Hardy band of women warriors joining Legion

By HOWARD WILKINSON

CINCINNATI — It is hard to imagine an Army veteran such as Joyce Leneave of Fairfield bringing her month-old daughter, all wrapped in blankets and sleeping in her mother’s lap, to an ordinary American Legion Post.

The typical post is, for the most part, a boys’ club. In the canteen, men belly up to the bar, drain a mug of beer, tell war stories while a football game blares on the TV over the bar, punctuated by the clack of billiard balls.

A man’s world.

But Leneave doesn’t have to walk into that world. Thursday night, at the Thank You Foundation’s offices in West Chester Township, Leneave could walk into her American Legion Post’s monthly meeting carrying her baby, and be instantly surrounded by other women, who ooh-ed and ah-ed over her little one.

She, along with 35 other women veterans from Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky, has her own post — a refuge for women veterans called the Greater Cincinnati Women’s American Legion Post 644.

It is the only women’s post in Ohio.

“We offer something different,” said Kelly Knox, a veteran of the Army and Air Force who is soon to be the new commander of Post 644. “Most women don’t feel comfortable in most posts. They want to be with other women who have served. And that’s what we give them.”

Nearly every American Legion Post has female members, but there is none in this area like Post 644, chartered 63 years ago specifically for women veterans. Of the 36 members of Post 644 today, all but two are women. The two men are husbands of women who belong.

There are 14,000 American Legion posts in the U.S. and abroad, but only four of them are women’s posts. There are two in Wisconsin and one on an Oglala Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota.

Nun started in Navy

There was a time when there were many more women’s legion posts. In the days after World War II, when 250,00 women veterans returned to civilian life, the American Legion set up women’s posts all over the country. Ten were in Ohio, but Post 644 is the only one that still exists.

It has not been easy for Post 644 to stay alive over the years. It has always been something of a nomadic post, holding its meetings in one location after another, never having an American Legion hall to call its own. The membership has gone up and down over the decades; and, several times, it has nearly gone out of existence.

Post 644 was in serious trouble earlier this year. Membership was dwindling and the leaders of the group, mostly World War II veterans, no longer had the good health or energy to keep things going.

That is when a group of young women such as Knox and Amy Carter, a Navy veteran from Bridgetown who served in the early 1990s, stepped in and made a push for new membership. Knox and Carter — who work at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center, like many members of the post — are taking over the reins of the organization and pumping new life into it.

The matriarch of the group is clearly Sister Marguerite McHugh, a nun of the Sisters of Notre Dame who is stepping down after 12 years as commander of Post 644.

Every woman who walks into a meeting has an interesting back-story to tell, of service from World War II to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But perhaps none more so than Sister Marguerite, who joined the Navy as a young woman from Kennedy Heights in World War II.

She knew something about firearms, and ended up as a gunnery instructor in Norfolk, Va., teaching Marines how to fire weapons.

“A lot of them had a hard time listening to a woman at first,” Sister Marguerite said. “Then, they would go out and lose a few men; and when they came back, they’d pay a bit more attention.”

She became a nun after the war and served in Cincinnati area parishes. About 30 years ago, she became involved in Post 644 and has been one of the core members trying to keep the post alive.

“It’s been hard,” she said. “We have moved from place to place over the years. We’ve never had our own home. But, still, we have survived.”

No ’Ladies Auxiliary’

Knox said that perhaps, if they can increase their membership and step up their fund raising, they can have a home of their own someday.

“That would be nice,” she said. “It would be like a community center. A place where women veterans can come and be with other women who served.”

In recent months, the American Legion has had a home at the Thank You Foundation, a nonprofit organization for veterans that is headquartered in an office park on Cincinnati-Dayton Road in West Chester.

At a recent meeting members began arriving about 15 minutes before the meeting started. One of the first to pull into the lot was one of Post 644’s two male members, Lee Berry, an Army veteran from Trenton in Butler County. He came rolling in on his motorcycle, carrying the flags that would be used for the meeting.

A few minutes later, his wife, Tammy, also an Army veteran, drove into the lot in the family van. The Berrys are both motorcyclists; they are in the Patriot Guard Riders, the motorcycle group that serves as an honor guard for military funerals and the homecomings for troops who have been deployed overseas.

Tammy Berry, who works as a nurse in the Cincinnati VA’s clinic for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, said she chose Post 644 because it gives her more of an opportunity to work for veterans — particularly women veterans.

“My whole thing is seeing that every veteran gets the benefits and the respect he or she deserves,” Tammy Berry said.

She has belonged to traditional posts in the past, and said she never felt comfortable as a woman veteran.

“You go into some posts and they don’t really know what to do with you as a woman veteran,” Tammy Berry said. “They try to push you into the ladies auxiliary or something. That’s an insult to me as a veteran.”

At the VA clinic, she said, she works with many young women who have returned from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike the days of her active-duty service in the 1980s, the women she sees at the clinic “have walked right up to the edge of being in combat. There are no front lines in Iraq. Everybody is in combat.”

A few of the young women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined the post, she said, although they weren’t at this meeting.

“I know them; and I know they are not going to want to walk into that all-male world of the regular post. These girls have been into some rough stuff and they want to be with people they can talk to and relate to.

“That’s why we are here. Women helping women.”