Louise was an only child, adored by both her parents, and the one thing they insisted on was that she studied hard, got a great education, and did well in school. Very little else mattered to them, and Louise had devoted herself to her studies accordingly. Her parents had had several requests to allow her to model in Paris from the time she was very young, since color was not an issue in France, as it was in the States. Her parents had declined every opportunity, which frustrated Louise in her teens, but by the time she entered nursing school at eighteen, modeling no longer interested her. She was a very beautiful young woman. She was twenty-one when she graduated from nursing school, and twenty-two when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

She had objected frequently, to her father, about hospital facilities being segregated, but it was something she had grown up with and was used to. It seemed profoundly wrong to her, but her parents said simply that the time had not yet come to change that. They hoped it would one day. North Carolina was their home and the place where Louise had grown up.

Louise profoundly shocked both her parents when she enlisted in the army as a nurse in January of 1942. Her father strenuously objected when she told them it was what she wanted to do. The United States Armed Forces were notoriously prejudiced and segregated, and he didn’t want his daughter exposed to ignorant racial prejudice, slurs, and abuse. He did everything to convince her not to enlist, but Louise was a strong girl with a bright mind and her own opinions, and she refused to be deterred. She said if racial prejudice was going to change one day, then brave positions would have to be taken, and she was determined to serve her country like any other American man or woman.