This is part of a series. It was submitted by Nancy Bertrand.
Catherine was born in Melrose on August 14, 1920. She was the eldest of seven children of Kirk H. and Harriet E. (Chesley) Titus, Jr.
She graduated from Wakefield High in 1936. Using a gift of money that her Grandmother Titus pulled from a cedar chest, Catherine was able to attend and graduate from the Melrose Hospital School of Nursing as a Registered Nurse in 1942.
After graduation from nursing school, Catherine attempted to join the Army to serve in World War II. Being a small woman under five feet tall, the Army initially rejected her. When the country’s need became bigger than her size, Catherine was able to join the US Army as a Second Lieutenant.
After training in Texas, and in spite of Army restrictions that she only serve in New England, Catherine boarded the Queen Elizabeth, now a US troop carrier, and sailed for England. After the invasion of France on D-Day, she followed the soldiers to France where she ran a ward in a field hospital outside of Paris. For her service in the European African Middle Eastern Theatre Campaign she was awarded the Bronze Star.
She was later promoted to First Lieutenant. (Catherine liked to kid her brothers, who also served in WWIl and/or Korea that they had to obey her, as she outranked them all.)
While she was preparing to follow the troops to Japan after the German surrender, the Japanese surrendered, and so ended Catherine’s service to her country. The nation no longer needed a woman less than five feet tall.
Her brother Babe introduced Catherine to her future husband John Landers. They were married on August 29, 1947. They purchased a house on Madison Ave. in Greenwood. In the early 1950’s with a third child due, Catherine and John decided with the assistance of her father and brothers to build a new house on the vacant lot next door. Catherine pulled out a drawing of her dream house, a two-story colonial, but her brothers convinced her that everyone was building “ranch houses.” That was one of the last times that Catherine would give up on her wishes.
With the birth of their fourth child Catherine spent the remainder of her life devoted to raising her children.
For most of her life, Catherine lived in Wakefield, where she delighted in pointing out the houses that her family had built in town, including her little home of sixty years behind the Greenwood School.
Following the death of her husband John in 1975, Catherine established the Landers Family Fund Scholarship at the Citizens’ Scholarship Foundation of Wakefield to honor her late husband and his cousin Miss Katherine Landers, an elementary school teacher in Wakefield.
Near the end her life Catherine became an early financial supporter of the Wakefield World War II Monument Committee’s campaign to replace the aging wooden WWII monument with a new granite structure. She wanted to make sure that the six Titus veterans and all the other Wakefield service men and women of World War II would be permanently remembered.
The Lt. Catherine (Titus) Landers Fund for Nursing was established by her family in loving memory to continue her support of higher education, and with the stated preference that the scholarship be renewable and awarded to an aspiring nursing student.
Her son also donated the flagpole at the Hartshorne House in honor of his mother’s love of her country, and of her home town.
The Wakefield Historical Society’s “Wakefield’s Women” series will feature a different story every day through Women’s History Month, and will also be posted on the blog at our website, wakefieldhistory.org. Many of the stories will also be featured in the Wakefield Daily Item.