A Memorable Visit to the Club
Here, Nadia Tira introduces us to entertainment clubs in Second World War USA, and explains how they offered new opportunities for veterans with disabilities.

During the Second World War, several entertainment clubs were set up to serve and entertain troops still in or returning to the United States. My project analyses how disability was experienced in these places. The clubs I am looking at for my thesis were the ones run by the USO (United Service Organizations), which had a more religious and conservative background, and the famous Hollywood and State Door Canteens, where many of the people volunteering to entertain the troops were celebrities from the cinema and theatre world, something that added a layer of spectacularity to a memorable night.
When these entertainment places were created, they had regular servicemen and, many times, servicewomen in mind. The dances were its most famous and popular attraction, with troops and women volunteers (known as hostesses) jitterbugging to the latest hits or chatting about what the men missed the most from back home. However, as the war wore on and more disabled and wounded troops started returning home, they too visited these clubs and canteens, especially in communities near military hospitals or big cities like New York.
Often, these outings were the first time these newly disabled (or wounded) men and women were outside of either the hospital or the military. So, the trips to these clubs were their first interactions with civilians and provided them a glimpse of what their postwar life could be like.[1]
Newspaper reports of these visits related how some of the men overcame their fears and anxieties with the help of the hostesses, such as George Brisco, a serviceman who had lost a leg and was too self-conscious to go to the dancefloor until Deanna Durbin persuaded him.[2]
Ultimately, these experiences were these men’s first test of life in civilian clothes post-disablement and reflected a desire for them to regain their place in American society.
[1] Hortense Morton, ‘Stage Door Canteen Here Presses N.Y. for Honors’, The San Francisco Examiner, 1 April 1945, p. 63.
[2] Edith Gwynn, ‘Inside Hollywood’, The News Tribune, 20 December 1942, p. 38.

Nadia Tira is a second-year PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her PhD project deals with the experiences of disability at several entertainment clubs for servicemen during the Second World War and in the late 1940s in the United States of America.