Thursday, August 2, 2012

Just Another Bay Ridge Senior, Part of Greatest Generation

At 88, she's a member of a senior center in Bay Ridge. She has 20 great-grandchildren, and she crochets baby blankets to donate to the Sunset Park Family Health Center.

But 68 years ago Ruth Soranno worked in a U.S. Navy office in Washington, D.C., helping the Allies decipher Japanese code.

“We knew we would destroy the enemy. And we did,” she told the Brooklyn Eagle in a profile Monday.

File under: You Never Know Who You'll Meet at a Senior Center

WAVES breaking codes. The Mariners' Museum at Free Republic

Go to McBrooklyn's HOME PAGE.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stop using the greatest generation. A real put down to those that came before or after. Fighting or living during World War II does not make one great.

mcbrooklyn said...

Of course it's a simplistic over-generalization (the generation that wrote the Declaration of Independence was pretty great too), but as a generation they made a lot of sacrifices and saved much of the world from a terrible fate. They were just 18, 19 years old or so when the war broke out. They dropped out of high school or college and signed up for who knew what. If they came home after the war, they didn't dwell on it, they started businesses, had kids and worked hard. They made a lot of mistakes but it's a good thing they did what they did or today we would have a very different world.