Life in the motor pool had its routes and rhythms. For soldiers needing transport from place to place, it also had its expectations.

Even on the homefront, troops thought they’d see a man behind the wheel.

“Where’s the GI that’s going to pick us up?” one soldier asked.

Mary Allen replied, “Here I am.”

All of 85 pounds, carrying a box she used as help to climb into the tall vehicles, Ms. Allen stood game in her service to the Army motor pool. She maneuvered the bulkiest tows, drove the biggest trucks.

In World War II, everyone played a part, she figured.

Ms. Allen enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, thinking she wasn’t doing enough. She expected travel, and the basic training in Des Moines seemed nice enough. (Though the Army, unprepared for female forces, had only men’s uniforms for the trainees. “If we didn’t look a sight,” she recalls.)

Then, the Army shipped Ms. Allen right back to her native St. Joseph, to the Air Transport Command at Rosecrans Field. So much for seeing new places … she was three miles from her mother’s house.

Some days, on duty runs around the city, she’d stop in to say hello, the huge military vehicle parked on a residential street.

“Mary, what in the world will people think?” her mother would ask.

The daughter answered, “Tell them I just hijacked a truck from the Army.”

Many days were more sobering. Wounded troops came through St. Joseph on their way to rehabilitation facilities. Ms. Allen would pick them up Downtown, drive them along MacArthur Drive to Rosecrans. Before that, the men got coffee and doughnuts, and they always asked her to join them.

“They had never seen a WAC before,” she says. The woman started gaining weight from all the breakfasts, but she told her mother, “I can’t tell those boys ‘no.’”

One day, she fed a soldier, not yet 20, who returned from combat without hands.

The work suited her. The youngest of seven children, Mary grew up in a household where service to neighbors and country proved requisite. Her grandfather fought in the Civil War, her father in the Spanish-American War and her brothers-in-law in World War I.

In that part of St. Joseph, near the hospital and the Cathedral School that she attended, most houses flew American flags, she remembers.

The Army finally served Mary’s sense of wanderlust by transferring her to Long Beach, Calif., though doing so a week before Christmas. She learned to negotiate the motor pool without snow in the forecast.

Some illness back home forced the WAC to take a hardship discharge before the war’s end, and she returned to St. Joseph to tend to family matters. Her father had died when Mary was 17, and she would work at Swift to help make ends meet.

But life in the service never left her mind, and she re-enlisted in 1953 as Americans fought in Korea. This time, the Army trained her to be a lab technician, and she shipped out to a military hospital in Yokohama, Japan.

The assignment opened her eyes to a wider world. While Mary disliked a culture she felt devalued women, she marveled at the pearl divers in her new world, at the women who dyed silk in the rivers.

She adventured up Mount Fuji twice during her stay, both times getting an “idiot stick” for her efforts. Why an idiot stick?

“Because you’re an idiot if you climb it,” she says.

After 23 months abroad, the WAC again came home to deal with a family emergency. She would eventually land a job in the lab at Methodist Hospital, where she worked for 23 years.

“Everywhere I’ve ever gone, I’ve tried to find someone to look after,” she says. “I took that from Mama.”

At 85, heart troubles slow her, as does arthritis she attributes to working years in the freezers at Swift. She dutifully takes the pills the VA supplies and a doctor’s advice that the companionship of her dog will extend her life more than the medicine.

She shares her Westchester Village apartment with a 9-year-old rat terrier named Missy.

A niece forwarded her name to be included at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Va. A copy of her biography from the memorial foundation sits on a shelf in her living room next to her service medals.

“I loved the Army,” she says. “It was the best thing I did in my life.”

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.