"It was really a kick. We had dancers and singers and piano players and stand-up comics," recalls Tyler. "They were really marvelous girls. They had made up these songs and dances."

Each weekend, the Red Cross took the women to hospitals and bases too small to be visited by professional performers.

"People needed entertainment," says Tyler. "There wasn't much going around."

"We did the Danny Kaye stuff, whatever we could do to entertain them," she says, adding that the isolated troops were easy to please. "They were great audiences. All you needed was two legs and a skirt."

Tyler had studied ballet before coming to Radcliffe in 1941. She performed a dance for the Entertainment Unit, but hit a pair of rainbow striped men's boxers underneath her ballet costume.

"I'd start doing this very formal...dance. You could just hear the moans of these boys," she recalls. "Then I would do something like a handspring and they could see the striped pants."

"It was a lot of fun because they were sure [the dance] was going to be something awful," Tyler says.

One night Tyler performed her handsprings and backflips inside a airplane carrier with pipes hanging from the ceiling.

"I didn't realize how low the top of the room was," she says. "When I came off the stage, the girls said, 'We thought you were going to get hung up. You just missed those pipes."

Tyler's hidden boxers were not the only undergarments which attracted the troops' attention, she remembers.

"One day, Dean Mildred P. Sherman called me up," she

One night in the midst of gas Radcliffefirst-year was forced to drive out to pick her upafter the young woman's secret finance showed upon the family's doorstep.

Following a that incident, Sherman requiredthat a chaperone accompany the Entertainment Uniton all their trips. But Tyler says the chaperonedidn't help matters any.

"The chaperone was the wildest one of thegroup," Tyler recallls. "We were up on stageperforming. But she was out [in the audience]making out with all these boys."

War work continued through vacations school,according to "Adapting to Change," an unpublishedpaper on the Radcliffe Class of 1943 by MeredithWolf '95.

"During the summers, Radcliffe women worked infactories and laboratories to help with the wareffor," Wolf writes.