There’s a very cool article about WWII-era Seattle in the P-I today, when about thirty women were “drafted” into becoming cab drivers when many of the city’s men went off to fight for their country. One of those many little tidbits of history that tend to fascinate me.
ONCE THIS CITY seemed to burst with soldiers and sailors waving goodbyes or homecoming hellos amid the ache of a very different war. Some came back in coffins. Some landed, singed and bandaged, in the rear seat of Nadine McKee’s Yellow Cab No. 21.
With stateside men in short supply, 23-year-old Nadine “Mick” McKee (now Henry) was the youngest of about 30 Seattle women happy to be “drafted” just after Pearl Harbor as Seattle’s first female taxi drivers, liberated and unleashed behind the wheel.
The assumption that they would want to lend a hand for the sake of Uncle Sam was unquestioned. But the new feeling of freedom blowing in their hair through an open cab window was a wind of change that didn’t come easy. For nearly four years between 1942 and the end of World War II in 1945, McKee traced and retraced Seattle’s streets nine hours and 300 miles a day in a 1941 Plymouth four-door. Carrying GIs and civilians, she broke the gender barrier but never dared break the speed limit much less the rigid rules of co-ed conduct.
iTunes: “Battle of Evermore, The” by Led Zeppelin from the album IV (1971, 5:51).