Pat Rudd was honored in Tallahassee for her service to the community of St. Cloud, and to the country for her service in the U.S. Navy, in 2022. (Photo/Rep. Paula Stark)
Dorothy Jean "Pat" Rudd, one of the last remaining World War II veterans and a beacon of light in the community, passed away Tuesday a month after celebrating her 104th birthday.
Friends posted the news, as well as fond memories of Pat, on social media Tuesday night.
"She is definitely part of our history and we will sorely miss her and her personality and her big heart," state Representative and St. Cloud Main Street Chairman Paula Stark said. "It’s been such an honor and a privilege to know her and to be able to be in so many different arenas with her and connect even in the car alone where we'd have personal little chats where she cracked me up."
While working as an instructor at a factory associated with the Marshall Field’s Company during the early days of World War II, she followed her brother into the Navy and was recruited through a new Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) program. After boot camp at Hunter College in New York City before heading to Washington D.C. for a year, Rudd was in one of the first groups of WAVES to deploy to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1944, which was then considered an overseas war zone. She was one of 200 women and 2,000 enlisted men who arrived to assist with cleanup and restoration efforts still underway at the Hawaii base three years after the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack.
“I went back to my platoon and told them I wanted to sign up right then to be on the off-shore mission,” Rudd told the News-Gazette in a 2017 story.
After Congress amended a law allowing WAVES to volunteer for service in the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, she arrived in the islands, where her duties included running the base’s Education Office and teaching literacy courses to sailors. She also volunteered at the Navy base's hospital. She served in Pearl Harbor until after Victory Day signaled the end of the South Pacific portion of the war in the fall of 1945. Rudd recalled the streets of Honolulu packed with civilians and enlistees celebrating the news of America’s victory.
“Everybody was elated when that war was over,” she said.
During that time, she met her future husband, Gerald, who was also in the Navy and was originally from Kissimmee. After her retirement from SunTrust (now Truist) Bank in 1986, they built and ran a hunting camp in Georgia. They moved to Kissimmee, and then St. Cloud, in 2013. They had been married for 75 years when he passed away in 2017.
In the years since, Pat has been a fixture at veterans events all around Osceola County, when the military has been honored on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, and other related events hosted by the county's Museum of Military History.
"She came to all of our events," Museum Executive Director and St. Cloud Mayor Chris Robertson said. "Her family is spread out all over the country, so she became family to us. She had an impact on a lot of people's lives by sharing her stories."
He remembered Rudd telling him people could go to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. to "see a plane flown by someone she knew."
"She asked me, 'Charles Lindbergh, you ever heard of him?'" Robertson said Rudd related. "Only, she called him 'Lindy.'"
In those later years of her life, Rudd made sure to pack life into her years. In 2017 she was named Queen of the St. Cloud Senior Center, and was still an active member of St. Cloud Chapter 46 of the The Order of the Eastern Star, an international fraternal organization for both men and women with ties to the Freemasons. known for making fine needlework pieces for the Veterans Administration (VA).
“I do feel blessed, I really do,” Rudd recently told the News-Gazette. “I am blessed to be so lucky to be active and still enjoying life.”
Information for this story came from reports from when Rudd graciously spent some time speaking with News-Gazette reporters Terry Lloyd and Rachel Christian.
