"Homecoming"

Foggy rain blanketed San Francisco harbor as a big U.S. transport moved under the Golden Gate Bridge. But for most of the ship's 2,000 jampacked passengers, it was as if the sun were shining: they were homecoming veterans of Guadalcanal, New Guinea and many a naval battle. For some 90 young women, however, it was a fearsome moment. They were the Australian wives and sweethearts of U.S. G.I. Joes, 6,000 miles away from their Down Under homes--and about to meet their in-laws.

"I Forget How He Looks." News pictures told the U.S. that its soldiers & sailors had gone for the same sort of friendly, healthy good looks that they had learned to look for at home. None of the girls had been to the U.S. before, almost all were young (average age: 20), some had small babies (there were 14 in all). Very few of them had seen their husbands for many a month. Said blue-eyed, self-assured Mavis, who met her signalman husband Edward Austin Humphreys at a Sydney zoo more than two years ago: "You know I'm forgetting how he looks and how he talks."

"He Just Asked Me to Dance." Brown-eyed Constance Clement, a onetime cake counter clerk, met her husband Luis, a chief petty officer, at the Trocadero dance hall in Sydney a year and a half ago. "He just asked me to dance and I kept dancing with him all night," she explained. Her destination: Humboldt, Neb. where her father-in-law is a contractor. She was much relieved about what her three sisters-in-law would be like after she met a "lovely" Nebraska girl who was working at the Western Union desk of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel.

"You Shouldn't Speak to Me." A Marine lieutenant who had been on the transport told one young Aussie's tragic story: When he spoke to her one day aboard ship, she had said to him: "You shouldn't be speaking to me, you know," explained that her compatriots shunned her because she had married a Negro soldier. Bound for his family in the deep South, she had thought, until then, that things would be different in the "melting pot of the world."

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