A Young, Modern Professional Woman

The Great Depression-which began with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, and would not abate until the nation at war required full employment-had devastating nationwide effects, worst among them crippling poverty, rampant unemployment, home and farm foreclosures, and prolonged hunger and homelessness. As the economic depression took hold and deepened, Virginia, a young woman of eighteen when the stock market crashed, may have had little choice other than to seek employment and remain at home with her parents once she graduated from Oak Park High School.

Virginia secured a job as a receptionist and office manager for an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Jerry Greenwood, in downtown Chicago. Carol pursued a career in commercial art and fashion illustration, taking classes and studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Depression, a national emergency of epic proportion, scarred an entire generation and damaged all aspects of American life. As young women just then beginning to define their adult lives, Virginia and Carol found themselves working hard within a frightening national context of near economic collapse. Bread lines, soup kitchens, and public works projects served as temporary steps to help ward off hunger and despair. To be securely employed, as both Virginia and Carol were, was an achievement. They were fortunate, too, in continuing to have an exceptionally close and loving relationship with one another and with their parents.

As a firstborn child spending her earliest years on a remote ranch, Virginia had had to learn self-reliance. With the onset of the Depression, eighteen-year-old Virginia learned that food on the table and a roof to live beneath necessarily superseded loftier dreams and ambitions. Many years later, Virginia's friends would attest to her great love of romance in books, movies, songs, and theater. A romantic temperament would have been difficult to sustain during the decade-long Depression, with economic deprivations that did not ease until Virginia was in her early thirties. For an entire generation of young Americans, to work and be paid for one's work would have to be enough. ...

Photographs of Virginia around this time portray a young woman with stylishly thinned eyebrows and a bobbed hairstyle-in moderate keeping with the flirtatious, independent "flapper" spirit of the day-an attractive yet pensive woman, smiling a bit ironically as if aware of the gap between the near-glamorous image of a modern young woman and the reality of life as an unmarried medical receptionist in her early thirties still living at home.

With the advent of the Great Depression, the flapper image would be replaced by another iconic image: the resourceful, sophisticated maturity of a Katharine Hepburn, a Bette Davis, a Marlene Dietrich, or a Greta Garbo. - Whole populations of urban single women struggled to survive, but as the '30s merged into the '40s and the Depression began to recede, everything would change with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. World War II began for Americans on December 7, 1941- Virginia's thirtieth birthday,and suddenly the patriotic fervor of wartime, coupled with an urgent need for women in the workforce, ushered in yet another era.

Years later, Virginia would openly claim that her real life began when she met Paul Galvin. As America entered the Second World War, she could scarcely have anticipated or prepared for the great stroke of destiny in 1944 that would lift her out of all that she had known or experienced and plunge her headlong into what she would call "her storybook life."

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