Mildred Randall Piper’s parents wanted her to become a teacher or doctor, so she enrolled in pre-med classes at Texas A&M. Then came the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I thought the hell with that, I don’t even spell good,” she told The Maui News in 2014. “The Navy came along and I joined the Navy.”
Piper, who maintained an independent streak throughout her long life, died Jan. 13 at her home in Haiku, Maui. She was 98.
Born Jan. 24, 1920, in Iredell, Texas, Piper joined the Navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) at age 21 in July 1942, the same month President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Navy Women’s Reserve Act into law, creating the division to free up men for sea duty.
She served as a bookkeeper and storekeeper in Tennessee, Illinois and Hawaii through 1945.
Arriving in the islands in December 1942 aboard the S.S. Lurline, she was first stationed in Puunene, Maui, and then transferred to Pearl Harbor, where she met Philip A. Piper.
They married in November 1945 at St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Her husband went on to become a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Honolulu. He died Jan. 18, 1997.
One of her prized possessions was a warrant officer’s desk salvaged from the USS Oklahoma, which was torpedoed and capsized in the Pearl Harbor attack. Piper restored the waterlogged desk and kept it for 70 years.
“When we married, we didn’t have a lot,” she told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2016. “My husband and his crew built the best tables from salvaged wood. They brought in the desk and it was going to be discarded. Furniture was at a premium so it became ours, and we were delighted with it.”
Before she died, Piper had hoped to donate the desk to the World War II Valor in the Pacific Monument.
On Maui, Piper was the bookkeeper for Tri Isle Realty &Development Co., owned by her daughter, Donna Ting, for 35 years. She also was a former president of the Maui Chapter of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association and a past Worthy Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star Mid-Pacific Chapter on Oahu.
Ting said gardening was her mother’s passion, and travel a close second. Despite her advanced years, Piper recently undertook trips to India, Scotland, Canada, Singapore and the Amazon rain forest.
Piper is additionally survived by four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Services will be held 2:30 p.m. Feb. 17 at Makawao Union Church, 1445 Baldwin Ave. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to La‘a Kea Foundation, P.O. Box 790994, Paia, HI 96779, or a favorite charity.
