factory along MacCorkle Avenue in South Charleston, she walked into another world.

You can read the rest of this article in this issue of Goldenseal, available in bookstores, libraries or direct from Goldenseal.