A Nice Old Lady

In the college town of Oberlin, Ohio (1950 pop. 7,062), neighbors knew Alice Cowles Little as a dear old maiden lady with a sharp memory and a penchant for collecting. Her memory, even after more than half a century, still warmly cradled the color and sound of the faraway Pacific islands that she visited as a young missionary for the Congregational Church. Her collections--sea shells, bits of pressed vegetation, samples of earth and coral--cluttered her antebellum house on Oberlin's East College Street, where she lived quietly the last 50 years.

But meticulous Alice Little, it turned out, had brought home more than sea shells and memories. Early in World War II, U.S. Naval Intelligence heard that she had lived in the west central Pacific, interviewed her. To the Navy's delight, Miss Little rooted out other items in her collections--maps, charts and the journals she carefully kept for the board of missions on trips around her islands aboard the sailing vessel Morning Star. Out of the faded books and charts leaped such facts as these: how the tides swept in and the heights of shoreline cliffs, how deep the channels were and how wide the sandy beaches, where in the crystal water lay hidden coral reefs and where lay clear passage at low tide. The Navy borrowed books, charts, fauna and sand. Alice Little settled back to her quiet spinster existence.

Last week Alice Cowles Little died at 93. And in the midst of the sea shells and pressed plants and a vast collection of postage stamps, friends found a well-creased, patently cherished letter from Naval Intelligence thanking the little old lady from Oberlin for her role in the successful wartime invasions of the islands Tarawa, Makin and Kwajalein.

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