Merle Egan Anderson
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Merle Egan Anderson (born Merle Egan, Smith Center, Kansas c. 1888, died 1986)[1][2] was a member of the United States Army Signal Corps' Female Telephone Operators Unit during World War I. She is one of the first 447 female veterans of the U.S. Army.[3] She is credited for persisting in the effort to gain the Operators Unit veterans' status, which was eventually signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.[4][5]
She worked as a long-distance telephone operator for Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company in Helena, Montana.[6] After the war, she married Hal Anderson and moved to Seattle.[3] She had one child, a son who served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War and died in April 1974 while stationed in the Philippines.[7]
Merle Egan was born in Kansas c.1888.[8] After three years of high school, she started work in 1906 as a toll operator at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. She then went to work at a public telephone system in Montana, travelling from town to town to fix problems, and eventually became a traffic supervisor.[9]
Military service
American female switchboard operators in World War I, nicknamed "Hello Girls" and formally known as the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, were needed for telephone communications between military units. These switchboard operators were sworn into the U.S. Army Signal Corps.[10]
Egan was not among the first group of women to join the Female Telephone Operators Unit because she was not fluent in French. By the summer of 1918, more American-built circuits had been added to locations in France, reducing reliance on French switchboards. When the Signal Corps relaxed the bilingual requirement for new women recruits, Egan enlisted[11] and sailed to France with the fifth operators unit in August, 1918[12] on the RMS Aquitania.[13] In France, Egan trained groups of male soldiers to operate magneto switchboards before each group headed to the front.[14] After hostilities ended, Egan operated the telephone exchange for the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Versailles. She was awarded a special commendation for her work as a Signal Corps operator.[15] Egan's request for discharge was granted in May, 1919.[16]