As White River Junction celebrated the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, Bonnie Briggs was up at the VA, where she worked as a nurse.
“We had to keep doing our work even though we were crazy with happiness,” Briggs recalled during an interview in her living space at The Village at White River Junction last week.
She had so many reasons to celebrate that it was tough to keep track of them all. The end of the war meant her husband of close to a year was coming home. And on top of that, V-J Day, on Aug. 15, 1945, was Briggs’ 23rd birthday.
“I’d kind of forgotten that. I don’t think that birthday was terribly important that year,” Briggs said.
On Saturday, Briggs, 98, was honored as Hartford’s oldest resident during a presentation of the town historical society’s Hartford Cane.
She was born on Aug. 15, 1922, at what was then Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, and raised in Lyme.
Briggs met her future husband, Fred, when they were students at Thetford Academy.
“He invited me to the senior ball,” Briggs said in an interview alongside her son, David Briggs. “I never thought he would, but he did.”
After graduating from Thetford Academy, she studied nursing at the University of New Hampshire before transferring to the nursing school at Peter Bent Brigham School of Nursing in Boston. She cited her mother as an inspiration for her work caring for others.
“My mother was a very kind person, always kind of helping the neighbors along a little bit,” Bonnie Briggs said. “There was a little girl who had rheumatic fever and I used to go read to her. I was taken by the fact that somehow you could make a difference if you were nice to people.”
She was in class when she and other students learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I was in Boston at the Brigham where I was a student nurse, and the word came through the building that we were in the war,” Briggs recalled. “Everybody started cuddling together and crying and saying, ‘We’ve all got boyfriends, they’ll all have to go to war,’ and we just hoped and prayed it would be over quickly and nothing serious would come of what we just heard. But it involved every one of them eventually.”
Her beau, Fred, was among them. He enlisted in 1942.
“He knew it was inevitable that he would be drafted and so he said, ‘If I’m going to go, I want to be a Marine,’ so he signed up for the Marines,” Briggs said.
While he was in the service, Briggs graduated from nursing school in June 1944 and started working as a nurse at the VA, renting a room along with other nurses who worked there. They formed a close bond.
“There were a lot of people in the same boat. It was a good place to get acquainted, not be lonely,” she said. “You were lonely for your husband, but you did have other friends.”
He officially became her husband on Halloween in 1944, while he was home on leave. Their wedding, Briggs said, “was the most homemade wedding you ever heard of.”
They married in her parents’ living room and she wore her cousin’s wedding dress. After a weeklong honeymoon at a cousin’s cabin on Lake Fairlee, she traveled with Fred Briggs back to his base in Bremerton, Wash., squeezing in as much time with him as she could, before taking the long train ride home by herself.
“It was lonely. He’d just gone back overseas for another tour and the war was still on. You still didn’t know what the future was, but it was looking good,” Briggs said. “We weren’t really worried then. The war was so close to being over, it was only a matter of time. We just wanted it to be over and get started with our lives.”
When the war ended, Briggs got back on the train to meet Fred in Washington state. But it would be more than a simple pickup.
“Everyone was waiting for discharge papers, and they had a stack a mile high,” Briggs said.
They waited a few months, eager to return home to Vermont.
“(The papers) came through at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and at 5 o’clock we were on a train headed for home,” she recalled. “I remember we stopped at various stations because the train was full of GIs. Some of them would get off at various stations and they would come back with a box of chocolates because we were the newlyweds on the train.”
When they returned to White River Junction, the couple got started on their next goal: owning a business. The first, a logging operation on Lake Winnipesaukee, didn’t go according to plan. They rented a small cabin with another couple, Elwin and Irene Phillips. Fred had grown up with Elwin, and Bonnie had become friends with Irene while they were both nurses at the VA.
“I thought it was adventurous. Two couples who were just crazy and not thinking very hard into the future,” Briggs said. “Have a job, live on the lake, life was pretty good. Have fun.”
It lasted a summer, and then it was on to the next venture.
“You came home from the service and you had to make decisions. We were young and carefree and just figured that everything would turn out fine,” Briggs said. “We had some good times and I don’t think we worried too much about the future.”
Next was a gas station in the center of White River Junction, summers running a restaurant in Fairlee and winters running a ski tow in Norwich (the snow was hit or miss, but the job came with a cabin where they would host friends).
“I thought that was wonderful because you had some gas pumps to make a little money on. It would mean a paycheck so I thought it was a great idea, a good start,” Briggs said. “We had various little businesses. My husband was always thinking, ‘What are we going to do to make things better?’ ”
While Briggs helped her husband in these endeavors, her primary concern was taking care of their growing family, which came to include four children.
“I guess I’d call myself the first assistant in whatever he chose to do; I was behind him,” Briggs said. “I went right along with it hoping that someday we would do things that were more productive. And they did get better.”
The tide turned when Fred Briggs and Elwin Phillips started an Army/Navy surplus store called Briggs & Phillips in White River Junction. The store eventually became known as Briggs Ltd., and it “worked quite well,” Briggs said, in part because the surplus clothes were a “bargain.”
“I found out that I liked retailing,” Briggs said. “I liked selling stuff.”
She also learned how to tailor so the family could better serve their customers, and she delighted in helping people find the perfect tuxedo for a landmark event.
“Anybody who was getting married or going to a prom, they were happy. Your job was to make sure they stayed happy,” Briggs said.
The couple eventually bought the building the department store was located in. As Fred focused more on fixing up the space, Bonnie handled the store itself.
“More and more he’d give me more and more responsibility,” she said.
When Fred died in 1992, Briggs ran the store for another decade before selling it.
And now she’s enjoying watching White River Junction continue to grow.
“It makes me very happy, very proud, because the Briggs family had quite a bit to do with it. There were businesses downtown that were coming and going, giving up. We never gave up. We just hung in there, probably because we didn’t know what else to do,” Briggs said with a laugh. “We did hang in there and I think that’s to my husband’s credit and a little bit of mine. Just keep going, keep going and better days are coming.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
