Plant a Garden,
Write to a Friend
Above: Janice Robb Anderson ’42 on Swarthmore’s campus. Today she enjoys reading, volunteering, and planting vegetable gardens.
orn into an Army family, Janice Robb Anderson ’42 moved frequently as a child. Her father, a West Point graduate, was in the Army Corps of Engineers, and the family lived in several places in the East and Midwest, as well as in the Panama Canal Zone.
When she arrived at Swarthmore in 1938, she studied Latin and Greek and played “too much bridge.”
“All the boys were pacifists,” according to Anderson. “The minute Pearl Harbor was bombed, all the boys became patriots and enlisted.”
After college, she, too, joined the war effort by working for IBM.
Anderson trained on their machines, IBM’s giant precursors to the computer. She taught Women’s Army Corps members and government workers to use the equipment.
When World War II ended, Anderson shipped out to Asia in 1946. “After two months at sea, we limped into Yokohama,” she says. When she arrived, Tokyo had been badly bombed, and the survivors were starting from scratch.
“In the early days after the war, Japanese people had to wear wooden clogs, because they didn’t have leather for shoes,” says Anderson. “They packed trains to go to the countryside to scavenge for food. It was terrible.”
Soon after arriving, she was assigned to work for the general who was the chief surgeon of the Far East Command working under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. She worked as a secretary and then as a feature writer for the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes.
She met Bill Anderson when he arrived to testify in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Bill was born in Hankow, China, part of Wuhan; he and his widowed mother fled to Hong Kong in 1937 after the massacre that became known as the Rape of Nanking. He was captured during the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941 and survived four years as a prisoner of war, including time in a labor camp at a locomotive factory.
The couple married in Tokyo in 1947 and moved to Hong Kong, where Bill Anderson was general manager of the National Cash Register (NCR) Hong Kong. “I stopped working to raise our three daughters,” Anderson says.
courtesy janice robb anderson ’42
“What is lovelier than getting a handwritten note from someone you haven’t heard from for a long time? What joy! When you get old, you long for friendship,” says Janice Robb Anderson ’42.
They spent 13 years in Hong Kong, returning to Tokyo in 1960. She studied Japanese, helped Japanese teachers and students by teaching English, and was active in social clubs for expats and Japanese women.
After 12 years in Tokyo, Bill became CEO of NCR and the family moved to Dayton, Ohio. Bill died at age 102, after 72 years of marriage.
Now 103, Anderson lives in Palo Alto, Calif., where she keeps active with book and bridge clubs.
When people ask, “What’s your secret?” Anderson has a ready answer.
“I’ve always loved vegetables. Nobody had to tell me to eat my vegetables as a child. I not only ate my vegetables, if there were any leftover vegetables, I ate them, too!” She planted a big vegetable garden in Ohio, and later in California.
“People thought I was crazy to be down there on my knees in the vegetable garden, but they’re dead and I’m alive. I always eat my vegetables first.”
She enjoys volunteering her time to tutor people in English, delighting in teaching English idioms.
Anderson’s eyesight is still good, and she often reads two or three books simultaneously. She plans “to read every one of those famous books banned in Florida,” she says.
Her advice to younger people: “Keep in good touch with dear, old friends.” She’s thinking of starting a new club focused on everybody writing monthly to one old friend.
“What is lovelier than getting a handwritten note from someone you haven’t heard from for a long time? What joy! When you get old, you long for friendship.”
Looking back, Anderson regrets she didn’t get a Ph.D. and teach Latin. And she is glad that more students now are studying it than when she was in school. “Good discipline for the mind,” she says.
“When I was younger, I always thought that in my old age, I would become a vegetarian. The question is, ‘how old is old?’” asks Anderson.
“I just haven’t quite gotten there yet.”