The Reminiscences of Mrs. Marc A. Mitscher and Mrs. Roy C. Smith Jr. : 1890-1982; 1892-1987

Based on two interviews of Frances Smalley Mitscher conducted by Commander Etta-Belle Kitchen, USN (Ret.) in January 1971, and two interviews of Mary T. Alger Smith conducted by Dr. John T. Mason Jr. in March and October 1978, the volume contains 227 pages of interview transcript (63 for Mrs. Mitscher and 164 for Mrs. Smith). The transcripts are copyright 1986 by the U.S. Naval Institute; the interviewees placed no restrictions on their use.

The two memoirs in this volume are, coincidentally, both from the widows of officers who were graduated in the Naval Academy’s class of 1910. Even so, they are strikingly different in tone. Frances Smalley Mitscher was born on 25 Otcober 1890 in Tacoma, Washington, the daughter of attorney and judge Francis A. Smalley. She married Ensign Marc Andrew Mitscher on 16 January 1913. Admiral Mitscher, born in Hillsborough, Oklahoma, on 26 January 1887, died while serving as Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet in February 1947. Mrs. Mitscher died in 1982 and is buried beside her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. In her oral history, Mrs. Mitscher provides a wife’s-eye view of one of the U.S. Navy’s most famous admirals of World War II. In so doing, she reveals facets of his personality that only she saw. She recognizes that he was a different man at home than on board ship, and she describes the portion of his life that she shared. One gains a realization of the large degree that her life was shaped by her relationship with Marc Mitscher. She went where his career dictated, and thus her interests were dictated largely by her husband’s interests. Mary Taylor Alger Smith was born on 1 May 1892 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of naval officer Philip R. Alger and the former Louisa Taylor. She married Ensign Roy Campbell Smith Jr. on 1 August 1912. Commander Smith, born in the quarters of the Naval Academy Superintendent (his grandfather) on 1 August 1888, retired from the Navy with a physical disability in 1938 and died in 1946. Mrs. Smith died in 1987 and is buried buried beside her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. In her oral history, Mrs. Smith addresses the theme of dependency to an even larger degree than does Mrs. Mitscher. With a wry sense of humor, Mrs. Smith dwells on the inconveniences that go with raising a Navy family at home and abroad (the Smiths had four children). She had to find solutions to a good many problems that don’t confront a mother rearing children entirely in the United States. One reads here about difficulties in dealing with the cultures in such places as China and Panama, and the ways in which her children got into the sort of scrapes that children inevitably do. In addition to being a Navy wife and Navy mother, Mrs. Smith was also a Navy daughter. Her earliest recollections in this memoir extend back to the early 1900s when she was living on the grounds of the Naval Academy, where her father was a professor and an early secretary-treasurer of the Naval Institute. In engaging fashion, Mrs. Smith describes the simplicity of an era long since past—a time before telephones and automobiles were common and when radio and television had yet to be invented.