A recent photo of Ethel May Sherwin celebrating her 100th birthday on Friday.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
She served in the Second World War and now this Medicine Hat resident has celebrated a milestone, her 100th birthday.
Ethel May Sherwin was born on the family farm near Wood Mountain, Sask., on March 12, 1921.
The third child to her parents – Gurley and Gladys Oakes, who had moved from Nebraska – Sherwin enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in May 1942 and served four years. CWAC was established in 1941 to address the shortage of manpower during the Second World War. Women were recruited to fill support and clerical roles.
Sherwin spent two of her four years of service in Canada and two overseas including Farnborough, England and Appeldoorn in the Netherlands.
She was discharged in May 1946 and married Melville Sherwin in November of that year.
He was a widower with three small children, and together they later added three more to the family whom they raised in Crane Valley, Sask., before settling in Medicine Hat in 1967.
Sherwin currently lives in the Good Samaritan Society’s Medicine Hat seniors’ residence, where she celebrated her significant birthday.
Her daughter, Dallas King, says her mom’s interests over the years have included curling, playing cards and bingo. She’s also a big baseball fan. She loved to travel in her younger days, including to many countries in Europe.
In July 2017, when Sherwin was 96, an adventurous spirit was evident when she took the opportunity to have a ride in a B-25 bomber aircraft out of Medicine Hat.
At the time she told the News she wished she could have enlisted in the war a little earlier but the minimum age requirement was changed only after she had enlisted.
In CWAC she had been a driver and then an assistant mechanic, but felt that was not a good fit for her. The army then sent her to Edmonton for a clerical course. Sherwin laughed about the typing she was taught and admitted to never being any good at that either. Her administrative duties and working the telephone are where her talents lay. Before she was sent to Europe in 1944, she had prepared pay books for new recruits.
In 2017, she talked excitedly about going to Europe with the army and called it the “highlight” of her life.
If there is one sight and sound of those war years that has lingered with clarity, it is that of a helicopter landing near her office window in Farnborough, England, she told the News in 2017. It was possibly one of the first helicopters developed from the British Experiment Station in Farnborough.
Sherwin’s administrative tasks included helping to arrange for two soldiers to return to Canada. Their joy and what she’d been able to accomplish in getting them home as soon as possible still made her eyes twinkle with excitement decades later as she talked about it.
King provided a copy of a memoir that her mother had written, in which she talks about her life experiences.
“All the things I have done and seen and all the places I have visited, I have to say that I have had a fantastic and full life.”
