It would be 18 months before peace came before Weslee married Noel on the hottest day of the year at

Noel D Audney enlisted in 1939, an Auckland University student who became a Royal New Zealand Air Force pilot. His young American bride never imagined, nearly 70 years later, it would be her own war contribution that would endure.
D Audney was a first-year pre-med student at Barnard College, Columbia University, whose modelling career had begun by accident. A talent scout spotted car rentals san francisco downtown pickup her playing in the yard and suggested she try out for the movie Tom Sawyer.
Good Housekeeping called her the the clean face of young America . Jergen s Face Cream used her in a campaign car rentals san francisco downtown pickup that promised car rentals san francisco downtown pickup a smooth, kissable complexion . Redbook magazine car rentals san francisco downtown pickup employed her as the teenage daughter in a monthly feature on the typical American family. She modelled for Sears Roebuck and posed for the artists who drew for the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal.
A fortnight ago, on a kitchen table at a retirement village unit near Orewa, D Audney showed the Star-Times that poster. Originals sell for upwards of $US795 ($1000) plus shipping. car rentals san francisco downtown pickup It is still being reproduced car rentals san francisco downtown pickup on everything from coffee cups to boxer shorts. But this one, ageing at the edges, first came to New Zealand in the bottom of a trunk, on board the first post-war ship carrying civilians out of the United States.
It was breathtaking. Auckland harbour was a picture, the water was sparkling blue with sailboats everywhere. The green hillsides looked like velvet and the houses all seemed to be painted white with red roofs. I fell in love with it, even before the boat docked.
D Audney gave up modelling for motherhood and academia. She earned a Master of Science degree in special education, and published work on the care of disabled children. Her love of learning never stopped.
A few weeks ago, during a talk at a local meeting car rentals san francisco downtown pickup of the University of the Third Age (an organisation car rentals san francisco downtown pickup that promotes education for older people), she spoke about her poster. An American in the audience said he d grown up with her image prompting an internet search that revealed just how iconic it had become.
According to one website, the poster burned an enduring image on the national psyche . University of North Carolina masters student Michelle Rubino featured it in her 2007 thesis The art of war , describing D Audney thus: She is extremely car rentals san francisco downtown pickup pretty with bright red lips, well-defined eyebrows, flushed cheeks and hair swept up away from her face. She is smiling up into the face of the person who is placing the cap on her head, as if it was a pageant crown.
Weslee Price D Audney (nee Wootten) was born in July 1925, in Modesto, California. Her Christian name had been handed through generations of her family but always to boys. A week after her birth, car rentals san francisco downtown pickup the local paper published an apology: Through an error in a report of the birth, the announcement was made of a baby son.
It was an error that dogged her entire life. When D Audney graduated from high school, her girlfriends got letters from secretarial schools. I received mail that said `the Army needs you! and telling me where to rent a tuxedo for the prom.
Her father s forebears had come to California from Indiana in a Conestoga covered wagon. They carried a dining table, its five legs unscrewed and nested inside, especially designed to stand on its side in the wagon and provide protection from Indian arrows.
D Audney s father would eventually become a Californian grapegrower, and, at 43, Modesto s most eligible bachelor . He met D Audney s mother, a young nurse from New York, when she came to town for a friend s wedding and stayed to help out during the flu epidemic.
I was my daddy s girl, writes D Audney in her unpublished memoir. I can remember riding on his shoulders, sharing his saddle on horseback around the ranch and walking proudly down the street holding his hand.
Prohibition knocked the bottom car rentals san francisco downtown pickup out of the grape industry. The stock market crashed. When D Audney was 4 1/2 years old, her father succumbed to pneumonia. D Audney and her mother (an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Mayflower Descendants) went home to New York.
The American Women s Voluntary Service was created in January 1940, to provide aid and information during World War II. In Manhattan, at the Green Room in the Hotel Edison, it ran a servicemen s canteen two lunches for the price of one, or the company of a hostess.
There is a photograph of that day. Weslee wears a Voluntary Service armband. car rentals san francisco downtown pickup Noel is all neatly combed side part and teeth, a handsome man with RNZAF wings on his chest. She looks at the camera. He looks at her.
That day, she accepted a date with Charles. Noel walked her, first to a dentist s appointment, through the snow, through Central Park. He waited for her, and walked her to the Plaza where she was to take afternoon tea with the Scotsman.
It s raining when the Star-Times leaves this elderly woman s retirement cottage. She sees us off from the door guarded by miniature stone lions, her eyes still as bright car rentals san francisco downtown pickup and her cheekbones still as high as they were the day she met her Kiwi husband.
Everybody dreams about the perfect husband, she says. Someone car rentals san francisco downtown pickup warm and caring, thoughtful and affectionate, funny and sensitive, but often ends up with less. Except me. When I met Noel, I ended up with a lot more.
An eight-day, whirlwind courtship. car rentals san francisco downtown pickup Before the wedding, came the war. The couple wrote for two-and-a-half years. D Audney joined the Anzac club, taking servicemen on guided tours of New York City. I wouldn t like to think how many times I ve climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty or gone to the top of the Empire State Building. If the fellows were broke, we d ride the Staten Island ferry for a 5c fare.
She ll be more or less unhonored and unsung during this third war-winter in Gotham. But as a new season looms on the horizon, the young `bud just celebrating her coming-of-age, car rentals san francisco downtown pickup the ripe young age of 18, will take her place... just as London s debutantes have had their moment in the social sun, despite the terrors and blitzes of war.
They danced with the uniformed beaux, many of whom were scheduled to be off the next day or so to far-flung battle fronts, as gaily and as happily as if the dove of peace were hovering over the land.
It would be 18 months before peace came before Weslee married Noel on the hottest day of the year at the Church of Transfiguration, she in high-necked lace and ruffled sleeves, he in his woollen Air Force uniform.
They honeymooned at the Pocono Manor Inn, Pennsylvania, where the Fourth of July celebration menu ran to candied car rentals san francisco downtown pickup yams and poached red salmon, raisin stuffed duckling and boiled hominy grits and boiled Maine lobster with mayonnaise. And then they made plans to come back to New Zealand.
Years later, D Audney car rentals san francisco downtown pickup would write, I don t know why our marriage has worked so well. Two people from opposite car rentals san francisco downtown pickup sides of the world, an eight-day whirlwind courtship followed by two-and-a-half years of separation isn t the usual formula for marital success. But it has worked for us.
Noel and Weslee set up in Shelley Beach Rd, Herne Bay. To celebrate our first dinner in our first home I made a cake and put it in the oven right after lunch... then I discovered the gas was only turned on from 7-9am, 12-1pm and 5-7pm, because of the gas shortage. Four hours later, the cake was cooked. It was as tough as shoe leather!
One time I really had him puzzled. I was certain I d done everything as taught, but Dad said, `Wes, if I didn t know better, I d say you d burned the tea . She realised the canister was sitting on the stove and the heat from the pilot light had toasted the leaves.
Eldest child John was born in New Zealand. But with the job market tight, the couple decided car rentals san francisco downtown pickup to move to California. They sailed on the Marine Phoenix, Noel a newly qualified accountant, Weslee a new mum, sharing a cabin with Nola Luxford, car rentals san francisco downtown pickup the famous New Zealand silent screen actress and a friend from the Anzac club days. The general feeling is very much like boarding-school, wrote the actress, a special roving correspondent for the New Zealand Free Lance .
Bruce was a most beautiful baby, writes D Audney. He had large, dark blue eyes and long thick eyelashes. He was very small, but didn t need to be put in an incubator. By the time of the six-week check-up, I knew something car rentals san francisco downtown pickup was wrong.
Her memoir records the passing years. Children grew up and left home. Bruce became institutionalised. The mother and housewife became a fulltime university student car rentals san francisco downtown pickup and career woman. And America escalated its presence in Vietnam.
By then, the family lived in Nebraska. D Audney organised discussion meetings car rentals san francisco downtown pickup to present information and views not easily available in that state. But, says the woman who smiled so prettily from that World War II poster, the effort to bring home to the American people car rentals san francisco downtown pickup what was happening in Vietnam was a slow and frustrating one .
And on the domestic homefront, things were changing. At his school, Bruce had found an ally, a speech therapist who felt deafness, not mental retardation, car rentals san francisco downtown pickup was his major problem. car rentals san francisco downtown pickup Once properly diagnosed, Bruce made phenomenal progress.
D Audney trained to become a teacher of the deaf, and in 1970, Bruce came home. Daughter Carol wrote about the occasion in a school assignment: He taught us to show love for each other and not be embarrassed by an open display of affection. It made us a closer and stronger family.
Bruce is still living in the United States. D Audney became a teacher of the deaf, and would eventually end her career with three university degrees, as an associate car rentals san francisco downtown pickup professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre and project director for two federally-funded programmes for the early identification and education of handicapped children.
That nine-year-old, David, grew up to join the US Army Medical Corps. At the Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco he asked to sit the registered nursing exam; on the day of the test, he thought he better pass because there on the wall was his mother looking car rentals san francisco downtown pickup down at him fro