25 Curry Crescent: Another love story
An excerpt from my forthcoming book, "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes and Winning World War 2"
Kay Brainard Hutchins was a Red Cross girl during World War 2. Of her two brothers, one was a prisoner of war and the other was missing in action, later determined to have been murdered on the ground after successfully bailing out of the B-24 on which he was the co-pilot during the Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. This is her account of how she met her husband, Jack Hutchins.
My first husband was on the rebound, so to speak. I didn’t realize it. I went out to California to visit Mary Jo, my dear Red Cross friend, who married one of the boys on our base who I introduced her to, one of the pilots. She had to go to Germany, too. She was one of the first Red Cross girls to go to Berlin. So we didn’t get home until 1946, when everybody else came home in 1945, because we hadn’t done our two years. And we were in occupied Germany.
When I came home, I had numerous offers for jobs, just people calling me, wanting me to go to work for them. I decided to work for a law firm that was very well known in Palm Beach, but I said before I start work I’d like to take a little time off. It was the middle of the summer, so they said that was fine, why didn’t I wait until September to start?
In July, Mary Jo called me from California, and we both felt out of place. All our friends were living it up and drinking and having fun, and we’d been living in these completely destroyed areas that were just unbelievable, Aschaffenberg, where we had been stationed, was 70 percent destroyed.
Aschaffenburg is about 30 miles from Frankfurt. I was so depressed there that I asked for a transfer, and I was transferred to Erlangen, which was right outside of Nuremburg. Erlangen was a hospital city so it wasn’t as badly beat up. But we had just come from that to home to everybody being, starting to buy, “Got a new car, got a new Cadillac, $3,000.” Can you imagine? So Mary Jo called me and she said, “Whit’s going to come down and visit” – he lived in Northern California – “why don’t you come out and visit at the same time? My brother’s just gotten out of the Navy and I think you should meet him.”
So I flew to California. Mary Jo lived in Santa Barbara, and they met me in L.A. I guess there was no airport in Santa Barbara at the time.
The brother was a nice guy, but we didn’t hit it off at all. But her cousin Jimmy, her first cousin, came over and joined us, and the four of us – Mary Jo and Whit and Jimmy and I – we all had a wonderful time. And Jimmy had a sister a couple of years younger, she was going with a boy, and we just all had something in common. It was just wonderful, fun. So I ended up thinking I was in love with Jimmy and he was in love with me, and Mary Jo and Whit were going to get married. Sissy and her boyfriend were going to get married. But I had to come home after five weeks – and I came home, but I’d already told Jimmy I would marry him. And my mother – that was the only time I ever saw her really unhappy about who I was going with. She didn’t know Jimmy at all, but I guess she thought I was doing this on the rebound, and I didn’t think of it as that at all.
We didn’t get married until October, and the longer between the time I left there, I wasn’t really too sure, but I thought, well, I told him I would and he’s driving all the way across the country to get married, and my sister said, “You got yourself into this, now you’d better go ahead and get married.” So I did. Jimmy and I moved back to Santa Barbara for a while, and then we moved to Los Angeles, and I thought when we got to Los Angeles I’d go to work. I was already sure I wasn’t going to stay married. Not his fault at all, it was my fault, the whole thing. And darned if I didn’t turn out, the first week I was in Los Angeles, which was three months after we were married, that I was pregnant. So, since I was pregnant I knew I was going to have to stay longer, and I did. I lived with Jimmy for four years, and when Kim was three years old I decided I was coming back to Florida. Jimmy of course wasn’t very happy about that, but he knew that I wasn’t happy.
When I was in Paris on my way to Germany, I had met a boy who was only a year younger than I. Jimmy was a year younger than I, too. Some Red Cross girls were sightseeing the first day we were in Paris and as we walked past one of the outdoor cafes near the Opera House, these GIs, American boys, were sitting at a table and they called out, “Parlez vous Francais?” and other sort of remarks. They said, “Come have a drink with us.” I think there were four or five of us girls and five of them, and I just happened to sit next to this Jack Hutchins. I learned his name. Another guy in the group was from Jacksonville, Florida, and they were in Paris on a three-day pass because they were waiting to ship home. They were headed home. We were headed to Germany.
Jack took an immediate liking to me. He was very attractive and nice, so I didn’t mind when he said, “How about a date tonight? The whole group of us are going to go out.
I had already made a date on the train from Dover into Paris. I was in one of those old clipper cars with two officers – did they hold five, six people? It seems to me there were two black officers, which is unusual, and this white officer and me, and one other Red Cross girl. One of them was a very nice guy, and he was a specialist of some kind. He was with the military, OSS or something, and stationed in Paris. He didn’t make any pretense of not being married, but he said, “How about having dinner with me tonight and I’ll show you some of Paris?” I guess I knew he was married but I thought that sounded nice, he was going to take me to dinner at the Maurice – in fact I think he lived at the Maurice; if you’ve ever been there, it’s one of the top hotels in Paris.
And then I met Jack. So I did something we used to do at the University of Florida when I visited up there. I said, “I’ll have a ‘late date’ with you. I’ll be back at the Red Cross hotel by 10 o’clock, because I’m just going to dinner with this very nice person.”
Well, my date did take me to dinner, and then he took me up to the top – there was a place up in the top of the hotel where you could look out all over the city and it was beautiful – but I told him, “I’ve made some plans to go out with a group at 10 o’clock.”
So he said, “Okay, I’ll get you back there.”
It was about 10 after 10 when I got there, and dammit, they’d been there and gone. I was mad as hell. Well, that’s a fine thing.
Anyway, some GI was in the lobby and he played the piano, and we had gotten a whole group singing songs, so I got over my madness. And early the next morning I get a call from downstairs saying, “There’s somebody down here to see you,” and it’s Jack.
He told me that they went to Moulin Rouge, did things I would have loved to have done, but I missed out on it. But from then on we were arm in arm and traveled all over Paris. They would stay with us so late that then they couldn’t find a place to stay, the beds were all taken, and they slept in the lobby of the hotel one time. Then they had to go back before we left for Germany.
I took some pictures, and they didn’t come out very well, but I sent some of them to Jack, and I never heard from him. So I thought, “Oh well, that’s the way it goes.” And I thought no more about it until I arrived in New York Easter Sunday, I think it was April 26, it was a very late Easter. Mary Jo and I arrived, and we stayed a few days. Mary Jo left earlier because I had a cousin that lived right there in New York that I was very fond of, so I stayed with them. And a Navy fellow that I had met many years before was in New York and knew I was there somehow, maybe I called him, I don’t know. I was going out to lunch with him, and when I got back to my cousin’s apartment, his roommate said, “Oh, you had a telephone call from Jack Hutchins.”
No, he didn’t. He said, “You had a telephone call.” And I told him – oh, I’m putting the cart before the horse – when I got back I had to go to the train station because I was going to Hartford to visit my uncle. So I had left for Hartford. And when I got to Hartford, my uncle said, “You had a call from a Jack Hutchins. But he said he’d call back.”
I said, “Jack Hutchins?”
And he said, “Yeah. Don’t you know a Jack Hutchins?”
I said, “I had a few dates in Paris with him, but I haven’t heard from him since.”
He said, “He said he’d call back.”
Well, he called back and he told me he was walking on the streets in New York with his wife – which I didn’t know he had – “and I saw you walking with a Naval officer on the other side of the street.” He and his wife were there for lunch on business of some kind, because he was from Pittsburgh. And, I had a very easy address to remember, 25 Curry Crescent; he’d never forgotten that. So he went to a telephone and called for the number of the Brainards in West Palm Beach, and my mother answered the phone.
In those days, you called through an operator, and a long-distance operator would stay on the line forever if you wanted her to. It was a person to person call, so the operator said she was calling for Kay Brainard.
My mother said, “She’s not here.”
“Do you know where we could get in touch with her?”
“She’s in New York.”
“Do you know where she is in New York?”
“She’s at her cousin’s house.”
“What is his name?”
“Frank Brainard.”
“Do you have his telephone number?”
“No,” she said, “but I can probably find it.” She finds Frank’s number and the operator calls it, and a roommate of Frank’s says, “Oh, she just left for Hartford.”
The operator says, “Do you know where she’s going in Hartford?”
“She’s going to her uncle.”
So he gets Uncle’s name, and that’s how he tracked me down. When he finally got me he wanted to know if I was coming back to New York, and I said, “No, I’m going from here to Washington. I have to check out of the Red Cross.”
He said, well, he’d like to see me.
And I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not gonna be there.”
Of course, since he said he was with his wife, why, I didn’t really care one way or the other. But seven years later, he calls Curry Crescent again, and this time my brother gets the phone. And he says, “I’m calling for Kay Brainard. Is she there or is she living in Alaska or where is she? Is she married now?”
And Bill said, “Well, she was married but she’s divorced, and she has her own apartment.”
Bill gave him my number, and he called me, and he said, “I’ve got two weeks vacation. I’m separated from my wife, we’ve been separated for quite a while, and I’d like to come to Florida. Is that all right with you? I’d like to see you.”
I wasn’t dating anyone specifically at the time. I knew a few people but I wasn’t going steady. I remembered he was nice and a lot of fun, so I said, “Okay.”
He said, “Can you get me a place to stay?”
I said, “I’ll find you a place to stay.”
Which I did. So he stayed, and then he said the first night, “You are going to marry me, aren’t you?”
I didn’t say yes or no, but at any rate, that started the romance all over again, and we wrote letters back and forth. Oh, I said, “You better write to me this time around.”
He said, “I’m not very good at writing letters.”
And I said, “Then let’s forget the whole thing.”
Well, he started writing letters and pretty soon he was writing me every day, and every day when I came home from work there would be a special delivery letter there for me. That only took overnight and it cost 20 cents in those days.
After six months of flying down here when he had a holiday weekend or something, he gave up his job up there and moved down here, and then his divorce was final. I had been divorced a couple of years, but his was just final after he moved down here.
Aaron Elson: Where was your child from your first marriage?
Kay Hutchins: Kim was five or six years old. He started school that same year we got married.
Kim stayed with me, and was five or six years old the year we got married, and I had two other children by Jack.
During the war Jack was with the artillery, under General Patton. Never talked about it. I don’t know the least thing about it except that when they were stationed someplace, there were some little French kids that his group were very fond of, and he used to love it when they came around, and they would give them Hershey bars, and “cigarette for Papa,” and that’s as much as I know about it. I have only two or three snapshots. And since I know so much about my own military and so much of my friends and my brothers, it just seems ridiculous not to know what your husband did, but I don’t know a thing, except that he was under Patton. And he was made captain I think on the field. I think he told me that one time. I don’t have anything to prove that. I do have his discharge papers. And he’d been in Africa. I think he probably was involved with Normandy.
