If you have spent any time at all around the Osceola veterans community, you most likely met or at least saw St. Cloud resident Dorothy “Pat” Rudd, who recently passed away at age 104.
She was a steady presence. Born in Illinois in 1921, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) in 1942. Outside of traditional medical positions, women had only briefly served in the military during World War I, and the military abruptly discharged most women right at the end of that war, only to issue the call to serve again at the start of World War II. Pat was one of the first Navy servicewomen to be deployed to Pearl Harbor, still devastated from the surprise Japanese bombing attack in late 1941. She performed administrative work and taught servicemen to read as a volunteer.
She was in Honolulu on the day the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, ending the war, and was released from the Navy in December, at the final rank of Specialist (S) 3rd Class. She had met her future husband Gerald J. Rudd—U.S. Navy Boatswain Mate 2nd Class, while stationed in Honolulu and they married after the war and settled in Kissimmee. They were married 71 years when he passed in 2017…