Against All Odds: the Story of Elinor Powell and Frederick Alber
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1: Arrival
The Arizona sun beat down mercilessly as Second Lieutenant Elinor Powell stepped off the transport truck at Fort Huachuca. At twenty-three years old, she had imagined many things about her service in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but nothing had prepared her for this.
Milton, Massachusetts—her hometown—felt like another planet now. There, she had grown up insulated from the worst of America’s racial hatred, attending integrated schools, making white friends, living a life her grandmother could never have imagined when she fled slavery via the Underground Railroad decades before. Elinor’s father had served in World War I with pride, and she had followed his example with the same sense of duty burning in her chest.
But Arizona was different.
“Colored Only,” the signs read. At the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Phoenix, wearing her crisp Army uniform with its officer’s insignia gleaming in the afternoon light, the waiter had looked straight through her as if she were invisible. When she’d persisted, he’d simply said, “We don’t serve your kind here, ma’am,” the word “ma’am” dripping with sarcasm that made her uniform meaningless.
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