Help Celebrate Maine World War II Veteran's 99 Birthday With Card

A simple gesture can have a monumental impact, especially in making someone's day feel even more special.

Well, now is your opportunity to do just that for a veteran in Maine who will be celebrating a major birthday.

World War II U.S. Navy WAVE Leona Chasse will be turning 99 in January, and her friend and fellow veteran Joy Lewis Asuncion has put the call out on Facebook to send along birthday cards.

What's a Navy WAVE, you ask?

Well, according to an article from defense.gov, the president signed a law in 1942 that created what was known as "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service," or WAVES. The article states this was done to "free up male personnel for sea duty," but it would ultimately have an even greater impact on World War II and beyond.

Turns out, Leona was one of 10,000 Navy WAVES "secretly recruited as 'Code Girls' to serve as Code Breakers working in secrecy to break German and Japanese codes," Joy's Facebook post states.

How incredible is it to think that she had such an important role during the Second World War in serving her country? Major respect for her.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, these code girls were unsung heroes that worked behind the scenes constantly trying to keep up with communications during World War II all in an effort to keep soldiers out of harm's way.

Can you imagine the effort, time, and work it would take to try and crack messages all from a jumble of letters that seemingly make no sense?

Leona was a piece of that instrumental puzzle that would help win the war as a code girl.

Now's our time to do something special for her after all that she's done for us and the country, and again, it's super simple.

All you have to do is mail her a birthday card:

Leona Chasse
Scarborough Veterans Home
290 US-1
Scarborough, Maine
04074

If you're interested to know more about code girls in depth, there's a book by Liza Munday aptly named "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II."

Let's give Leona an incredible 99th birthday gift. Thank you for your service, Leona, and Happy Birthday.

LOOK: Things from the year you were born that don't exist anymore

The iconic (and at times silly) toys, technologies, and electronics have been usurped since their grand entrance, either by advances in technology or breakthroughs in common sense. See how many things on this list trigger childhood memories—and which ones were here and gone so fast you missed them entirely.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

Source: Help Celebrate This Maine World War II Veteran’s 99th Birthday by Sending Her a Card

Categories: Articles, Local News