Book details soldiers’ families

Salina base only one to house wives, children during Vietnam War

There was a time when Walter Cronkite was Dorothy Gallagher’s best friend.

Gallagher would hang on every word the TV newsman said. Then, she went to a map of Vietnam posted on her wall and checked the location of the latest skirmish against a pushpin that pierced the map.

That pushpin represented from where her husband, Jack, sent his most recent letter home.

It was a tough time, just waiting.

Waiting for news.

Waiting for the next letter.

Waiting for Jack to come home.

Lucky for Gallagher, she wasn’t alone.

Often, watching Cronkite’s newscast, she was surrounded by other women who were waiting just like her.

“We were a family,” Gallagher said. “We did everything together. We were just there for each other. If somebody needed a hand, we were there.”

Gallagher and her toddler daughter were one of approximately 7,000 families who lived during the Vietnam War at Salina’s Schilling Manor, the only military base in the history of the country opened solely for families of overseas soldiers. It was open from 1965 to 1977.

Donna Moreau was one of the military brats who spent part of their childhood at the base. She met friends there. She learned to drive there. She met her first teenage love.

And now, she’s immortalized a little-known piece of Kansas history by documenting part of Schilling Manor in a book.

Moreau wrote “Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War,” which came out in May. The book is a factual account of three women’s lives at Schilling Manor, with fictionalized scenes interspersed throughout.

Hear the author

Donna Moreau, author of “Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War,” will speak Thursday at the Dole Institute of Politics. Reservations are requested by calling 864-4900 or e-mailing doleinstitute@ku.edu.

She’ll speak about the book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Dole Institute of Politics.

The book is, in part, a tribute to a generation of military wives who are often overlooked in the controversy that surrounded the conflict.

“The common denominator among these women is they said, ‘We just did what we had to do,'” Moreau said. “They never thought of themselves of being the heroic other side of the war. They never thought they were doing a service to their country by maintaining households and raising children in a relatively normal environment.”

‘Grassroots kind of thing’

In 1965, Schilling Air Force base was shutting down. The military had determined it no longer essential to its operations.

But thanks to an Army wife at Fort Riley, who planted an idea in the mind of John “Mike” Scanlan, the base wouldn’t become a ghost town.

Scanlan, the commander charged with disassembling the base, negotiated to open the base again to women and children of the soldiers headed to Vietnam. It’s something the military hadn’t done before and hasn’t done since.

“There was a lot of anxiety in the Pentagon about this,” said Jerry McKain, who later was a deputy commander at Schilling Manor. “It was the first time anything like this had ever been done. It was really the grassroots kind of thing.”

Soon, after top military officials approved of the concept, Schilling Manor became a town unto itself. At its peak in the late 1960s, there were 675 occupied houses, with a waiting list of other families wanting to get in.

There was a library, swimming pool, theater, medical services, stores and everything else usually found in a town or military base.

Wives kept busy, keeping their minds off the danger facing their men by tending to their children, taking them to little league baseball and football games. They raised money for charities, distributing POW and MIA bracelets. They staged fashion shows for fun.

“We were in a waiting pattern,” said Gallagher, who lived at Schilling Manor for a year beginning in 1969 and retired with her husband in Salina. “It wasn’t the end of the world. There was no doom and gloom ever. There was never any feeling sorry for yourself or feeling sorry for your children. It was just part of your life.”

Difficult times

But the tension facing the nation was still present – and maybe even concentrated – at Schilling Manor.

That’s what Bill Medina, who lived there with his mother and two brothers from 1966 to1975, remembers. There was no escaping the war.

“It was always in your mind, from the minute you wake up in the morning,” said Medina, who now owns a construction company in Salina.

And then there were the sedans – the ones that came around, filled with military personnel, to tell a family their husband and father was missing or dead.

“There were blue sedans and green sedans,” Medina recalled. “When you saw that four-door military sedan come around the corner, it was just in the air. You knew when that car turned down that street, everybody would come out on their front porch, wondering where it would stop.

“I can’t express that feeling you’d have, when the car turned the corner and came down that street.”

Kathleen Frisbie knows that feeling, though her notification came in the form of a telegram she received in 1965, while living with her parents in Michigan. The telegram said her husband, Bruce, the man who fathered her three young children, was missing in Vietnam.

Frisbie, one of the three women highlighted in the book, moved to Schilling Manor in 1967, hoping she’d get support from other military wives waiting to hear from their missing husbands. She stayed until 1971, but never heard from Bruce.

When the daily activities died down, and the children went to bed, reality began to set in for many of the wives. Some had a system of letting their neighbors know they were lonely – they’d simply turn on the light over their kitchen stove, and a friend might give a phone call or come over for a cup of coffee.

“That was a real strength in our life,” said Frisbie, who at the time went by the name Bonnie Johnson. “It was a bedrock foundation for us. There were a lot of uncertainties in those years, not knowing what tomorrow might bring. It’s something I’m very, very grateful for.”

Wives still waiting

Moreau, the author, lived at Schilling Manor for just more than a year beginning in December 1970. She thought she’d left the place behind until 1986, when she saw the movie “Platoon,” about a recruit in Vietnam.

Memories started flooding back of her time at Schilling Manor in 1970-72, when she was 15 and 16 years old. She wanted to tell the story of the women and children at Schilling Manor.

At the time, Moreau was a producer, director and fundraiser for theater productions in New York City, so she considered writing a screenplay about the experiences. She never got around to it, so she started six years ago to write the book, her first.

“It’s called, ‘Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War,’ but it kind of tells the story for what it’s like for any family member, even now … and what it’s like to wait for news from somebody who you love is at war,” said Moreau, who now lives in rural Massachusetts. “It’s horrible. Horrible. Whether it was Penelope and Odysseus or the modern families, the waiting side of war will always be emotional. You never know from one moment to the next whether your life is going to change.”

Moreau and her two sisters were among the lucky ones. Their father came home and is still living.

She can’t help but think the story of Schilling Manor, and the women who lived there, rings true for women and husbands waiting for their soldiers to return from Afghanistan or Iraq.

“Do the wives and families suffer the same as the wives and families back then did? Yes,” she said. “Because you know what? The men still come home in flag-draped coffins. There are sill babies waving to their fathers. There’s still the day-to-day wait by yourself, raising your children alone.

“The emotional side of war has not changed. And the emotional side of war will never change.”