Pair reunites in Triangle 65 years after a Marine gave a little girl a doll

A Marine is walking down a dusty road in Guam shortly after its liberation in 1944.

Pfc. Richard Washburn of Denver soon spots a frightened 4-year-old hanging onto the folds of her mother’s dress.

Washburn gets down on one knee and hands the little girl, whose name he doesn’t know, a rag doll and continues on.

That simple act brought a smile to the girl’s face that Washburn says he never forgot.

National Museum of the Marine Corps docent and retired Marine Barry Colassard of Lake Ridge just happened to sit next to that little girl, Natty Calvo, on a bus in Guam as part of a Reunion of Honor Tour to Iwo Jima. He was so touched by the tale that he vowed to incorporate it into every tour he leads at the museum.

“I want people to know Marines as I know them,” he said.

Colassard told the story to the Women Marines Association when they toured the museum last April. To his surprise, one of the visitors, Lynn Giaudrone, said she knew Washburn.

“I was here for lunch with the Women Marines,” she said. “I asked a question and put it all together with Barry.”

When Giaudrone returned to her California home, she visited Washburn and told him she heard his story while touring the museum. That led Washburn to write Colassard a letter in which he said giving Calvo the doll was simply an act of kindness during the darkest of times.

“Too often the stories of war tell only the horrors of combat,” Washburn wrote. “That may be necessary but it is not all that transpires on and at the battlefield. Nearly all Marines carry with them a loneliness and desire to create a feeling to bring some joy into the lives that have been subjected to carnage enveloping their lives. What I did was something out of heart and opportunity.”

Today, Washburn is 86 and blind. Calvo, 68, is a grandmother of 13 who has recently been diagnosed with cancer.

The pair reunited for the first time back in 2001, and thanks to the Women Marines Association and the Third Marine Division Association, they had a chance to spend some time together this week at the museum in Triangle.

After touring the museum with Colassard on Thursday, Washburn recounted that after he gave Calvo the doll he was called into his commanding officer’s office. A reporter wanted to know all about the rag doll and the little girl.

“The story went everywhere, to the New York Times and the radio,” he said with a chuckle. “My dad was in the hospital, and my mom sent the rag doll and used it to answer my questions about the nurses.”

In a poem that she sent along with the doll, Washburn’s mother said it had hair like his sister’s, eyes like his girlfriend’s and a stomach like hers.

Calvo said she never forgot the kindhearted Marine, although it took more than a half-century for the pair to meet again.

“I never forgot, but it took us 56 years to reconnect,” she said.

Washburn and his wife, Dorothy, visited Guam as part of a reunion tour in 2000 with Military Historical Tours. Before arriving on the island, Washburn contacted television stations and newspapers in Guam in his quest to find his “doll lady,” leaving behind his e-mail address in the hopes she would get in touch with him.

Although he got no response while in Guam, when Washburn returned home he had an e-mail from Calvo and the friendship that began with the gift of a rag doll was renewed.

They exchanged e-mails and phone calls, meeting in person in 2001 when Calvo was in California for a work-related trip.

Calvo said she took the doll everywhere. It eventually became so dirty that her mother threw it away.

“I was a little girl. I didn’t know I could have washed it,” Calvo said wistfully.

But when Calvo and Washburn reunited eight years ago, he had another gift for her — a rag doll to replace the one he had given her back in 1944.

Calvo said the new doll will be treasured by her family when she is no longer here.

Military editor Julia LeDoux can be reached at 703-369-5718.