Feb. 8, 2007
Betty Gumm has volunteered for the American Legion Auxiliary since she married her husband George in 1953, joining a family molded by a tradition of service.
Betty’s family immigrated from Germany and received a land grant in 1843. Betty was born in 1934 and raised on a farm in Thiensville.
George’s father Clarence had served in World War I, and on the morning he died was scheduled to receive a plaque in the afternoon for placing American flags above veterans’ graves for 50 Veterans Days. George’s grandfather fought in the Civil War and had 11 grandsons who served in World War II.
George was the youngest of five boys, John, Clarence Jr., Marvin and Henry. The S/Sgt. Henry F. Gumm Post 486 American Legion is named after Henry, “Hank,” the only grandson to die in combat. His mother Helen received the notice of his death from her brother-in-law, who was a telegraph worker in Jackson.
After the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa died in combat, the Army enacted Sole Survivor policies, to ensure families would not lose entire sets of brothers. As the youngest of his brothers, George was going to be extracted.
“First they had to find him. George was in the 745th tank battalion in Germany,” Gumm said. “He was with Patton’s tanks when they were going through.”
Before he was extracted, George, at age 19, was among the U.S. infantry forces to liberate 30,000 prisoners from the Nazi concentration camp Dachau. His unit also found 20 train cars filled with dead bodies waiting to be incinerated.
“Some people say the Holocaust didn’t happen,” Gumm said. “I’ll tell you it did.”
When an extraction group found George, he didn’t want to give up the fight, Gumm said, but he wasn’t given a choice.
“He wrote Ma a letter,” Gumm said. “‘You won’t see me for a while,’ he said. ‘I’m going to settle this for Hank.’”
Back in Wisconsin, Betty graduated from Cedarburg High School at age 16, and spent a year in the Milwaukee State Teachers College and two years training in a hospital to become an X-ray technician.
Years after the war, at age 19, Betty met George when she was tending bar in Glendale. They were married in 1953, the same year she was certified as an X-ray technician.
“We got engaged on Dec. 7,” Gumm said. “We used to joke that was the beginning of active combat.”
In 1962, George and Betty took over his family’s tavern and restaurant on the corner of County P and Sherman Roads in Jackson. In 1969, her late brother Wayne Heidel and his wife Jeanne took over the bar.
“She’s a wonderful sister-in-law. We’ve alwasy gotten along great,” Jeanne Heidel said. “She even helped us out tending bar for a while after we took over.”
Carrying on her family’s rich tradition of service through 54 years of volunteering, Betty Gumm is currently the Home Chairman in the Auxiliary’s Department of Wisconsin. For the past year, she has coordinated more than 500 volunteers across the state who sew, knit, bake and generally provide veterans with creature comforts.
She’s campaigning with the Auxiliary to restore the use of service flags for families of soldiers. These banners were commonly known as “Sons in the Service” during World War II, but were discontinued during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Helen Gumm, for example, had a banner with five blue stars, one for each of her sons. A silver star denotes a solider wounded in service, and a gold star means a son was killed in action.
Gumm said she’s handed out about 20 blue star banners to families with children currently fighting around the world.
“I see a lot of them in West Bend right now,” Gumm said. “We’re trying to get it back in so anyone who is wounded is entitled to these.”
Gumm worries the burden of the current war in Iraq is being bared by too few. She knows a Washington County woman with a child fighting in Iraq, a child in Afghanistan and a child about to be deployed to North Korea. She remembers growing a victory garden and driving a hay baler at 9 years old during World War II.
“If you wanted to eat, you worked,” she said. “Everybody says about the war being ‘over there.’ How do you think these kids would respond if the war was over here?”
Michael Riebe, adjutant for Post 486, said Betty’s deeds of support are innumerable, from speaking at functions to helping veterans get their full military benefits to volunteering for the Milwaukee VA Hospital. Riebe said her speech at Kettle Moraine High School’s Veterans Day ceremonies brought a two-minute standing ovation for veterans and didn’t leave a dry eye in the house.
“A lot of us have it okay, but there are a lot of veterans who are just down and out and have nothing, and they lack family support. Betty Gumm is a champion for those types of veterans,” Riebe said. “When the government says ‘we will take care of you,’ Betty is one of the people who is seeing to it that the government does take care of these people.”
Betty Gumm has given mammograms since 1977, and now volunteers at evening screenings for the Wisconsin Women’s Wellness program. Having lost her father, brother and sister to cancer, she gives presentations on breast cancer and self examination to many groups.
“I don’t take this as a job because my sister was 50 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and 60 when she died from it,” Gumm said. “With the history of cancer in my family, to me it’s just something that has to be done.”
“I gave a talk one night to eight woman, and I was saying that one in about eight woman is diagnosed with breast cancer over the course of their lives,” Gumm said. Shortly after the talk she got a call from one of the women, who said she had breast cancer. The woman is doing well now.
Betty Gumm has helped pass the tradition of service to younger generations of her family.
“There’s no doubt about the fact she was a large influence on our family,” Heidel said. “She was instrumental in getting me to join the auxiliary, as well as my children and all my seven grandchildren. She’s a very important part of the family still, my daughters and grandaughters have high respect and regard and love for her.”
Betty has a son who is a civilian chaplain at the U.S. military academy at West Point and a grandson who is a civilian chaplain at Fort Drum, New York. Her faith carries her as she devotes even more of her time to volunteering.
“Whatever is going to happen to us, the Lord has this all meted out,” Gumm said.