WWII codebreaker, school integration advocate Edith Reynolds White dies at 96

When Forrest “Hap” White was young, a naval officer in a limousine pulled up outside his house in Norfolk’s Algonquin Park neighborhood in full gold braid uniform with a box of chocolates under his arm.
The officer came to the door and asked for Lt. Reynolds. Hap was confused, not knowing a lieutenant or a Reynolds in his home. Then he realized it was his mother. Reynolds was her maiden name.
It was the first time Edith Reynolds White’s family learned about her time in the Navy’s secretive and successful women’s codebreaking unit during World War II.
She and the Navy officer who came to the house chatted about the last time they’d met, during the war. He had traveled to Washington with a dripping wet Japanese codebook recovered out of a sinking submarine. Edith, a shift commander, strung up the book on a clothesline and started cracking the code with the other women in her unit. It would help with efforts in the South Pacific, including the Battles of Leyte Gulf and Philippine Sea.