Maeve Smith couldn’t have been more excited when, last year, she signed on to direct the musical “The Hello Girls” for Sonoma Arts Live in Sonoma. Smith had discovered the music for the Broadway show a few years earlier and loved it.
“I was just blown away,” Smith said. “It was this amazing story, and the music was incredible and helped with the storytelling so much.”
“The Hello Girls” tells the story of the more than 200 American women who were sent to France during World War I to work as telephone operators for the U.S. Army. After the war, however, the women were denied status as veterans. It took decades of advocating, not until the 1970s, that the women received that classification and the benefits that go along with it. Sadly, many of the Hello Girls had already passed before that day.
Even with that recognition, however, the Hello Girls’ story remains little known.
“Yeah, completely forgotten. There are a lot of people that are doing this work to help them be remembered now,” Smith said.
Smith connected with many of those people when she began researching the Hello Girls in preparation for her directing role. She also discovered something that shocked and excited her: one of the Hello Girls, Juliette Courtial Smith, was buried in a Sonoma cemetery.
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“How does that happen? It's like she was just sitting there waiting,” Smith said.
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Smith and her daughters decided to bring flowers to the gravesite, but when they got there, they found the plot but no gravestone or any other markings.
“There was nothing there,” Smith said.
Smith decided that was an oversight that needed to be corrected.
So, at the same time she was directing her cast for the "Hello Girls” show, Smith was spreading the word about the need for a grave marker for Sonoma’s own Hello Girl. After months of effort, she was successful.
In September, dozens of people gathered at the St. Francis Solano Cemetery in Sonoma to unveil Juliette Cortial Smith’s headstone.
"It's been the joy and the work of a lifetime," Smith said. “I'm hoping I am a part of creating a legacy for women, myself included, and for my daughters."
