It is clear before she even tells the stories: There's life in Betty Walsh's photos.
The old black-and-whites, yellowed around the edges by the past six decades, are peopled by the sort of men and women you see in period movies. Straight from Central Casting, there's the World War II flyboy who named his plane after her. And the gentleman soldier with the topcoat and slick hair. And her fellow Army nurses, posed for a group shot in front of tents at a makeshift evacuation hospital in Germany -- a photo from which she is absent because she went AWOL that afternoon to go fishing.
These are the people and the memories the 85-year-old Walsh wants to talk about. There was suffering, too, as there was for everyone involved in the war. But she doesn't talk much about that.
Walsh, who at the time was Betty Sanders of Minnesota, would rather remember the two dates she had with David Gorcey, the film comedian who took a break from his work with Dead End Kids comedy group to join the Army. She'd rather talk about Lt. Raymond Johnson, who painted her nickname, "Sandy," on the nose of his plane and bought her a figurine. Most of all, she'd rather tell you about an officer from Yakima named John Wingenbach.
She met him at basic training in Camp Carson, Colo., and fell for him right away. It was his voice -- "strong and clear and true" -- that did it, she says. His men loved him, and she could see why. He was stoic in a time that demanded stoicism, but he was also dashing, a romantic. She taught him to dance before they parted ways, sent separately to the European theater. And he told her that after the war he wanted more lessons.
"He said, 'I'll see you again,'" she remembers.
In the meantime, 2nd Lt. Walsh and her fellow nurses had no shortage of suitors, a fact she downplays by saying "there were a lot of them and only a few of us." She and her nursing unit, which set up its evacuation hospitals a scant nine miles from the front, were revered by the fighting men. Walsh still remembers how the men, often badly wounded, would smile through the pain when they saw the nurses.
"They would see us and their eyes would light up," she says. "I got a poem from one fellow. He called me his 'angle in white' -- he couldn't spell 'angel.' I've still got that poem. It's about five verses long."
Inspiration from the wounded is what got her through the war, she says. That and the occasional visit by "Johnny" from basic training, who made good on his promise to see her again. He showed up three times during the war, including a clandestine meeting in Germany.
"They weren't going to let him see me because we were working 16 hours a day, but the nurses snuck him up," she recalls.
He visited once more in Germany and then once in France, where he and Walsh sipped champagne to celebrate the recently declared victory in Europe. She had orders to depart for the China-Burma-India theater to keep fighting the war. So he handed her a pistol and told her to be careful.
"I was just kind of numb, I guess," she says. "I didn't have any tears."
Believing she cared more for him than he for her, Walsh told Wingenbach she couldn't see him again. She loved him, she says, but wasn't sure he felt the same.
"He would sign his letters to me, 'All my love, Johnny,'" she says. "But he never told me he wanted to marry me, and I wished he had."
Before she could be shipped to China or Burma or India, the United States dropped two atomic bombs and Japan surrendered. Walsh went back to Minnesota, where all the pain and stress of the war finally hit her.
"I cried for days," she says. "And I can't say it's because I was missing my husband-to-be. I'm sure that the war itself had that effect on me."
Thousands of miles away, in Yakima, Wingenbach was dealing with his own heartache. He hadn't forgotten Walsh but he hadn't talked to her since they had left Europe. It took some prodding from his sister, who convinced him he'd never be happy unless he went after Walsh, but he made the trip to Minnesota.
On Jan. 16, 1946, they were married there. Shortly thereafter, he brought her back to Yakima and got work as an accountant.
Their marriage lasted 19 years before Wingenbach died of a heart attack in 1965. They raised six children. Five years later, Walsh remarried. She met Ed Walsh while getting an English degree at Central Washington University and spent five good years with him before his death. But that's a different story.
The stories Walsh wants to talk about while sharing her old photos all lead to Wingenbach.
"We were just meant to be for each other," Walsh says. "That's all there was to it."
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