15 Minutes of Infamy

Dorothy Berrum During WW2, thousands of young women invaded the city of Washington. With all the able-bodied men fighting the war, many of these women took government jobs and were, for the first time in their lives, out on their own.  One such woman was 18-year-old Dorothy Berrum. In August of 1944, Dorothy, and two of her friends, left their hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She went to work for the War Department. Her workplace was the Pentagon. Dorothy and her two friends had shared an apartment, briefly, before Dorothy decided to move into her own room at a government housing project for women called Arlington Farms. Dorothy, who found her old friends a bit too conservative and straight-laced, wanted her independence. While she devoted herself to her job during the day, her nights were filled with parties and dates with the young men whom the draft board had left behind. This concerned her friends, of course; just as the war had brought shortages of everything from silk a...