In 1943, Eva Brown was working as a young teacher in a small town in Arkansas when Navy recruitment posters caught her attention.

“Join the WAVES: Your Country Needs You Now,” and “It’s a Woman’s War too!” they said.

She took a day of sick leave, rode the bus to Little Rock and enlisted.

Brown, one of the few female World War II veterans in the area, died last month at 93.

She didn’t want a memorial service because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

That’s typical of a woman who lived a life of quiet service to others that went far beyond her time in the Navy.

“She had a big, loving heart,” said friend Butch Bailey, president of the Oak Harbor Area Council Navy League. “She was a genuine person who impacted a lot of people’s lives.”

Eva Marie Murdock was born Oct. 13, 1922 in Maynard, Ark. Her parents were tenant farmers, and the family barely scraped by during the Great Depression.

Brown talked later of warm memories from her childhood, such as bumping home in the back of horse-drawn wagon from church, staring at the stars.

She first spotted the man she would marry, Raymond Brown, at her high school graduation. He was standing at the back of the room, handsome in his U.S. Army uniform.

She enlisted at age 21 in the Navy WAVES — Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

In an interview with the Whidbey News-Times last year, she said she joined because all the men around her, including her brother, were enlisting. She wanted to serve her country, too.

“The purpose of our being accepted in the military was so we could replace the men at the desk so they could go to sea duty,” she said. “Some of them were happy to be released from working at a desk. Of course, there were some that kindly resented us.”

The majority were grateful for women joining the ranks and her experience was a good one, Brown said. She worked as a hospital apprentice first class.

After two years of service, she used the G.I. Bill to finish her degree. She married Raymond and went on to teach elementary school for the next 35 years in Arkansas and Illinois.

Brown followed her only son, Jim Brown, to Oak Harbor in 1986 to be closer to family.

She continued to take an active role in the community and the Oak Harbor Church of Christ. She served as a volunteer for multiple organizations, including for Whidbey General Hospital’s hospice program and the Senior Center.

She had a special heart for children, Bailey said. Any program at the church involving children, she stepped up to help.

Brown especially loved her three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, her son said.

Jim Brown remembers his mother as loving but sometimes stern. She was well-organized, which he said likely served her well as a teacher. She was self-reliant and didn’t want to be a burden on others.

Attention of any sort embarrassed her. Last year she and two other female World War II veterans were selected to serve as grand marshals in Oak Harbor’s veteran’s day parade. She told a reporter she thought the honor was at first a mistake, and downplayed her service, pointing instead to her fellows.

“I gave so little to the military compared with what it gave me,” she said.

Before she passed, Brown wrote her own obituary, leaving a blank for the date. It is a no-nonsense account of her life.

“The most important thing to her was serving her church and serving God,” Jim Brown said. “Her main goal in life was to help others.”