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Mar. 1—Julia Parsons knows how to keep a secret. She was tight-lipped about one for more than 50 years. Parsons, 99, of Forest Hills, was a code-breaker in World War II. She served in the U.S. Navy's WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), after graduating from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in 1942. Following cryptology training at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School, ...

GREENSBURG, Pa. (Tribune News Service) — Julia Parsons knows how to keep a secret. She was tight-lipped about one for more than 50 years. Parsons, 99, of Forest Hills, was a code-breaker in World War II. She served in the U.S. Navy's WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), after graduating from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in 1942. Following cryptology training at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School, Parsons was sent to Washington to be a code-breaker. She worked on one of the first computers to decode German U-boat message traffic sent via the Enigma machine, a...

Julia Parsons holds a World War II-era photo of herself. (Courtesy Veterans Breakfast Club in Pittsburgh) 1 Mar 2021 A World War II code breaker who helped hunt down Nazi U-boats turns 100 on Tuesday and will be honored with a parade past her house in Pittsburgh. Julia Parsons, who served in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or Navy WAVES, said her work was aided enormously by the sheer arrogance of the German High Command in believing that the allies couldn't possibly break their vaunted "Enigma" code despite warnings from their own U-Boat commanders. She told Military.com ...

Mitzi Trachtenberg. Photo: Dennis Letbetter One year ago (Feb. 8, 2020), right before the world started spinning backward, Mitzi Trachtenberg (née Tyrnauer) took her last breath surrounded by her children, their partners and many of her grandchildren. She was 90. “Mitz,” always one for drama and good lighting, passed away with a full moon illuminating a wildly windy Bay Area night. Her loved ones imagined that they’d have a memorial service for her and publish her obit but events intruded. Here we are a year later. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, on Nov. 29, 1929, a month after the start of th...

PITTSBURGH —  I can’t wait until I’m 45 and get all those great parts. --Elizabeth Hartman, in a 1971 interview. The first reports of 43-year-old Elizabeth Hartman’s June 10 suicide here were sketchy. Homicide detectives weren’t sure just who the slight woman was who had thrown herself from the fifth-story window of her efficiency apartment. A handful of neighbors volunteered what they knew. She was an unemployed actress, they thought, who had starred long ago in some movie with Sidney Poitier. She would have hated that description. Even though she was subsisting on disability i...