CAP: Flight student was one of the first women to go through USAF Basic Training

An Air Force pioneer looks back
By Janene Scully/Associate Editor
December 5, 2008

When Patricia Ono attended Air Force boot camp, she and her fellow airmen wore dresses for physical training, they couldn’t carry weapons, and to leave base they had to don white gloves with their uniforms.

Ono, now 81 and an Orcutt resident, was among the first women in basic training for the fledgling service 60 years ago. She shared her experiences with today’s airmen during celebrations at Vandenberg Air Force Base earlier this year.

Women who served in the military, such as Ono, will be recognized for their service during a ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday at the Freedom Monument Veterans Memorial in front of the Maldonado Youth Center in Santa Maria.

So what was boot camp like in 1948 for the first class of 74 women enlistees?

“Nothing compared to now,” she said with a chuckle. “When I talked at the Anniversary Ball at the base, I was telling them how we exercised in dresses, how we drilled in dresses, little seersucker dresses.

“We never got down on the ground to do pushups or anything like that. It was mainly for show because they had all the newspapermen from Washington there constantly taking pictures of the first squadron.”

When women military members now serving at Vandenberg saw the old pictures of Ono in uniform, they asked in amazement, “Are you wearing gloves?

“I said we had to wear gloves when we went off base in our uniforms. And they started laughing hysterically,” she said.

As a young woman in Cincinnati, Ono joined at the time when the Army Air Forces became a separate service, carved from the Army. The Air Force began in 1947; she attended basic training in 1948.

“I’d always wanted to from the time I was really young, and I took flying lessons in the Civil Air Patrol,” she said, adding that airsickness grounded her flying career before she could earn her pilot’s license.

She talked to an Air Force recruiter about signing up, but learned she would have to wait to enlist — the bill allowing women in the Air Force hadn’t passed yet.

“I can’t remember how long I waited, but this past October was 60 years ago when I enlisted,” she said, adding that her family didn’t like it initially, but eventually changed their minds.

She took a train from her hometown to San Antonio, Texas, for boot camp.

“It was easy compared to what they go through now,” Ono said.

The women recruits were kept separate from the men — with barbed wire fencing dividing the genders, which used separate mess halls and recreation facilities.

“We weren’t allowed to talk to any men (recruits),” she said. “We were escorted heavily. They didn’t want the first group to get into any trouble.”

Still, the men “treated us fine. They’d better. They had to show respect, a lot of respect, or they were in a lot of trouble.”

But the women recruits weren’t allowed to carry any kind of gun, Ono said, adding it wasn’t something that bothered her.

“I didn’t even know women were going to be allowed to carry guns,” she said.

After basic training, Ono was assigned to Westover Air Force Base, Mass., with the military police unit, an assignment she sought because of her pre-military jobs with two detective agencies investigating employees suspected of cash-register fraud.

She was the Westover military police unit’s lone female member.

“I still wasn’t allowed to carry a gun,” she said.

Her job was with the provost marshal office, and she took pictures for identification photos and fingerprints.

“That’s about all the women could do then is clerk typist (jobs). There wasn’t many things open for women then.”

She met her husband, George, a military photographer, through her job duties, and the pair married. But pregnancy prematurely ended her military career after three years at the rank of corporal because at the time, pregnant women weren’t allowed to serve, she said.

Ono’s military involvement was far from over, however. She moved to the Central Coast when her husband was transferred to Cooke Air Force Base as it was becoming Vandenberg Air Force Base in the late 1950s.

Working with an officer’s wife, they helped create the base’s first family services center, and Ono was the first secretary to the wives club, she said.

The couple, who had two children, remained on the Central Coast once George Ono retired from the military, and later worked for a defense contractor at Vandenberg. He died in 2001

She also spent 15 years as a volunteer with the Red Cross at the base hospital. Later, she worked 16 years as a volunteer consumer mediator with the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office.

Sixty years after joining the military, she says she enjoyed being among the pioneering women for future female airmen.

As for today’s women serving in the Air Force, Ono believes they have “wonderful opportunities if they make good use of them.”

One sergeant recently asked Ono, “Would you go back in if you had a chance?”

“In a minute,” Ono answered.