Floretta S. Welch, a devoted Navy wife, watched her husband go off to war over three decades spanning World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
With all those nights of worry and near-constant relocations, Welch found ways that she too could serve her country.
She joined the war effort working in a defense factory during World War II and later became "Miss Flo," a popular radio personality for an English-language radio station in Japan in the 1960s. She and other military wives rallied support for troops and veterans as active members of the VFW Auxiliary.
Welch, 92, died Dec. 28 of heart failure. Her friends and three generations of family celebrated her life last week at a remembrance celebration in Blaine, where Welch had lived with her granddaughter for the past six months.
"She had to be very resilient and creative," said her daughter, Shirley Weeres of Blaine. "If something needed to be done, she did it. That's how Navy wives are."
Welch was born into a family of subsistence farmers in a gap in the northeastern mountains of West Virginia. Her family didn't know they were in the middle of the Great Depression, she told her children, because "it was poor all the time" there, Weeres said.
At age 16, she married Keith Welch, a feed store clerk. Two years later the couple was swept up into the war effort: Keith Welch enlisted in U.S. Navy, serving on the USS Tuscaloosa, and his wife and her mother took factory jobs making rayon flight suits for the Army Air Corps. They carpooled to a work site in Maryland.
"She would go up and down the line and check the bobbins that handled the thread. It was her job to change the bobbins," Weeres said. "With my dad being gone, she liked to feel like she was contributing. It was needed. The women worked when the men left. It was as important as the men who went to war."
