The Edith Newman story – Chapter 1

               “I can do anything I set my mind to do,” Edith (Soloway) Newman said.  This energetic 87 year old proved her point in her next sentence, “Did I tell you about the time I became a professional model?”  That experience is just one small adventure in the Edith Newman story.  It seems that she inherited some of that positive attitude from her beloved mother, Rose Kunin, who immigrated to America from her native Russia, in 1908.
           Edith’s mother, Rose, worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, but felt uneasy while there.  The bosses closed the only door out of the nine story building, on each floor where the women worked and Rose didn’t feel safe.  Being a ‘can do’ woman, she quit and found employment elsewhere.  Two weeks later the building caught fire, killing 146 young ladies, due to inadequate exits and fire escapes.
           Rose’s good fortunes continued when she met Jacob (Jack) Soloway, himself a Russian immigrant, they fell in love, married and raised five children; two boys and three girls, the third child being Edith.  They would move to Bayonne, New Jersey where Edith’s dad, Jack, would develop high-rise efficiency apartments, until the great depression caused that business to fail.  Jack would quickly find new employment as an owner/bus driver to support his family.  This background of hard work and using your brains to overcome life’s unexpected twists and turns is what Edith would inherit.
           Graduating from Bayonne High School in June 1941, Edith took a civil service test and began working for the U.S. Department of Labor.  “That was a good job then,” Edith said, “because we were still in a depression then.”  Edith’s future looked good in early 1942, until her older brother, Alex, then 19, developed rheumatoid arthritis so severe that it would soon cripple him if he didn’t move to a warm, dry climate.  Edith’s mom chose her to accompany Alex to Tucson, Arizona, to care for him until he was able to care for himself.  She was chosen because she had not yet established herself in Bayonne’s work community and would more easily do so elsewhere.
  Life’s experience begins
           Edith’s father paid $80.00 for the two, one way tickets to Tucson, and gave Edith $100 to live on until she could find employment to support herself and Alex.  He also provided her with the name of the only person they knew in Arizona, Joe Smith, who was the cousin of the man who used to deliver eggs to Edith’s mother at the Bayonne house.  This was the only help that Edith could expect; but being of that strong, immigrant, ‘can do’ stock, she never worried that she couldn’t handle whatever would come her way.
           Their train pulled into Tucson on Labor Day Weekend, 1943.  The town was bristling with Army Air Corps personnel, as the city was surrounded by three Air Force Bases.  All of the hotels were full and Alex was in sever pain and swollen from the arthritis.  Edith went into a hotel near the train station and asked for a room, while Alex stayed outside to protect their belongings.  The clerk took one look at the pretty young lady with long black hair and promptly told her that they were full.
            Edith poured her heart out to the man, explaining the sever pain her brother was suffering and all they needed was the room for a night or two.  The clerk relented and gave them a room with a two single beds, for $5 a night.  As Edith hauled the luggage up to the room she observed the other guests and quickly realized that the hotel catered to soldiers and ‘ladies of the evening’ who would share their room by the hour.  “I was young,” Edith insisted, “not dumb.”  Edith knew that they would not be able to stay in that hotel long.
           The next day she bought a newspaper and found a boarding house near the University of Arizona.  When she inspected it, it was perfect.  Clean, with a large room, two beds and reasonably priced, Edith felt lucky to have found it.  She and Alex quickly checked out of the hotel and moved.  That night, after she and Alex had gone to bed, they heard someone cough, then another, and another, until their was a loud symphony of coughing from every room.  Everyone in the boarding house, except her and Alex, were there to be cured of tuberculosis or some like disease.  Edith knew that they would not be able to stay in that room long.
            The next day she called their only contact, Joe Smith.  He helped them find a better place to live, still near the university.  Once they had settled into their new residence, Edith found employment with the Air Corps at Davis Monthan Air Base near the edge of town.  Her secretarial skills, combined with intelligence and personality, quickly moved her up the personnel ladder.  She became a part of the intelligence section, one of the most important posts on the base, where she would receive a top secret clearance to perform her duties.  Her superior abilities, however, caused her to be transferred to Ryan Air Field, a training base where primary pilot training was taught to aspiring cadets.
              Edith’s position there was to inform those cadets, who failed the training, that they would no longer become a pilot.  “The instructors and commanders didn’t want to tell the young men they had flunked out, so they left that to me,” she said.  “The cadets would sometimes cry and tell me that they only made one mistake and that all they wanted to do was fly.  I’d tell them that they still could fly, they could be a navigator, a bombardier, an aerial gunner or radio operator, they just couldn’t be a pilot.  That didn’t seem to calm them much.”
            Edith continued to shatter the dreams of those hopeful young airmen for a full year, and then return to the intelligence section at Davis Monthan Air Base.  Her job there was to gather and read combat reports from all the theaters of operation around the world.  She would file them in order and place pins on a map of the world, with twine from point to point, so that when the generals walked into the room they could tell what had happened the past day, at a glance.  “I remember the Battle of the Bulge well,” Edith recalled, “it was the turning point of the war in Europe.” 
 

A new phase of her life
           Edith also remembered February 1, 1945 very well, “in walks this handsome 1st Lieutenant with a chest full of ribbons and a purple heart.  His name was Bernard (Ben) Newman, and he was from New York.  I told all the women who worked there (on the base) ‘girls, I found a live one.’  We were all looking for husbands.  After that I kept after him.”
           Ben was also assigned to the intelligence section, having completed his combat tour as a B-24 pilot, flying out of Foggia Air Field, Italy.  “Most of his final missions,” Edith related, “were against the heavily defended oil fields of Ploesti (Romania).”  The destruction of these facilities was vital to stopping the German war effort; oil being the life’s blood of its war machinery.  The destruction of these fields was worth the heavy loses sustained by the 15th Air Force in their four month campaign.
            The pilots were briefed, prior to flying into harm’s way, if they sustained damage to their aircraft; try to reach Yugoslavia, where they had a better chance of survival.  On one raid over Ploesti, Ben’s 42nd combat mission, his B-24 was badly damaged by German anti-aircraft artillery fire.  The oil pump was destroyed allowing no oil to flow to the four mighty engines.  They soon began burning up and shutting down.  Ben, and his crew, didn’t like the idea of becoming a prisoner's-of-war and decided to fly until all the engines quit.  He nursed the critically damaged bomber past Yugoslavia and over the Adriatic Sea, where he was finally forced to crash land.            The water landing crushed the fuselage, its impact so sever that the flight engineer, sitting behind Ben, flew into him and shattered the windshield. The two escaped through the broken glass, its pointed fragments shredding their life preservers as they passed through its deadly grasp.  Ben lapsed into momentary unconsciousness and was pulled to the surface by the engineer.  On the surface, Ben gathered the crew.  Seven of the nine crew-members had survived. 
              As they floated in their rubber rafts, an Italian fisherman cut away his nets and rowed toward the downed airmen.  Edith stated, “That fishing net was the man’s only means of earning a living and supporting his family.  However, the U.S. offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who rescued downed airmen and the fisherman knew this.”  He would provide a humanitarian act and earn enough to buy new nets at the same time.  It took the Italian’s; there were two on the fishing boat, two hours of rowing before they reached the Americans.
            Once the airmen were safely aboard the fishing boat, the Italians began rowing to shore.  The boat’s owner paddled in one direction and the mate, his nephew, rowed in the opposite, causing the boat to go nowhere.  The owner shouted at his nephew, working himself into a frenzy, finally getting so angry that he swung his ore at the inept crewman, hitting him on the head.  The crew all laughed, even through such an intense moment.  Somehow, that worked and they began rowing together.
            The fisherman radioed ahead that they had wounded airmen in their boat and several hours later, when they finally reached shore, ambulances were waiting.  The Americans were loaded into the military ambulances, but denied access to the exhausted fishermen.  The boat’s owner again began shouting and working up to a frenzy, but before he could reach for his ore, Ben stepped in and overruled the decision of the ambulance driver.  “The Italian road to Foggia Air Base Hospital and stayed with Ben until he received payment,” Edith said.  Mercenary or not, he had saved seven American airmen’s lives.
           Edith and Ben began dating after that first meeting in February, 1945, and a romance bloomed between them.  On August 14, 1945, the day the war ended, things would change and yet again, a new phase of Edith’s life would begin.  “There was a party on base,” Edith said, “and the soldiers with the most points were announced.” (Points for discharge after WW II were awarded by time in combat, time in service, and medals earned.)  It took 65 points to be discharged.  Of all the soldiers there, Ben had the highest with 185 points.  “He left right away,” Edith remembered, “we exchanged photographs and promised each other that we would write, but it was a terrible month before I got that first letter.”
           Ben returned to New York, where he attended St. Johns Law School in New York City, under the G.I. Bill, but would write to Edith regularly, as she continued to work for the Air Force in Arizona.  During Ben’s last semester of law school, Edith would return to New York, for the first time since leaving in 1942, and on June 23, 1948, they would be married.  Six months later Ben, after graduating from law school, took the New York Bar exam, which he passed.  The couple decided that they would like a warmer climate, but chose to go to California, rather than Arizona, as Tucson was too hot.
          The newlyweds moved to Los Angeles, where Edith once again accepted employment with the Air Force, to support them until Ben could take the California bar exam; which required a six month residency period.  Ben passed that time working as a law clerk.
              So what about Edith’s modeling career?  It was something she decided to do, but you’ll have to wait until our next edition to find out, because Edith’s story didn’t end after the war, it just began!