Page "United Service Organizations" Paragraph 25

Author Joeie Dee pointed out that " for women entertainers, traveling with the USO made it possible to be patriots and adventurers as well as professionals.

" She adds, however, that the G. I. s in the USO audiences " tended to see these women in a different light-as reminders of and even substitutes for their girls back home, as a reward for fighting the war, as embodiments of what they were fighting for.

" Edward Skvarna remembers 1943, when he met Donna Reed at a U. S. O.

canteen and asked her to dance.

" I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her.

But I really felt she was like a girl from back home.

" Jay Fultz, author of her biography, states that soldiers " often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety.