World War II may be a far-off event in history for some. For Kay Martin Britto, 88, the war forever changed the fabric of her family.
Born in 1936, Kay was only 5 when the United States entered the war in 1941. Her family, devoted parishioners of St. James Church in Falls Church, had sent their seven other children to St. James Catholic School, and young Kay was no exception. The school and parish communities immersed themselves in the war effort on the home front. Kay remembered saving up money to buy war bond stamps to fill a stamp book. Each stamp cost 25 cents. Once the book was filled, she exchanged it at school for a war bond.
The parish community’s fundraising was so successful, they purchased a jeep for U.S. troops. Kay remembered being the lucky student selected to hand an honorary certificate to a military official on the day of the presentation.
Her family also participated in lifting morale overseas. “My father was a journalist and he would send a newsletter to the St. James men at war,” she said. “In the newsletter, he would talk about different people that they knew, people who had been their classmates or people from church.”
But the Martin family sacrificed much. Kay’s six brothers were sent to serve around the world in different branches of the military. Two never returned home.
“When someone was injured or killed, they sent an officer to the home to tell (the family),” Kay said. “I would look out the window at the front of our house and see this khaki-colored car pull up. And it was someone coming to tell us that something bad had happened.”
The khaki car would pull into the Martins’ driveway multiple times over the years. “If I saw this car pull up, in my head, I would be praying and say, ‘Let it just be someone wounded, not somebody killed,’ ” she said.
In 1943, her parents were notified that their son Jacques was missing in action. After James Martin’s letters to his son were returned, marked “deceased,” they were told that Jacques had been killed after his ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic Sea. The next year, their son Paul was wounded in the invasion of Normandy, France, on D-Day. He would be killed two months later in France.
Prior to Paul’s death, Kay’s parents sent him a photo of Kay holding a service flag with several blue stars. During the war, families would hang service flags in their homes with blue stars representing each child in service. A gold star would replace a blue one for a child who was killed.
When Paul received the photo, he wrote back to the family and to Kay, “I got the picture of you with the flag, and you look kind of worried. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
“When you read them in retrospect, you think, ‘Oh, this is so sad,’ ” Kay said.
The Martin family became a double gold star family. They later dedicated one of the St. James stained glass windows, an image of St. Christopher, to Paul and Jacques.
Family life was never the same again. “It colored my elementary years,” Kay said. Still, after the war, Kay said her childhood became more normal.
She attended Immaculata Seminary in Washington for high school and went on to graduate from Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, today the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg.
She met her husband, Nelson Britto, when he was a college junior at a graduation party at Georgetown University in Washington. She asked him if he was a graduate. He joked, “No, I failed.” Over their 64 years of marriage, the couple would have five children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Nelson supported his family working at IBM, while Kay went on to earn a master’s degree in library sciences from The Catholic University of America in 1980.
Kay worked in numerous libraries over the years and enjoyed leading story hour for preschoolers as a children’s librarian.
She felt called to serve in big and small ways. While the family lived in Richmond, she learned of a new opportunity for women to lector. She immediately signed up but was told that the position required her to cantor as well. She continued, regardless. Later, when the family lived in Fairfax, she signed up as an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion at St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax and delivered communion to the sick at Fair Oaks Hospital.
But Kay’s most proud accomplishment was serving as a foster mother for four months to a baby boy in the 1960s. She said she often thinks about him. “I could have passed him or gone to church, and he could have been an altar boy,” she said. “When I worked in the library in Arlington, I thought, ‘He could walk in here and check out books, and I wouldn’t know he was the same child.’ ”
Over the years, Kay has attended daily Mass. She said her dedication to the faith and parish community can be traced back to her family and her Catholic education at St. James School. “I just like going to church,” she said with a laugh.
