Hazel Turner waitress to Tuskegee Airmen

OZARK—The year was 1942.

Hazel Matthews Turner, then valedictorian of the first graduating class of Ozark Colored School, had determined after a visit with the late D.A. Smith to Tuskegee University that she wanted to study where Booker T. Washington’s Lifting the Veil of Ignorance statue rested as a sign of hope for blacks wanting an education.

The young Turner was accepted into the college after her parents made a $100 payment for her to start the commercial dietetics program.

She paid for the rest of her education by serving as a waitress to the Tuskegee Airmen instructors, a group of officials who not even Turner imagined would receive recognition through both honors and films for training the first black military pilots for World War II.

According to the U.S. Air Force, the term “Tuskegee airmen” involves all service members – including the instructors – who worked at the Tuskegee Army Air Field that was established in the 1940s after blacks were unbarred from flying in the U.S. military.

Turner said she helped serve the instructors around 5 a.m. each day for breakfast in a separate dining hall from the students before training. She prepared bag lunches and then served dinner to them in the evenings, taking breaks between the meals to attend class.

Back then, Turner said neither the waitresses nor the instructors seemed to think anything of the role the airmen played in the nation’s history.

Today, however, after movies like The Tuskegee Airmen and Red Tails, Turner said the recognition is well-deserved. She said she was proud to have served even a simple role in some of their lives, although she’s never seen either of the movies all the way through.

“We served them regular food, had regular, personal conversations, and oh, did they leave good tips when we put our cups out on pay day once a month! That was our spending money because everything else went toward our education,” Turner said.

“If they needed special dishes for whatever reason, I made sure they got what they needed. My training there paved the way for me to make a living elsewhere before I went on to study education.”

Turner, 87, spoke Tuesday of some of the airmen and instructors who were stationed at Fort Rucker after the war and resided in the Wiregrass. Mr. Wright, she remembered, was heavily involved in local civil rights. Mr. Crenshaw met with Turner’s family during the time she traveled to Virginia and North Carolina with her husband.

Turner also made her own history. After finishing at Tuskegee in 1947, she moved to Virginia, where she worked as a dietician at a black hospital in Roanoke.

She then caught word of scholarships offered to black teachers to attend school at Virginia State University. She received the scholarship and went on to study for her Master’s degree at West Carolina University, where she experienced integration in some of her courses.

“The instructors were very nice but some of the classmates weren’t,” she said. “Sometimes, they’d ask if I wanted a banana or say mean things. Back then, all we knew was segregation and all we knew was to work.

“We hoped and we prayed for something different but we didn’t know what different was. When we knew different, we strived to be that difference and were able to influence others.”

That “difference” was an opportunity Turner received after graduating to work as a reading supervisor in the state. After implementing a program that involved computers in a high school, Turner said the classmates that teased her most visited to learn more about the program.

Turner retired from teaching and returned home to Ozark to care for her father in 1996.

The kindness she remembers as a child remains in the small city, she said.

But Turner said she wished the mentalities of some younger generations would change.

“Young people still need goals,” she said. “My parents held it over my head that I needed to do well. I always told my children that if you were struggling with something, you buddy with someone who gets it and with people going in the same direction that you want to go. Don’t let setbacks get you down.”

“People ask me about longevity or how I’ve lived to be so old, as some of them say. My only answer is that I live by faith.”