For Irene Clayton, Freedom Is a Family Story

Irene Clayton’s first understanding of America began with a story she inherited.

Her father, George Mitroka, immigrated from Czechoslovakia, passing through Ellis Island after fleeing political persecution. According to Clayton, he left as a teenager after his mother gave him money and told him to walk through the forest to escape the country on foot.

More than a century later, from her daughter’s home in the hills of Pine Plains, Clayton still measures the United States by what it offered him.

At 103, she walks, laughs, and loves playing cards. She has a bright, contagious smile, and her memories come quickly, carrying her from a childhood shaped by immigration to a war that sent her across the world.

As the United States prepares to mark 250 years of independence, Clayton’s life offers a rare vantage point on the country’s promise and its contradictions. She has lived through 103 of those years, moving from the Depression and World War II to the postwar rise of international air travel, marriage, the birth of five children and eight grandchildren, and a quieter life in Pine Plains with a view of America formed less by ceremony than by family history.

“We’re lucky we were here,” she said. “We are not persecuted for our thoughts.”

Her daughter Christine Clayton said that belief became one of her mother’s lasting lessons.

“My mom has instilled in me and my brothers and sisters a love of freedom of thought and belief,” Christine said.

Born Nov. 15, 1922, in Conemaugh, Pa., Clayton grew up in Phillipsburg, N.J., where she graduated from Phillipsburg High School in 1940. Europe was already at war.

Clayton trained as a nurse in Brooklyn and later took a position at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island. She had planned to enter the service when she turned 21.

She also trained at St. John’s University in Brooklyn, where a Department of Nursing had been formed in 1937 within the School of Education. St. John’s was among 1,125 nursing schools nationwide that participated in the Cadet Nurse Corps program, training women to serve in military and civilian hospitals during the war.

Clayton remembers the decision less as a dramatic turning point than as part of the urgency overtaking the country.

“Everybody was getting all hepped up about going into the service,” she said.

She entered an Army program and was sent first to Fort Dix, N.J.

“I wasn’t in it very long when they sent me over to India,” Clayton said.

World War II remains vivid to Clayton not as a clean sequence of dates and places, but as motion: orders, ships, heat, confusion, duty, and young men carried back from dangerous missions.

“Everything was hot at that time, everything went very quickly,” Clayton said. “It was very confusing.”

In India, she served near the air route known as “the Hump,” the perilous passage over the Himalayas used by Allied pilots to move supplies into China. The route was notorious for its altitude, weather, and terrain.

“I took care of the guys who flew it and fell,” Clayton said. “Flying was dangerous then. And so, that’s where we were.”

Her time in India was physically punishing.

“You couldn’t eat anything,” she said. “I mean, I lost a lot of weight, which I didn’t even have.”

But Clayton does not dwell on hardship. To her, the war was mostly a matter of doing what had to be done, even when the reasons and consequences were beyond any one person’s control.

“I mean, Mr. General would come and say we’re doing this or that, and that’s what we would do,” she said.

One of her clearest memories came on her journey back to the United States. Her brother John was serving on Okinawa, still a dangerous place as the war neared its end. As her ship neared the island, Clayton asked the engineer to send him a message.

“I told him I was passing by and just wanted to say hello,” she said.

She did not know then whether the message had reached him. About a year later, when she and her brother saw each other again, he told her that it had.

Both siblings survived the war.

Asked whether she thinks about the war often, Clayton replied quickly.

“Never.”

Clayton returned to a country entering a new era. The military world that had sent her across the Pacific gave way to a civilian world being reshaped by international flight.

According to Clayton, Pan American World Airways was recruiting nurses and servicewomen as they returned to New York, seeking women with training, discipline, and composure for the expanding world of commercial aviation. She went almost directly from Army service into one of the most prestigious and demanding jobs of the postwar era: stewardess.

She graduated from the Pan American World Airways Stewardess School at LaGuardia Field and worked on Constellation Clippers flying to destinations including Bermuda, Lisbon, London, Vienna, and Prague.

Pan Am sent stewardesses to beauty salons in New York City for hair and nails, Clayton recalled. She lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport. The work brought prestige and travel, but it also required discipline. Clayton trained for emergency water landings, known as ditching.

Her Pan Am years placed her in the early age of global aviation, when international flight was still rare and many passengers were famous, wealthy, or powerful. Clayton and her family recalled encounters with Henry Kissinger, the football player Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, and the polar aviator Charlie Blair.

Even in the air, her nursing background remained part of the work. In 1951, Clayton helped care for Antonio Gaidoni, a 10-year-old boy from Celbridge, Ireland, who flew alone from Shannon Airport to Idlewild Airport in New York to receive treatment for polio at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center.

Paralyzed from the waist down after contracting polio at age 3, Antonio was cared for during the crossing by Clayton, then a Pan American World Airways stewardess. After his treatment, Antonio recovered, and Clayton also accompanied him on his return flight to Ireland.

The episode linked the two halves of her early life: the nurse trained by war and the stewardess carrying people across a world that was reopening after it.

Eventually, Clayton returned to nursing. She married Samuel C.E. Clayton, an orthopedic surgeon who had also served during the war as a doctor on a ship. The couple settled for many years on Long Island, where they raised their five children.

She loved Long Island, she said, because it was where her children went to school and where her husband practiced medicine.

About 15 years ago, Clayton moved to Pine Plains. She lives on a property with her daughter Barbara. Christine lives just down the road. On most nights, the family plays a round of cards.

Christine said her mother’s longevity is not mysterious to those who know her habits.

“I think she is so healthy in mind and body because of both her diet and exercise,” Christine said. “She always ate healthy food, lots of veggies. Very few processed foods. She loves chocolate. She was also a walker, for many years.”

But Clayton’s long life has not softened her view of history. The country that gave her family refuge also sent her to war, and she speaks about both with gratitude, realism, and little sentimentality.

Asked whether World War II taught later generations anything lasting, she was blunt.

“I don’t think we’ve learned a thing,” she said, noting that there have been many wars since.

“There’s always a lot of politics involved,” she said. “And so you just had to go along with it, because there wasn’t anything you could do.”

That tension runs through Clayton’s memories: gratitude for what the country gave her family, and a clear-eyed understanding of what power can do to ordinary people. Her father’s escape taught her what America could offer. Her own century of life taught her that freedom can be fragile.

As the nation turns 250, Clayton is thinking less about the anniversary itself than about the people who will live with what comes after it: her children, her grandchildren, and the generations still learning what must be protected.

“That’s who I’m concerned about,” she said.