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ROSIE
from Chehalis -- WHERE are you?
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Did you work at the Chehalis Boeing Plant between 1943-45? Contact the Lewis County Historical Society so we can include you in the “Rosies and the Guys” Reunion on July 4th. (30% of the employees were fellows, so guys are invited, too.). For more
information: |
Feb. 17, 2005
For immediate release
CONTACT:
Edna Fund
122 Sunnyside Drive
Centralia, WA 98531
360-736-5431 or cell: 360-269-7515
Email: dutch@localaccess.com
LOCAL WOMEN RECALL WORKING AT CHEHALIS BOEING PLANT
Sixty years ago, hundreds of local women aided the war effort by building parts for B-17s at the Boeing Aircraft Co.’s branch plant in Chehalis.
They’re called Rosie the Riveters, but women worked side by side with older men and younger guys who, for one reason or another, couldn’t serve in the armed forces. Instead, they answered Uncle Sam’s call to “Produce for Victory.”
Locally, that primarily meant working at Boeing’s Chehalis plant, which employed more than 700 people working day and night shifts for 22 months at 321 N.W. Pacific Ave., where the Lewis County PUD now sits.
“We all had a thought in our minds that we were helping our friends and relatives who were serving,” said Margaret Shield, 83, Centralia, who worked as a mechanic at Boeing’s Chehalis plant while her brother served in the South Pacific. “We did our part. We felt patriotic.”
“With my husband overseas and everything, I wanted to do my part,” acknowledged Margaret Langus, 82, Chehalis, who served as a nurse at the plant while her husband, Allan, fought in hand-to-hand combat as an infantryman in the Philippines.
This summer, sixty years after the end of WWII, organizers of a “Rosies and the Guys” reunion want to honor the men and women who worked on the home front to support the soldiers, sailors and aviators fighting in Europe and the South Pacific.
An informational meeting to organize activities, recruit volunteers and solicit donations will begin at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28th, in the Centralia meeting room of Timberland Regional Library.
Volunteers are needed to track down people who worked at the Chehalis branch plant or at the Badger family’s St. Helens Manufacturing Co., which operated on Fords Prairie producing 2,500-pound fumigation units for military use under a war contract.
The idea started as an offshoot from the Veterans History Project, a Library of Congress program sponsored locally by the Timberland Regional Library, said Edna Fund of Centralia, the library board’s chairwoman. Through the project, volunteers have interviewed nearly 90 WWII veterans in the five-county region—58 of those in Lewis County who were interviewed by Fund.
Shields, who was in her early 20s in the 1940s, enrolled in a four-week class in sheet metal work offered at the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds. Then she moved to Seattle, where she roomed with a Centralia girl, Rhoda Jean Ford Ray (now deceased). Both women worked at the Boeing plant—Shields as a mechanic and Ford as a riveter.
After a year, Shields transferred to the Chehalis plant, which opened in June 1943, primarily to make airplane parts and assemble tail sections for the Flying Fortresses, or B-17s. The Army had few B-17s, famous for bombing German industrial targets, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but wartime production boosted the total to more than 12,000 by May 1945, when production ended.
Shields, who like most of the women covered her hair with a cotton bandana knotted at the top, worked on the drill press before being promoted to a B mechanic, a job that paid her about $3 an hour while running the electric saw trimming struts.
“We had fun, just jawing with everybody, but when we were working, we concentrated,” she recalled. “It wasn’t something you could take lightly.”
She knew firsthand what could happen, having seen her predecessor nearly sever his thumb on the electric saw. He rushed to the nurse’s office and no longer worked at the plant afterward.
As a plant nurse, Langus said she primarily treated workers for cuts and scrapes, although she remembers one man who drove a rivet into his thumb. Dr. Duncan W. Turner, who practiced medicine in an office across the street from the plant, helped during emergencies.
After graduating from the University of Washington in June 1944, Langus—who was living with her parents at Hope’s Dairy—received a call from Boeing asking her to work as a registered nurse at the plant. She started in September 1944 and worked till the war ended.
She remembers Aug. 14, 1945, when office worker Dorothy Greeley read over the Teletype machine that the Japanese had surrendered. The war was over!
“We told the rest of the town about it,” recalled Langus, who retrieved her car from its parking spot across the street and, with a friend, joined an impromptu Victory Parade driving around and around between Centralia and Chehalis.
Within a week, the Boeing plant was emptied.
“When the plant left, the whole town suffered,” Langus said.
During the 22 months it operated, Boeing paid $2.2 million to employees at the Chehalis plant.
According to a September 8, 1945, Daily Chronicle article, A.W. Jacobsen, Seattle, general superintendent of Boeing branch plants, described the Chehalis plant as “the most outstanding of all those operated in Western Washington by Boeing and said the type of labor employed here was of exceptionally high standard.”
