An old black-and-white photo shows June Rodrigue standing at the engine of a massive truck, tools in hand, her hair tied back and wearing a dress — just like the other mechanics.
Mechanic and dock worker aren’t the jobs one would think would be on the 97-year-old great-grandmother’s resume, but that’s what she did to support the military during World War II.
“Everybody was gung ho for the war. Everybody was involved,” Rodrigue said during an interview at her McComb home.
She was raised in Algiers across the Mississippi River from New Orleans and had aspirations of becoming a nurse.
“I wanted to be a nurse and my two best girlfriends were Baptist. The Baptist church paid for their tuition in New Orleans, but I couldn’t afford it, so I didn’t go,” said Rodrigue, a devout Catholic.
In need of a job that would provide a livable wage, she took the civil service exam.
“I had no college education but I was no dummy,” she said.
Her scores indicated she’d be a good mechanic, and the Army called her up and asked her if she’d go train to be one in Cisco, Texas. After training, she returned to New Orleans to work at a Ford Motor Co. plant that had the contract to repair military vehicles, including trucks, tanks and Jeeps, installing spare tires, replacing spark plugs and performing other tasks.
“Motors were simple then,” Rodrigue said.
One time she got picked to paint the interior of a Sherman tank.
“I was the only one who was skinny enough to get inside,” she said.
Rodrigue crawled inside through the top hatch and brush-painted the cramped space white with no mask and hardly any ventilation. She said the experience gave her an appreciation for the soldiers who would be fighting in it and the risks they faced.
“The only way you could shoot the gun was to go through that little hole and stand up on the top of the tank,” she said.
After working on military vehicles, Rodrigue got another assignment at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, where she verified the contents of shipments headed overseas for the war effort.
Rodrigue said she liked working at the port better than being a mechanic.
“We had everything right there. It was out in the open. It was my cup of tea. And it was close to home. I got to ride the streetcar,” she said.
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While those jobs were a means of employment, there was more to it than that, Rodrigue said. Knowing that the work she and her co-workers did was in support of the U.S. military at wartime made her proud.
“It was for the boys fighting,” she said.
She recalled waving at boats loaded with sailors and soldiers headed overseas as they left the Port of New Orleans, knowing some of them wouldn’t return.
“Everybody did their job and was happy to do it and respected those boys. That’s why we all ran out to the ship and waved goodbye,” she said.
She said one day she was eating in the cafeteria and one of her co-workers said, “You know, June, I’m Jewish,” making the atrocities of Nazi war crimes all the more significant.
Her father — and her friends’ fathers — were World War I veterans, so the idea of fighting the Germans was not unfamiliar. On Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Rodrigue and her friends were on the way to the veterans home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to visit the father of one of her friends.
“All of the veterans were lined up in the hall and they were really upset. All we had was the radio and they were all gathered around that radio to hear what was going on,” she said.
But more importantly, the work she did during the war occurred while the love of her life was away fighting it.
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She met Curtis Rodrigue on a blind date when she was just 14.
“He lived in St. Rose. That was in the country and I was in New Orleans,” Rodrigue said.
He was six years her senior, but Rodrigue’s parents approved of their relationship, she said.
He entered the service in February 1942 and deployed to Europe on June 14, 1944 — eight days after D-Day — and served in northern France, Rhineland and central Europe.
He was wounded in the leg by artillery while driving a half track and returned home in December 1945, entering New Orleans aboard the Queen Mary.
“That was really something to see. That was a big ship,” Rodrigue said.
The Rodrigues married that following April and moved in with his family in St. Rose. June went to work at a shirt factory until their first child, a daughter named Myra, was born in 1948.
Curtis got a job with the Illinois Central Railroad that took the family to Memphis and eventually McComb, where the Rodrigues found their adopted home. They bought a farm in Smithdale and raised Tennessee walking horses and other animals.
They were married for 42 years when Curtis died in 1988, and June ran the farm by herself for nine years before moving to town.
They had seven children, 24 grandchildren “and don’t ask me about the greats,” she said.
She’s proud of her grandson’s military service in the 1st Infantry Division — the Big Red 1 — at Fort Riley, Kan., where she went in 2010, cooked an authentic Cajun meal and threw Mardi Gras beads for the soldiers before their deployment.
“We cooked for the boys — alligator, crawfish, shrimp. We didn’t have anything left,” she said.
And just like it was in her youth, Rodrigue noted the importance of that work, too, and for the same reasons.
“Some of the boys we fed didn’t come back, and that broke my heart because they were so nice to me,” she said.
