August 14, 1982

Margaret Heller Himstedt Letzig from Little Rock (Pulaski County), who became the first Arkansas woman to attain officer status during World War II, died in Little Rock. In 1942, Letzig volunteered for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps when she was forty-three years old, received her basic training at Fort Des Moines in Iowa, and served at the Pentagon in Washington DC. She was honorably discharged in 1945 as a first lieutenant from the corps which, by that time, had been made an official part of the U.S. military service as the Women’s Army Corps.