Just a few weeks later, Dot’s hopes were realized. A letter arrived at 511 Federal Street informing her that she was invited to work as a civilian for the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, which was part of the Signal Corps. She was expected to pay her own way to Washington, but she would be paid $1,620 a year, almost double what she had made teaching school.
On October 11, 1943, a cool Monday morning with the hint of autumn in the air, Virginia Braden came to the Lynchburg train station to see her daughter off. One of Dot’s aunts came as well, and both of the older women were crying. Dot was too nervous for tears. She was carrying her raincoat and umbrella, along with two small hard-backed suitcases containing all the clothes she owned. The train was crowded. Gas was rationed, as were tires, and most people no longer drove long distances. Members of the military received seating preference, so civilians often had to stand, or sit on a suitcase in the aisle. This day, Dot was lucky and found a seat near a boy she knew from high school. He was on his way to start military training and asked where she was headed. “I’m going to Washington to take a government job,” replied Dot proudly. When he asked her what the job was, Dot had to admit that she did not know. There had been something on the form about “cryptography,” but she had no idea what that word meant.
Towns and trees and farms streaked by the window as Dot’s train left Virginia’s Southside and headed through the rolling Piedmont, the land flattening out as they drew closer to the capital. After several hours the train pulled into Washington’s Union Station, where the unavoidable fact of world war—and the nation’s resolve to win it—was everywhere apparent. As Dot stepped out of the train she could feel that the tempo here was more fast-paced and even more determined than it had been in her hometown: If the war had been present in Lynchburg, it was omnipresent in Washington, especially here in the city’s Union terminal, where more than one hundred thousand travelers now alighted every day. The passengers were black and white, male and female: men in suits heading to and from cities around the country; servicemen in uniform, and servicewomen too; civilian women in hats and jackets or dresses with neatly tucked waists.
Passing through the ticket gate and into the concourse, Dot found herself dwarfed by the space, which was said to be big enough to hold the Washington Monument laid out flat. With its arched doorways, its marble and white granite, its elevated statuary depicting ancient legionnaires—shields added for modesty’s sake, to hide their muscular legs and thighs from female view—Union Station was the most imposing public space she had ever stood in. Extra ticket windows had been added, platforms lengthened to accommodate the hordes of wartime travelers. There was a vast waiting room whose mahogany benches were always, now, full. The usual station amenities—newsstand, coin-operated lockers, drugstore, soda fountain—had been augmented by a servicemen’s canteen. Above Dot’s head was a big poster fluttering from the ceiling that declared, AMERICANS WILL ALWAYS FIGHT FOR LIBERTY. Amid the military flavor, though, there was a feminine cast: Female voices now announced the arrival of trains.
Clutching her belongings, Dot threaded her way through the crowd. She followed an overhead sign that said TAXICABS and made her way to the stand at one side of the station, where she hailed a cab for the first time in her life. She gave the driver the address she had been told to report to, then settled back in her seat with a sense of awe and nervous excitement. The cab drove her through the city’s monumental core, familiar from schoolbooks though she had never actually seen it. Out the window Dot could glimpse the dome of the U.S. Capitol, the Washington Monument poking skyward. Soon the cab was skirting the western side of the National Mall and she could see the Lincoln Memorial, and, before her, the wide ribbon of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, a physical but also symbolic link that connected Abraham Lincoln’s statue, and all that he stood for—emancipation, unity—with the defeated South in the form of Arlington House, the onetime home of Robert E. Lee, elegant and imposing on a Virginia hill. There was American history, old and new, stretching out on all sides as the cab carried her over the Potomac River and along a highway that skirted Arlington National Cemetery, with its green hills and stark white tablets. But now the river was behind her and they were plunging deeper into the Virginia suburbs. Where on earth were they going? The ride went on, and on and on, and Dot began to worry that she would not be able to pay the fare when they got wherever it was that they were headed.
Finally, the taxi pulled up in front of one of the strangest places Dot had seen. Set back from the thoroughfare, barely visible to passersby, her destination was a compound, almost like a little city. Behind a screen of trees loomed a large school building, not unlike the private academies Dot was accustomed to: a four-story hall of creamy yellow brick, L-shaped, with a wide central drive and a high portico set off by six Ionic columns. Newer buildings were scattered about. Two steel mesh fences surrounded the compound, and each building had its own perimeter fence. Dot’s main impression, one that would stay with her for the rest of her life, was of wire: lots and lots of high, terrifying wire, beyond which high-ranking military officers were passing, and through which she, a twenty-three-year-old ex-schoolteacher armed with a raincoat, an umbrella, and two suitcases, was expected to make her way.