March 24, 2019: Twelve

March 24, 2019: Twelve

               

My mother worked at a bomber plant!

 Clara Wickenheiser was born 12/10/1918 to Gus and Lena Wickenheiser.  She was the second of 10 children, nine living. Her mother tended home and garden, her father worked a small farm, and supplemented his income by laying track for the railroad and working in the local grain elevator.   In 1937 my grandfather died of blood poisoning, leaving the older children to support their mother and younger siblings. The last years of the depression were hard on the family.

Then on 12/7/1941 disaster struck the United States when Pearl Harbor was bombed, thrusting the country into the European war.  While the ships and planes were still crumpled and smoking in Hawaii, the recruitment offices were signing up young men at record numbers.  They were ready and willing to get into the fight.  This included my mother’s brothers and cousins.

As the men left for training camps and the front, the jobs they held went empty. By 1942 over 12 million men had been called to active duty.  Someone had to fill the void, and women joined the work force in their stead.  Auto factories, retail, offices, schools, the women stepped up and went to work, for many it was the first job they ever held outside the home.

As the war escalated the need for munitions and military vehicles increased.  With the men off to war, this job fell to the women as well.  Women assembled ammunition, and built tanks, ships, and aircraft.  The small Willow Run Airport at Ypsilanti Michigan was revamped by that genius of the assembly line, Henry Ford.  He built a factory and hangars at the airport, and soon had B-52’s rolling off the assembly line.   My shy, retiring, and often sickly mother put down her books and put on her boots and went to work at the “bomber plant.”  Ypsilanti had been a quiet sleepy little town, and with few workers left in Detroit to fill the 50,000 jobs that the factory could offer.  The call went out nationwide for workers, and the nation’s second freeway, now known as I-94, was built to provide access and to transport parts.  By 1943 there were 41,750 people employed at the plant, 43% were women.  Using the assembly line method, the “Rosie the Riveter” women put in over 750,000 rivets per plane and rolled one B-52 Liberator off the line every 55 minutes! Women pilots were used to ferry parts, and over 1100 Women’s Airforce Service Pilots were trained to fly military aircraft.  Women joined the UAW; the first-time women joined a union.  They wore trousers and held their hair back with bandanas.  They got dirty, greasy, and hid inspirational notes in the planes for the pilots to find, hoping to give them courage and a taste of home.

My mom did not like working at the plant.  It was her patriotic duty to assist in the war effort, and her familial duty to get the best paying job she could find to help support her family. Raised in a small town, many of her co-workers were more sophisticated and worldly than she was.  The co-workers she was friendly with often asked her to go out with them after work, and she finally gave in one day, and went to a party with them.  There she met a brash young man, a determined bachelor, and a fancy dresser, who took one look at my mother and fell like a ton of bricks.  She didn’t like him.  She thought he was too fast.  He persisted, and by August 1945 they were married.

There is an effort to preserve the history of this army of women who stepped up during the war to build the planes, bombs, and fill the void in the work force stateside.  I am proud that my mother was a “Rosie the Riveter,” and wish she would have lived to see how her place in history is cemented in time.