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An original Nevada USO girl remembers past dances

Page Last Updated: Friday March 20, 2009 12:00am PDT

The Nevada town of Hawthorne, is steeped in history, and one project that will restore the memories of the area's military past is the restoration of the 1940's-era USO building.

And perhaps even more charming than the old dance hall is the living history that some of Hawthorne's residents provide.

Things in the western Nevadan town were pretty quiet for Ruby Hume until her sixteenth birthday, when she was allowed to be a junior hostess at the USO building for the first time. Ruby remembers walking into the front doors of the storied building clearly.

"We had a soda fountain over here," she says moving about the hall. "And that was my favorite part. Being that we were junior hostesses we were the ones assigned as the gals that made the milk shakes and the sundaes, and we made a lot of them too."

The soda fountain wasn't Ruby's only favorite part of the USO.

"We spent many hours on the dance floor, she recalls. "We all loved to dance...our pastime--I guess it was dancing."

The center of Ruby's life, at the time, was the USO building.

"At the beginning, when the sailors came, they only got leave every forth night and uh...so for a little while there we had four boyfriends and saw the same movie 4 times."

She was a typical teenager for the time and she clearly recalls the details of the various events that unfolded at the dance hall.

"We had this wonderful Navy band--big band, she said. "It was kind of nice to go with one of the band members, because you could dance with everybody and he always had his eye on me. My saxophone boyfriend sat right there in the front row."

Ruby, still works out at the town's famed ammunition depot, and she has no plans to leave Hawthorne.

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