Geneva Polsfuss would never talk about her work as a World War II code breaker. All her family could ferret out was that she worked deciphering encrypted Japanese military messages and lived in a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse.
"We tried to get her to talk about it," said her son Mark of Chicago, "but she would always say, 'I took an oath not to talk about it.' She said, 'I know one of the things I discovered had a big impact,' but she would not say what it was."
Polsfuss, then Geneva Langert, was one of more than 10,000 women who flocked to the capital during the war to serve as code breakers, an era chronicled in the 2017 New York Times bestseller "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II."
The rest of his mother's life was an open book, Mark said, brimming with family, friends and a deep Christian faith.
Polsfuss died Jan. 9 at the Little Hospice in Edina following a fall. She was 96.
Ethel Geneva Langert was born in 1923 in Glendale, Calif. When she was an infant, the family moved to Minneapolis. Her father was a traveling salesman. Mark said his mother, who always went by the name Geneva, liked to accompany her father on his trips around the Upper Midwest.
Her mother took in sewing to pay for her daughter's dance lessons, and she danced for years and had a stint as a professional.
As a student at Roosevelt High School, Langert met a handsome, gentle Macalester College student named Lyle Polsfuss. When Lyle was stationed in Newport News, Va., as a captain in the U.S. Army, she found a job in Washington to be near him.