Jovita Tellez had graduated from Luling High School as World War II raged. She vowed to do her bit. In her case, it would be Navy service.

“I heard countless times that her older sister did not want her to join and said that she would join in her place,” said her daughter, Nancy Marin. “Mom, as she told me, said, ‘You can join if you want, but I’m going to join, I have to do something.’”

Tellez enlisted in the WAVES, the acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service in 1945 at age 21. She tried to join a year earlier, after graduating from high school in 1944, but the Navy had filled its WAVES quota and she had to wait.

“When I told my father I was going to join the Navy, he supported my decision and responded in Spanish, ‘It is a job worth doing,’” a Navy history quoted Tellez.

One of the last surviving WAVES, she died May 18 at age 100 and was buried Wednesday with military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. 

The idea of being part of the war perhaps grew from being a first-generation American, the daughter of parents who left Mexico for the United States around the turn of the 20th century. She was sworn in at the post office in downtown San Antonio and trained for seven weeks at USS Hunter Naval Training Center in the Bronx, N.Y., with graduation coming just before V-J Day.

The war over, Tellez and her fellow WAVES were given what the Navy calls a “Memorable Day” leave and went to Manhattan, where tens of thousands of celebrants filled the streets. Tellez recalled joining crowds that formed large circles made up of military of all branches, as well as civilians.

“We cried, laughed and sang,” the Navy history quoted her as saying. “I was kissed by so many sailors, I don’t know how many.”

Jovita Enriquez Tellez was among 87,000 women who served in the WAVES, the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve, from the time it was created in July 1942 to September 1946. In a military that swelled to 16 million over the course of the war, it was a small component but a big step for women, who had never played an active role in the armed forces in those numbers.

Standing next to her mother’s casket, Marin quoted Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “We could not win the war without the aid of women in uniform.”

“Mom was one of them,” Marin, 72, said.

“Navy WAVES definitely paved the way and blazed the trail for women like me to serve in the Navy on active duty with all benefits because so many like Jovita and other WWII women volunteered knowing they would not receive full benefits like male counterparts,” said retired Navy Command Master Chief Octavia Harris.

As the Texas ambassador for the Military Women’s Memorial, Harris, herself a path-breaking senior enlistee in the Navy now living in San Antonio, awarded Tellez a proclamation naming her a living legend. 

“Jovita and WAVES didn’t have many rights white male Americans enjoyed, like voting, owning homes and even their own bank accounts. But she was driven to serve her country,” Harris added, and noted that those in the WAVES and Women’s Army Corps were so successful, women kept serving in ever larger numbers.

“Jovita must have been one of the first Hispanic women to serve as a WWII WAVE so her service, in my opinion, speaks even more volumes in the history and trails she blazed.”

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In peacetime, Tellez stayed in uniform, working at the Washington Navy Yard, where she was a ship servicewoman third class working in warehouses and at the Ship Service Exchange in customer service and shipping. A year later, the WAVES were all but demobilized.

Tellez, armed with an honorable discharge, Good Conduct Medal and the American Campaign and Victory medals, came to San Antonio in July 1946 and used her GI Bill to learn stenography at Durham Business College. The next year she met Tony Tellez, a veteran himself who’d served in the Army Air Corps, and they married on Nov. 26, 1949.

Tony and Jovita Tellez had four children — Marin, Cynthia Tellez, Anthony Tellez and Gail Anderson.

Marin describes Tellez as “the most caring, loving, tender, attentive mother anybody could ask for,” recalling how her mom put the kids’ socks over a gas heater in the bathroom during the winter and then slipped them on their feet. “She tucked us into bed like a military bed. Everything was tight, tight, tight.”

Tony Tellez worked at Kelly AFB, did bookkeeping and tax returns for people and spent time as a Realtor. Jo Tellez, as people knew her, went to work at Kelly herself when Marin was about 15. She was in logistics, packing and shipping, a job she held until retiring.

But Tellez wasn’t done. She immersed herself in ministry work, serving in the Legion of Mary, a lay Catholic organization, and visited a San Antonio hospital every Tuesday, a routine that went on for 20 years. She also visited the local jail, offering to pray with families visiting inmates.

Deeply religious, Tellez went to Mass every day for 35 years unless it rained. She never drove, instead walking to a nearby church on weekdays and having her husband drive her on Sundays. 

Marin said her mother didn’t have hobbies like making jewelry, sewing or gardening.

“People would tell me, ‘Your mom heard that I was sick and reached me and told me she was praying for me.’”

A little notebook on Tellez’s bed listed every person who had a prayer request — with Navy precision. If it was cancer or family trouble, Tellez dated it. 

“If the person died, she dated it. You know, things like that. And so her morning prayers, she would then pray over over the notebook for those people in her notebook,” Marin said.