Ouida Bankston

is honored with a Brick from Lois Pitman.

1918-1977

Ouida once told me, when I asked, that her name was a short version of the French for Yes, Lady. But Ouida Bankston was no Yes Lady. She was intelligent, witty, and independent. She was ten years older than I, and I adored her from day one. When I was ten, our folks put me on a train to Whitworth College to see her May Day celebration, perhaps. I felt that I was Queen of the May, just being with Ouida and her friends, and eating at exciting places like the Purple Pig.

We laughed at the same things; she never seemed to notice our age difference. As we washed and dried dishes she taught me college songs, like I'm a Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech and a Hell of an Engineer as if we were conspirators in mischief. We were Butch and Slug from a popular cartoon, and she gave me a book of Little Lulu, a cartoon girl whose antics were hilarious to my sensibility.

She graduated from the University of Alabama and sometime after WWII began, she was recruited with thousands of other young women to assist in the war effort in Washington, D.C. She was assigned to the Military Intelligence Division in the War Department. In cryptography. That was the sum and substance of her description of her work. If I plied her with questions, which I did, she turned into Mona Lisa. She seemed to enjoy being in that place at that time as well as making a contribution in an effort we all supported. We received snapshots of inaugural parades, and we heard about the time Mr. Truman touched his hat in greeting her while he was taking his early morning constitutional.

Two memorable gifts came through Ouida's being where she was when she was. One was a mysterious Christmas gift. Under the tree the small package didn't look imposing, but it gave a thump every time I moved it. Thump, thump, over and over. It got rotated many times. Suspense was all. And the gift was... two packs of Dentyne taped together... at a time when any gum was a rare find. There are few presents I remember as well, nor the delightful ingenuity of the giver.

The other gift came from our parents. For graduation from high school Mom and Dad sent me by train to Washington to visit Ouida in the dorm at Arlington Farms and to fly home. She took me to the great monuments of our capital city, historic and beautiful, even crowded as it was in 1946, with temporary buildings and thousands of personnel.

Ouida ultimately moved to Maryland, her work coming under the aegis of the National Security Agency, headquartered at Ft. Meade, MD. She was sent to Durham University in England, and I learned years later that she was studying languages, Turkish and Arabic. She was certified as a linguist and sent to Crete. There, after one week, at age fifty, she suffered a heart attack, was air-lifted by helicopter to Athens, Greece, hospitalized, and ten days later flown to a U.S. hospital in Weisbaden, Germany, for several weeks. She eventually returned to work full-time at Ft. Meade. During the Cold War Mom used to say she always knew Ouida would be working overtime whenever a national crisis was in the news, and there were lots of crises.

She came home to visit, making numerous trips especially during the year of Dad's illness, but her true restorations took place on the beaches of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico or driving in the Blue Ridge Mountains to see the spring flowers. She and several co-workers retired to Florida not too far from one another. Their friendships seemed to be intensified by the nature of their work and the level of security it required. Before her untimely death Ouida asked to be buried amidst this community. It was as if they who had given so many years for the work of their country when patriotism was acceptable found their personal acceptance with one another.

Submitted by Lois Bankston Pitman

September 14, 1998