A hero on the line

Rice remembers ‘Hello Girl’ Louise Beraud Griggs at Veterans Day ceremony

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Louise Beraud should have been home in Houston enjoying the rewards of a college degree. Yet there she was, busily patching calls through a telephone switchboard in wartime France. And the building was on fire.

The young woman who left Rice University after her junior year to finish college at Chicago University had put off her degree to attend to a more important matter: The War to End All Wars.

One of nearly 300 American women to join the Army Signal Corps Female Telephone Operator Unit in the waning days of World War I, Beraud worked punishing shifts in difficult conditions to keep the front lines connected to command, from her arrival in France in June 1918 until the war’s end that November.

The woman who became Louise Beraud Griggs when she married her wartime sweetie was honored for her heroic service at Rice’s 2010 Veterans Day observance Nov. 11. Members of Griggs’ family, including her granddaughter Shelley Gottschalk, the wife of Arthur Gottschalk, a longtime professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music, attended the annual observance at Rice Memorial Center in her honor.

The ceremony at the Rice Chapel featured talks by Michael Dye of Rice’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Rice University Police Department Major Dianna Marshall, an Air Force veteran, and Staff Sgt. Joshua Rodriguez of Rice Naval ROTC.

Griggs, who died in 1981 at the age of 85, was an outstanding student before the war, when she was a member of one of the Rice Institute’s early classes, and after, when she returned to complete her degree in 1920.

Certainly her bravery was never questioned.

“She was pretty modest,” Shelley Gottschalk said. “She did talk about the fire, but I don’t remember if she said how many people were there with her.”

Various reports indicate between two and four other “Hello Girls” were at the switchboard in an Army barracks in Souilly when the building caught fire during a shell attack in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, a bloody, months-long battle that helped seal Germany’s fate.

While soldiers worked to put out the blaze, Griggs and other operators refused orders to abandon their posts and kept critical lines of communication open. For that, they won special citations from the Army.

“We just kept on working,” Griggs told the Houston Chronicle in 1980. “It wasn’t really a matter of bravery. You just do the thing that’s right. You don’t think of anything else.”

That made it tougher to swallow when, at the war’s end, they were informed they were never actually in the Army, and therefore could not be honorably discharged.

The corps was formed in 1917 when Brig. Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, reportedly ignored orders to keep women (other than nurses) out of the war and formed the operators unit that quickly became known as the Hello Girls.

Most of the recruits from among nearly 7,000 applicants had been telephone operators and all were fluent in English and French. They were given two weeks of training in communications and self-defense, took an enlistment oath and told to buy their own uniforms. The first 233 Hello Girls were sent to France in March 1918, and they quickly proved their worth, working long hours to keep command posts wired to the front.

Griggs had learned French at home. “Her father came over from France as a master chef,” Gottschalk said. “John Jacob Astor hired him. He was at the top of his class at the Cordon Bleu.” Griggs’ parents met in America and settled in Houston, where Gottschalk said her great-grandfather ultimately managed the Tejas Club at the Rice Hotel and catering at the Rice Institute.

Griggs and her colleagues provided instant translation that soldiers who previously manned the switchboards could not. The Rice Thresher reported in 1920 that Griggs enlisted in March 1918, spent three months in training and sailed for France in June. At the war’s conclusion, she stayed in France for a time and worked with the YWCA to help resettle families before returning to Rice.

Always proud of her service, Griggs never forgot the government’s slight. “From the time I was a child, I knew about her efforts to get an honorable discharge,” Gottschalk said. “That was something she had talked about ever since I can remember.

“She said that after the war, something happened in the Senate and they were told they weren’t a part of the U.S. Army, and she and the other women in the Signal Corps had to petition Congress for their discharge.”

Griggs, she said, “wrote those letters for what could have been 50 years.” Finally, at the behest of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Congress passed a law ordering that the status of “civilian volunteers” with the Armed Forces in wartime be revisited.

Griggs received her honorary discharge and a World War I Victory Medal with a clasp for France in a February 1980 ceremony at the Texas Army National Guard Armory in Houston.

Griggs continued to make use of her aptitude in French after the war; she taught the language at Houston Heights High School until her marriage in 1924, said her daughter, Belle Griggs Johnson, who attended this week’s ceremony. “She never griped,” Johnson said of her mom. “She made the best of everything. She was a super, super woman.”

Gottschalk noted another Rice family connection. Last summer, she talked with Griggs’ niece, Louisette Roser Michaels ’41, now 91. “She said Aunt Louise was the reason she went to Rice. She knew how much her aunt loved Rice, her activities and the academics, and that’s what motivated her to follow.”