It might seem implausible at first to see former Potter farm girl and Nebraska Wesleyan graduate Doloris Coulter Cogan smiling over the completion of her first book.

Consider both her age and the book’s title. She’s 84. The book, published in April, is “We Fought the Navy and Won.”

Don’t be fooled.

As Cogan returns to her alma mater for homecoming weekend, this one-time debating whiz from the class of 1945 is prepared to retrace the whirlwind path that took her to the front lines of the fight to wrest the Pacific island of Guam from the control of the U.S. Navy and restore it to civilian rule after World War II.

Cogan was moving quickly on the career path as the U.S. regained control of a strategic, 30-mile-long dot far out in the Pacific, used it as a staging area to bomb Japan into submission and placed Guam’s 21,000 inhabitants on an indefinite timetable of military rule.

She got her master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1946 and joined Wesleyan chum Betty Winquest at the Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Suddenly, she was the editor of its Guam Echo, flown once a month to the island, and of the institute’s monthly newsletter, devoted to the large portion of the world’s population living in colonial orbit.

She was 21.

Fortunately, Cogan saved copies of all those mimeographed newspapers and newsletters. When she brushed the dust off them 60 years later, she saw a book in the making.

“This book is pure history that nobody else could have written,” she said.

But a woman who would later launch a successful public relations career with Pepperidge Farm — astronauts took the company’s bread to the moon — and Alka-Seltzer maker Miles Laboratories, wasn’t content to tie these periodicals together into a mere chronology.

“When I read them 60 years later, they read like a mystery. And I wrote this to read like a novel.”

Included in the cast of characters is U.S. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, intent on preserving Navy control in Guam, and Cogan’s boss, John Collier, and Collier’s anthropologist wife, Laura Thompson, who were just as intent on allowing Guamanians more voice in governing themselves.

The kicker is that a Potter farm girl is both an actor and producer of this real-life script.

In June 1951, Cogan, then 26, stepped down from an airplane, a delegation of one on her first trip to Guam, to be greeted by B.J. Bordallo, longtime leader in the Guam Congress, as well as the island’s superintendent and assistant superintendent of schools.

“Welcome home,” Bordallo says in the very first words of a book subtitled “Guam’s Quest for Democracy.”

The landmarks of life leading up to and away from this seminal experience all add up if you listen closely.

Doloris Cogan went to Columbia because she craved the wartime broadcasting prominence of Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid.

She felt drawn to a job with international flavor because she’d taken night classes about imperialism and world affairs.

Her husband’s career and the birth of three sons turned her into a stay-at-home mom. And divorce took her into a two-decade stint in the public relations business when the sons were 11, 9 and 3.

“It was the hardest thing I ever did,” she said.

But in her own career realm, and as seen now from her retirement vantage point in Elkhart, Ind., the most meaningful thing she did was during all the excitement at the end of World War II.

It was also an early culmination of ideals that started to take shape at Potter and in Lincoln.

They include “the respect we must have for the dignity of all people, regardless of race or national origin.”

They include allowing democracy to take shape from within, as happened over 150 years of U.S. presence in Guam, rather than imposing it on people who aren’t ready for it, as she believes is happening in Iraq.

“You have to speak truth to power,” she said. “And that’s what this book is about.”

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or  ahovey@journalstar.com.