It’s easy to think that I developed a bond of friendship with Jean Ellinger because both of us grew up in western Missouri. An explanation much closer to the truth is that Jean was one of God’s special people— someone for whom kindness and friendship were innate ingredients in her recipe for life. We first met in the spring of 1974, when I started working at the Naval Institute. She was then the administrative assistant for Commander R.T.E. Bowler, U.S. Navy (Retired). His title was secretary-treasurer, the organization’s on-scene honcho.
Bowler was someone with a deeply ingrained love for the Navy and a paternalistic concern for his employees. He was also a man inclined at times to anger and to memos cranked out at furious speed. And, like many of us, he was inclined to let things pile up in his in-box. Jean Ellinger’s desk was outside his office door. She was posted nearby as a sort of buffer, someone who calmed the roiled waters when needed and saw to it that things were dealt with in an orderly fashion. She took care of the needs of the Naval Institute’s board, sent out agendas and minutes on schedule, and served as the organization’s personnel officer at a time when human resources specialists were not yet commonplace. She was also a goodwill ambassador whose friendly, open manner gave visitors a positive impression of the Naval Institute. Her acts of kindness were common occurrences, as were her smiles.
In 1985, a year after Bowler retired, Jean did as well. She and her husband, Carman, moved back to her old family homestead in Albany, Missouri. Bowler’s successor, Captain Jim Barber, suggested that Jean would be a suitable subject for an oral history because she had seen so much of the Naval Institute’s history pass before her. So, on a subsequent trip to Missouri, I drove to the hamlet of Albany and spent a most pleasant afternoon in the company of the Ellingers. Conventional wisdom has it that opposites attract in marriage, but this must have been the couple that was the exception to the rule. Carman, a former Navy bandsman, was as warm and friendly as his wife. The bond between the two was unmistakable.
In our 1989 interview, Jean told of migrating from Missouri to Washington, D.C., early in World War II when the paperwork requirements of the conflict demanded an influx of “government girls” in the nation’s capital. She was drawn by the glamor of an environment far different from that in which she had grown up, and so she began work as a secretary in the old War Department. She met Carman, who was in the Navy music school, and married him not long before he was transferred to the battleship Nevada (BB-36) on the West Coast. In a relatively short time, she thus went from being a government girl to a Navy wife. After the war, the couple moved to Annapolis when Carman was assigned to the Naval Academy band. Jean began work for the Academy and then wound up doing free-lance typing of articles for the Naval Institute. This was before Xerox machines and well before articles were submitted on disks or as e-mail attachments.
Articles arrived typewritten, and Jean retyped them on smelly orange carbon paper so they could be duplicated and sent to board members, who then voted on which ones would make it into Proceedings. Jean admitted in our interview that she sometimes provided editorial help to authors while in the process of retyping. After a while, Jean decided she needed a new job that would fit in with the school schedules of her growing sons. She moved from the Academy’s staff to the Institute’s and was in the business and circulation departments for a few years. As with the articles, business was different in the precomputer era. Jean and her co-workers typed the names and addresses of members onto stencils that were used in sending out bills for annual dues. When the checks came in, she helped record the payments on 3-by-5 cards.
In the early 1960s Jean moved up from the business department to become secretary for both Bowler and for Roger Taylor, who headed editorial efforts for Proceedings and the limited number of books then published. The two fiefdoms were not completely independent of each other, so Jean’s diplomatic skills undoubtedly came in handy. She also made and renewed friendships for the organization at annual meetings. The gatherings were much less involved than the current ones, which have evolved into full-fledged seminars. In the Bowler era, the event included old business, new business, honoring of essay contest winners, a speech by the CNO, and then the part that everybody had come for: the postmeeting cocktail party.
The Naval Institute has grown and evolved over the course of the past 20 years, since Jean and Carman moved on to retirement, first in Missouri and later in Florida. The staff grew, the organization moved to a new building, and computers became an integral part of virtually every aspect of what the Naval Institute does. During those years it was an invariable pleasure to spend time with the Ellingers whenever they visited Annapolis and to communicate by other means between those times. A few years ago Carman succumbed to lung cancer, and this spring the effects of many years of inhaling second-hand smoke took Jean as well. My life has unquestionably been enriched by knowing both of them as wonderful friends.