Elizabeth "Liz" Richardson: the Clubmobile captain

1918 – 1945

The tie, exactly: Elizabeth Ann Richardson was born June 8, 1918, at Akron, Ohio, and raised in Mishawaka — a raised-here tie, and this city's own: she was a Mishawaka High School girl who went to Milwaukee-Downer College from 1936 to 1940 to study art and English, and who drew the "Beulah" cartoons her college remembered her by.

The course: Richardson joined the American Red Cross for Clubmobile service. The joining date stands in conflict and is printed in conflict: Lawrence University, Milwaukee-Downer's successor institution, gives May 1944; the standard biography gives July 1944. The Clubmobiles were the Red Cross's rolling canteens, crewed by women who drove to the troops with coffee, doughnuts and a phonograph, and Richardson served with hers in England and then in France from 1944, rising to captain of her Clubmobile unit. In February 1945 she was posted to Le Havre. Her letters and her diary — funny, observant, unsparing — survived her, and they are the basis of the Indiana historian James H. Madison's Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys (Indiana University Press, 2007), the book that restored her to the record whole; the National Archives' Prologue magazine carried her story in its Fall 2007 issue.

The end: On July 25, 1945, Richardson, aged 27, was flying from Le Havre toward Paris in a small L-4 Grasshopper liaison plane, bound onward to a new assignment in Germany, when the aircraft crashed in fog near Rouen. The pilot, Sergeant William R. Miller, was killed with her. She was buried first at St. André-de-l'Eure and was reinterred at the Normandy American Cemetery, where she lies as one of only four women in that ground — the other three are members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion killed in a vehicle accident the same month. The Wars leg owns the county's rolls; this course — a Mishawaka girl, a captain's bars earned in a doughnut truck, and a grave above Omaha Beach — is a person's, and this section carries it whole.

Sources:

1. James H. Madison, Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys (Indiana University Press, 2007), built on Richardson's letters and diary
2. Lawrence University archives, Milwaukee-Downer College records (Red Cross joining as May 1944 — conflict printed)
3. National Archives, Prologue, Fall 2007 (the Clubmobile course and the July 25, 1945 crash)
4. American Battle Monuments Commission record (Normandy American Cemetery interment)