Born: 1918, United States
Died: 2009
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Lula Mae O’Bannon (Choctaw) used the opportunities in joining the US Coast Guard SPARS during World War II to expand her horizons and serve the United States’s war effort.
Early Life
Lula Mae O’Bannon was born in Wilson, Oklahoma in 1918. As a child, she went to Goodland Indian School, an Indian Boarding School primarily made up of Choctaw children. At least three of her siblings attended Goodland together. Goodland had a complicated relationship with the Choctaw community. Prominent tribal members supported the school. It was labeled an “orphanage” by the twentieth century, but O’Bannon’s mother lived through the end of World War II.
O’Bannon attended Oklahoma Presbyterian College, an Indian women’s college in Durant, Oklahoma that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. She used the College’s partnership with Southeastern Oklahoma Normal College to get her B.S. in teaching. She attended college with her friend Lula Belle Everidge (Choctaw). The two Choctaw women taught at Goodland Indian School during the first two years of World War II.
Serving in SPARS
In 1943, O’Bannon and Everidge enlisted together in SPARS, the women’s branch of the US Coast Guard. O’Bannon’s brother, Leonard, was already serving in the Navy. A mentor at Goodland encouraged the two women to join. They thought there would be good opportunities for young women in the service. O’Bannon and Everidge took advantage of an offer by the Oklahoma recruiting officer Mabel Martin for young women to train in the Sooner Squadron of SPARS with their friends.
Together O’Bannon and Everidge went to Palm Beach, Florida in the summer of 1943. They were quoted jointly in the newspaper about their experience at the repurposed Biltmore Hotel, where the Spars were training. It was O’Bannon’s first time seeing the ocean. She and Everidge told the Tulsa World that it was “even more beautiful than words or pictures had led us to expect.” They enjoyed training and were “very proud of [their] uniforms.”
O’Bannon and Everidge were able to stay together again after training. They were both assigned to Coast Guard offices in Philadelphia. They did office work, supporting officers like Captain Eugene A. Coffin. The Philadelphia Spars were housed together in downtown barracks with very little furniture. Eager to impress their superior officer, O’Bannon and several other Spars invited Captain Coffin for dinner. As he sat at the table in their sparsely furnished room, the seat collapsed. The women were horrified.
Despite this incident, Captain Coffin remained impressed by O’Bannon. He recommended her for officer training. O’Bannon and Everidge went to Coast Guard officer training together. The Coast Guard Academy file labeled them “two peas in a pod.” Press coverage of O’Bannon’s officer training showed some of the stereotypes she faced in the Coast Guard. Reporters characterized her promotion as proof she, as a Native American woman, was “on the warpath” against the Axis powers. We don’t know how O’Bannon responded to or felt about this language.
When Captain Coffin was promoted to Commodore and reassigned to Hawai’i, he took O’Bannon as part of his staff. It was 1945. Lula Mae O’Bannon had just arrived in Hawai’i in time for the Japanese surrender. She remembered the great joy at the end of the war. “There was dancing in the streets,” she recalled. “The whole town was celebrating. What a glorious day that was.” [1]
Newspapers reported three of the O’Bannon siblings aimed to be home from military deployment by Christmas in 1945; Lula-Mae, her brother Leonard, and her sister Pearl Juanita. Despite being stationed in Hawai’i, O’Bannon came from the East Coast, possibly with her future husband Sgt Vincent Modzelewski. Modzelewski was an Army artist from New Jersey. O’Bannon met him in Hawai’i. O’Bannon was discharged as a yeoman second class.
Life After World War II
O’Bannon and Modzelewski married between 1945 and 1947. O’Bannon attended Peabody College in New Jersey for graduate school on the GI Bill. She then became a kindergarten teacher in Sayreville, New Jersey. Vincent Modzelewski taught art and was involved in local Democratic politics. In 1950, a census taker identified Lula Mae O’Bannon Modzelewski as white and did not mention her Choctaw heritage. She taught kindergarten for at least three decades and raised one daughter.
Lula Mae O’Bannon Modzelewski died in 2009, at the age of 91.