Annette (Butz) Dunseth, from Minot and born in Tolley, moved to Seattle, Washington, when she was in the eighth grade and wanted to join the military. During the spring of her senior year at Ballard High School in Seattle in 1957, she joined the U.S. Navy.

Dunseth and two other Girl Scouts from her troop visited WAVES recruiters and tested for the military.

“After the test they asked me if I was serious because I was the only one that passed. I said yes, but my mother wouldn’t sign for me so my father did because he didn’t want to pay for college. I wasn’t interested in college anyway,” Dunseth said.

After boot camp in Maryland, where during the heat of summer she would have to iron, starch and march in her seersucker uniform, Dunseth was sent to San Diego, California, in fall of ’57 to storekeepers school. She said, basically, it was a 12-week business and accounting school.

“I always put in for England when I was being transferred, but I never got there with the Navy,” she said.

In January 1958, Dunseth was stationed in Astoria, Oregon, at the Navy ship “Graveyard of the Pacific,” where she worked in the operations tower for storage of decommissioned Naval ships.

She was transferred to Pearl Harbor-Hickam at Honolulu, Hawaii, in January 1959, and later Schofield Barracks in Waialua, also at Honolulu, where she was in the middle of pineapple fields for two and a half years. During her time in Hawaii, she said, she spent time in dance studios and the YMCA learning to square dance. She sold movie tickets for a quarter on duty days in the evenings.

In Hawaii, Dunseth said, she was in accounting for a communication base and worked in a warehouse for electronic parts of radio receivers and transmitters. She also ordered food and did the accounting for the mess hall on the base in Waialua.

She came home to Seattle during the Seattle World’s Fair in 1961 and then was sent to Great Lakes Naval Station at North Chicago, Illinois. During her year at Great Lakes, she worked in a uniform store and was the master-at-arms for one of the barracks, which was head of maids’ service.

“That was interesting,” she said.

In 1962, she was ranked as high as E6, storekeeper first class, which was at that time the highest rank for her. She was sent on to more training to advance her career. She attended radiomen’s school at Bainbridge, Maryland, for six months to learn communications on the teletype machine.

From there she went to Trenton, New Jersey, to a switching center with “teletype-Western Union-style yellow message tape and ship to shore and Morse Code. I was a supervisor there. It was like a mailroom with mostly classified information and some civilians working there also,” she said. She noted that during the Cuban Missile Crisis during October 1962, the technology started to change and the communication switchboards were busier.

For a time, Dunseth’s two sisters joined her in New Jersey.

In 1964, she received orders to Seattle and from this point forward, she was stationed at Sandpoint Naval Air Station, Seattle, where she continued to work in communications, supervising and processing messages.

In 1971, after getting married and having her first child, she left the Navy, only to rejoin the Navy Reserves in 1973.

Dunseth transferred to Army National Guard Reserves and then Air Force Reserves when she was then sent to Germany. She finally got to England in 1983 for three months with the Washington Air National.

“I actually joined the service to go to England and it took my whole career to get there. I loved it,” she said.

Dunseth retired from the military in April 1984. She is currently regional representative for Military Women Across the Nation.

WAVES history

On July 21, 1942, President Roosevelt enacted the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) as a U.S. Naval Reserve Women’s branch of the military to enable more male sailors for sea duty. On June 12, 1948, the WAVES disbanded, making all branches of the military open to women. President Harry S. Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Act. The WAVES acronym continued past 1948 and World War II until 1978, when according to Naval History and Heritage Command, waves of women could be sworn into the regular Navy and all four branches of military at all times, not just in times of war. The WAVES acronym was disbanded under the Women’s Armed Forces Act. In 1979, WAVES National was created to “seek out other WAVES and assist them in transitioning from military back to civilian life,” according to Military Woman Across the Nation. In 1980, WAVES National was recognized as a nonprofit veterans’ organization.

Aboard the Royal Caribbean ship, Allure of the Seas, in 2014, members of WAVES National, “voted to expand membership to include women who have served or are serving in all facets of the United States military,” and was then renamed in 2016 to Military Women Across the Nation.