11/11/2025
🇺🇸 Honoring Our Heroes 🇺🇸
In honor of Veterans Day on November 11, the Mary Culver Home is proud to recognize residents Rose Marie Griggs and Virginia Toohey, and employee Terry Beals. Each woman is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.
Rose Marie enlisted in the U.S. Navy in November 1951 on her 21st birthday; at the time, being 21 was a requirement to join the military. Rose Marie’s parents were not happy about it, but they knew she was strong-willed and would do it anyway.
Her interest was piqued by the experiences of two women who lived in her neighborhood and recently had returned from the Korean War, so her desire to travel and do something else with her life prompted her to leave her job at a shoe store where she had worked since high school.
After going through boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, Rose Marie was transferred to San Diego. There were only 50 women in her class, but due to overcrowding they had nowhere for these women to stay at the San Diego naval base. The women were transferred to a naval air base about 30 minutes away and were bused to San Diego to attend class.
Rose Marie was trained as a storekeeper – her experience working at the shoe store helped to make her a standout – and ordered supplies for the base.
From her office, Rose Marie often heard sailors over the radio using very “colorful” language. While speaking to her father on the phone, she repeated one of the words she had heard the men use and asked her father what it meant. He was shocked! A few days later, Rose Marie’s commander called her into his office to tell her that her father must love her very much because he contacted the commander to say he didn’t want any of the men talking that way around his daughter.
Rose Marie was embarrassed, but her commander assured her it was fine. Her father was a good man who was just looking out for his daughter, he said, and he hoped his son would one day be that kind of father to his daughter. However, he told Rose Marie there was nothing he could do about the sailors’ language.
Rose Marie was in the Navy for five years. She met her husband while she was serving and remembers Nat King Cole performing on base.
Virginia enlisted at the age of 20 during World War II. Her father was not happy about his daughter joining the U.S. Navy, but she said he was outnumbered by Virginia and her mother, who had to sign for her enlistment. Virginia said she enlisted because she had nothing else to do, and someone told her she didn’t have the nerve to join the Navy so she had to prove them wrong!
Virginia took a train from Kansas City to Hunter College in New York. She was the only woman who caught the train in Kansas City, but there were 2,000 women on board when she arrived at her destination. After boot camp at Hunter College, she went to Camp Lajeune in North Carolina for corpsman training to become a nurse. She eventually was stationed at Glenview Naval Air Station in Illinois, where she worked in a hospital taking care of patients.
Virginia served from 1943 to 1945. After she left the Navy, she worked as an RN in a doctor’s office. She became a social worker at the age of 40 due to the higher pay and worked as a state inspector in Illinois inspecting nursing homes.
Terry, our director of dining services, enlisted in 1981 at the age of 18 to get out of working in the family business. She picked the Navy because it was the branch that allowed her to leave home the soonest, although her dad was not happy because he had served in the U.S. Air Force for 22 years at that time.
Terry worked as a mess management specialist, or cook, in security and as an aviation storekeeper. She served for three years.
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