“There were three shifts: day, swing and graveyard. When the shift would change, Cutting Boulevard was unbelievably alive with people. You can’t imagine how many people in this town there were.” - Vera Minkner

Mabel Draxton and Eduardo Carrasco

6. A DELUGE OF HUMANITY

   After a few months in the shipyards, 18-year-old Eduardo Carrasco returned to El Paso, Texas, to visit pals at the dry goods store where he’d earned $14 a week. “I says, ‘I’m making $85 dollars a week.’ They says, ‘What?’ You guess what happened . . . Everybody quit, and they all came to Richmond to work. They emptied El Paso, man.”

   War work swelled the city’s population from 23,000 to 100,000 in three years. American Radiator and Standard converted from making “bathtubs to bombs.”
   Fifty-five other businesses produced everything from aviation fuel to vitamins for defense. Jobs outnumbered beds despite 25,000 units of federally-sponsored defense housing, so newcomers slept in chicken coops, cars and took shifts in rented “hot beds” still warm from the previous occupant.

  Richmond contributed so much to the war effort it was dubbed “Purple Heart City.” Somehow, it managed to embrace all the “gaping strangers” who came to California for something better.

   As Willie Mae Cotright put it: “Everybody that I met was coming here and seeking, just like I was.”