World War Two was such a big part of history in Evansville, and it's basically gone at this point.

There isn't a lot left from World War Two.

Some of it's still there doing other things.

You may not recognize it as war industry.

The whirlpool plant is there, which was originally the Republic Aviation plant.

But as you're driving quickly down highway 41, most people probably have no idea what that was.

The Chrysler plant.

It's still there, but it's doing other things.

At the shipyard, its parking lot.

It's really hard for me to believe all the stuff that was on the riverfront down there for this list.

None of it's left.

The only remnant of the shipyard now is there's a little monument in the Bristol Myers parking lot.

Looks like a little tombstone.

I always show my students the one remaining crane that's at the bottom of Reitz hill.

Big gray crane down by the grain elevator.

In my opinion, Evansville hasn't done a really good job of preserving and cherishing its history.

Unfortunately, here in Evansville, we tear things down and a decade later, we regret doing it.

And when those things go away, when those physical places go away, then it's the memories.

And when those memories go away, we forget.

Before the war I can really remember.

Clear back to 1931.

And that was depression years.

It was a very hard time for many people.

A lot of men out of work.

I was in grade school at that time, and everybody seemed to be in the same boat.

We all were poor but didn't know it here in Evansville.

many of the businesses and companies, they closed.

There were many, many companies just went belly up and, people were looking for work.

I assume that was fairly difficult.

There wasn't that many jobs.

There was not much action going on.

As I best remember, my father was having a very difficult time.

I can remember many of my uncles lost at home.

My mother was from Owensboro.

We went there a lot.

She had three brothers in law that were laid off for nine years in the coal business.

They were starving and we took them food and clothes every Sunday.

I recall the soup lines, things like that that I would see in newsreels.

I didn't actually witness them myself.

I can't say that I saw bread lines or anything like that.

I don't recall that.

I remember that people were at the back door every day begging for food.

They were just people wandering the streets who were hungry and they'd say, lady, can you give me a sandwich?

They were there almost every day.

We lived at 1108 North Third Avenue, which is not too far from the Belt Railroad, and we would have hobos come around and mom would give them a sandwich.

I think Evansville was a lot like the rest of the country.

The jobless rate was as bad, or maybe a little worse than the national average.

And in Evansville, while it had some heavy industry, was was, you know, suffering through the depression, like much of America in the summer of 1941.

That's let's talk six months before Pearl Harbor happened, plants were laying off people and plants were closing.

And as if the economy didn't provide enough worry for people here in Evansville, there was the increasing news coming from Western Europe of the rise of fascism and all of the implications that that brought with it.

I remember in 1939, we used to sell extras that Germany invaded this and Germany invaded that, and Russia got in the war.

My great grandparents came over from Germany in the 1870s.

In the late 1930s, we would get radio broadcasts in German in Evansville, and he could follow the speeches of Adolf Hitler.

And he was very upset with what was going on in Germany.

{German} I remember that my parents were concerned about us getting involved.

They felt like we should be involved in the war.

But, you know, this was a huge, commitment to make.

The attack on Pearl Harbor really triggered the sense of patriotism.

Before that happened, there was a huge sense of let's just stay out of it.

It's their problem.

December 7th, 1941 I was ten years old.

It was on a Sunday, and we were getting ready to go to church Sunday school, and it came over the radio.

We were, chatting.

There was music in the background.

The radio became silent.

And then in a solemn voice, the words came over the radio.

Japanese war planes in force have attacked Hickman Field and the naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii.

The attack began about 30 minutes ago and still continues.

I felt devastated, and to be honest with you, we all prayed.

I was scared because, mom, she said, we all need to pray.

I knew if mom said we need to pray, I knew it was serious.

We knew that this is it.

This is going to be a big one.

We're going in for vengeance.

And I just remember how shocked everybody was.

And sad because she was afraid.

Someone that you loved was going to have to go to war.

Next day, December the 8th, with feast of the Immaculate Conception.

So we all went home and listened to President Roosevelt said, Eleanor hates war, and so do I. I can always remember that on the radio yesterday, December 7th, 1941.

A date with will live in infamy.

United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

All at once.

You're so patriotic.

You want to give, give you anything?

We knew we had been attacked.

No warning.

So everybody was just ready to meet the challenge and go to war.

They were already talking about taking people to service, and I was a senior in high school.

And that meant nearly every boy I knew.

There was about 20, 20 to 25 young men that lived in our neighborhood.

That frightened me that they would have to go, and every one of them had to go.

That was just the thing.

If you were physically fit, you were it.

Your friends and neighbors sent you on an all expense trip gave you your food, clothing and everything else, and they called that the draft.

Almost everybody that I knew enlisted.

They weren't drafted.

They enlisted.

I guess that they were overwhelmed with enlistees.

The day after Pearl Harbor.

I graduated from high school six months after Pearl Harbor, and a lot of us, including myself, volunteered for the Army.

I volunteered for the Army at 17 years old.

I mean, when you want to go, I would.

That was my dream of going.

But mom said, oh, you can't go.

You're a girl.

I said, yes, I can do that.

Or my husband making the remark, he he hoped the war didn't get over till he got there.

But he wasn’t there very long when he thought it could stop a lot of them wanted to enlist and they couldn't because they were 4F.

And that really tore them up.

I had one cousin who tried every way to get in the Navy, but they had him 4F.

I don't know what was wrong with him.

I was a 4F in the end it was a calcification in my lung, it kept me out.

I was devastated, the the war effort.

They wrote songs.

If you're in the service, you're good.

And if you're not, you're bad.

There was a lot of hatred, I guess you could say, for the Japanese.

We hated the Japs.

Oh, we hated them.

When you went to the movies, there'd be a big sign.

Stab a Jap.

And there'd be a soldier with a bayonet, run through a Jap and he’s flicking him up in the air.

I remember when we kids would play.

Oh my goodness, we would play Japs and Americans, you know.

Yes, we sang songs, kind of silly songs with kids.

whistle while you work.

Hitler is a jerk.

Whistle.

Whistle was.

And then we would do that with most of Mussolini.

And we dealt with Tojo.

You know, Van.

Evansville was predominantly German.

The west side was all German during World War One.

there was there was a real shame in being German, almost.

And, there was sort of a cleansing of Germanic culture from Evansville or an attempt at that.

There's still a lot of German speakers in first generation German people here.

And during World War one, and there were three German language newspapers that went out of business when the war started, the World War One, but World War two, I don't think that was near the, consideration that my great grandfather was born in Germany in 1880, came here in 1881 when he was a child.

He was harassed during World War One, and they wanted to make sure that he wasn't sending money back to Germany because he wasn't an American citizen.

But by World War two, he was fully American and kind of wanted to make it official and became an American citizen during the war.

And I always wondered if it wasn't like to say, yeah, I'm I'm not one of them.

I'm, I'm an American and I'm going to do my part and even take it to the extent of becoming an American citizen.

Now.

Evansville became enamored with the Second World War.

Well, some of the industries were already working on getting defense contracts of international steel, for example, where Walter Koch was a big player, had worked with the Navy.

It's amazing to me the foresight that the civic and business leaders of Evansville had.

They were able to see that change was coming, that there was a war going on and there were government contracts, that industry was shifting, there was money to be made, and there were opportunities to be had for cities that position themselves to get these government contracts.

What is remarkable is that it was synergy of three groups of people who had not got along well in the past.

The trade unions, business leaders and political leaders.

And very few cities had these three groups working together in harmony to get things done.

Walter Koch with International Steel, he and Mayor Duress.

They are quite forthright and aggressive in trying to seek some of these contracts for the city.

And I remember he would drive to Terre Haute and catch a train to go to Washington, DC.

I imagine he made it seem like 50 to 60 trips to get the jobs here, where people would have work.

It's war.

It's terrible.

People are going to die by the millions.

But in the end, for the cities themselves, they want to have part of that pot of gold that's going to be part of industrial production.

Jobs are going to be done.

The planes are going to be made, the ships are going to be built whether they're in Evansville or not.

It's going to be rather up to Evansville in its aggressiveness in trying to seek those contracts.

Cities like Evansville could easily have been left behind, and it was the foresight of the civic leaders that ensured that that did not happen.

We had the industrial set up ready to go to, to to make things like planes and boats as well.

We had the workforce here.

The folks in Evansville had a reputation of having a strong work ethic, but I think it was a lot of that was just, you know, our leaders working their contacts.

And then when the war hit, it's amazing when you read the newspapers just how quickly those contracts start coming.

After Pearl Harbor, there was efforts to move a lot of the industry inward because we didn't know the reaches of the axis air power.

In early February, I believe the, the announcements made that there's going to be an inland shipyard here at the shipyard was from Wabash Avenue and Ohio street on down around the curve almost to whole yard.

And it was all on the other side of the railroad track.

It just seemed like it went from one end to the other of the city.

But I guess it didn't.

But it just seemed like it was that big to me.

The company would work well, and we did this job over here.

Okay, we heard about the shipyard.

Me and some of the guys were working there, and we thought we'd run over here and take a look at the shipyard.

Impressed me, and I told my partner that to be a good place for me to come to live to see, you know, something like that huge being built right down on the riverfront.

You know, it was just it was amazing.

I can remember when it was just a vacant field.

There was a main Johnson terminal there, and then just overnight it was filled up with concrete and buildings.

I think what is interesting is that it happened so rapidly and it got started, and I believe it was March of 42 building the shipyard.

And the first ship was, actually christened on Halloween.

And 42 war started within six months.

We've taken an empty lot on the Ohio River, and you're building oceangoing vessels.

One of my favorite pictures is that picture of the the first keel being laid.

And you can see everybody standing around for the laying of the keel.

But at the top of the picture you can see they're also building a building.

So the shipyards is being built even as the first ship is being laid out.

I think that speaks to the, the pace of of development.

The war's not waiting.

The Germans aren't waiting.

Hitler's not waiting.

We can't get this done next week.

We need to get it done tomorrow.

President Roosevelt and the administration said in the in the summer of 1942, if a plant making war goods cannot be completed on online by the end of the year, stop it today.

It's hard for us to understand that, believe that.

But this was life and death while on the home front.

There's a lot of excitement and opportunity.

It's the backdrop of that is all kinds of bad war news.

On the heels of Pearl Harbor, the Germans have advanced deep into the Soviet Union.

What turns out to be a huge mistake, of course, historically.

But at that moment, we don't know that the Japanese were ruling the roof.

They were all the way down and, almost knocking on Australia's door.

The Philippines fall, we can't get to the boys Bataan.

We can't get to the boys at Corregidor.

It's bad news after bad news after bad news on the war front.

And we had to turn things around.

And the only way to do it was superior arms.

That's the key.

That's why we won.

The war is material from the United States.

You know, the number of planes and ships and weapons we could deliver.

And the LST of course.

We made more of them than anybody in the LST was absolutely critical.

The famous quote, Churchill's the fate of the two great empires is tied up in some darn thing called the LST.

He didn't use darn, he used something else, but that's basically true.

There could be an argument made that it was the ship that won the war.

And it was a shallow draft landing craft.

It was 328ft long, 50ft wide.

It was self beaching.

Let's say this right here is the beach.

You would bring your LST up here, you, unload into other craft, and then the other craft goes into the beach.

If it's safe, then they release 20 German tanks.

These ships that they're building here at Evansville are rather secret weapons, so to speak.

And this is not a type of concept that had been around before.

The reason Hitler couldn't invade Britain is he had no way to get his heavy material across the channel.

The Nazis experimented with some barges, and they tried to, put some tanks on some barges, but most of them swamped so they never could get their heavy material over the English Channel.

So Churchill, of course, he saw the need for just the opposite.

They were going to invade mainland Europe.

We would need to get our heavy material across the channel if we're going to do the reverse retake, Europe that the British are wanting that type of ship.

The Americans are going to design it.

But the man that designed it, Johnson.

Nedimier that this story is, maybe apocryphal, that he took about a half hour to design this ship.

Some sailors would say, I wish you had taken about an hour.

It was a rough riding ship everybody's ever been on.

One will tell you that.

They said it rode like a bathtub.

it was not smooth sailing.

It a rough ride.

That thing would rise up like this and slap the water and just shake everything all over.

Even your body it is awful.

But regardless, most sailors, regardless of that, would say they were good ships.

The LST was was vital to prosecute the war the way it was because of just the nature of how we had to fight it.

Once they made the beachhead, they needed to be, supplied with tanks, support, artillery, all that sort of thing that needed to get ashore and support the beachhead.

That couldn't have been done without a ship like the LST.

They announced the shipyard in early 42, and then not long after, they announced they were going to build, Republic Aviation.

When we went after the P-47 plant, there was some hesitation from the Navy because they thought, you know, it would be too much for such a small town.

And there was some talk of, let's move the shipyard maybe farther down, down the river.

There was some talk about moving the shipyard to Paducah, but there was there was talk that soon passed.

Republic aviation, that's the one I remember the most.

They made the planes out on 41 were they were assembled all of them.

They started building that, that factory from south to north, building the first airplane at the same time.

And when they were done with the factory, they were done with the first airplane, the Hoosier Hoosier spirit.

Other contracts then followed.

It was a boom here in Evansville.

There were just a multitude of plants that were making wartime products.

A lot of times we think about the big, I guess, sexy things, ships and planes.

But beyond that, there were other things happening.

Other places like civil.

They are wanting war contracts, and they're looking to do things beyond what they're doing.

When the war started, Servel made refrigerators, well, they switched over to making wings for the P-47.

Serval built a two block long building in 1942 and 43 to build essentially every P-47 wing for the Evansville plant and the New York plant, Hoosier Cardinals at First Avenue and Morgan.

They made the elevators and rudders.

I was working summers at Red spot, and they were supplying what they called a brown box enamel, that they painted the ammunition boxes with Briggs, which before the war had produced bodies, for for Chrysler, produced Corsair fighter plane wings, Shane uniform.

They were making military uniforms.

Anchor industries was making all kinds of, canvas material.

National furniture here in town was the second leading producer of cots for us military.

When you think about Evansville and how it transformed the industry that was here, Chrysler is a great example.

They go from making Plymouth automobiles to 45 caliber ammunition, 96% of it, in fact, three point some billion bullets.

That is an amazing stat.

And that's something that I think Evansville can really be proud of.

I went in and applied and I was the first employee hired.

There were three of us in the office to set up the office for wartime.

Before we started hiring.

We set up Chrysler Ordnance.

They were still finishing old cars, so we had to start setting up our files for the government.

We had to set up the different departments.

And then we started hiring, hiring, hiring.

It was up in the hundreds a day.

That's a lot of hiring.

My mother and dad purchased a franchise called Nationwide Employment Service, and it was incredible the amount of activity that was going on through that office employment was just, outstanding.

In fact, they imported people to work.

They came in from all, all the small towns around the work in the factories.

A lot of people came in like my mother.

She was, working for $5 a week, taking care of a crippled girl in eastern Kentucky in the poor hills of Appalachia.

Mom and her sister came to town in 42 for the war jobs, and they ended up staying here.

said she was making $60 a week, and she thought it was And it was a lot of money back then.

It was just absolutely fantastic.

I didn't come with mother at first cause I knew I couldn't get a job.

You had to be 18.

I stayed in Harrisburg with one of my aunts, and as soon as I turned 18, then I went to Evansville.

Well, there was a place downtown where you went to sign up for jobs.

I just went down there and signed up, and they wanted to know which one I'd rather have.

And I said, I thought I'd rather have Republic Aviation, and they called me within the next day or two.

anybody needed a job was no problem.

All you had to do was go to one of these, war industries and knock on the door.

And you had work, and it didn't matter if you were black or a woman.

They want they needed everybody.

See, a lot of the man had, you know, gone into service.

So there were good jobs for women.

The women made a major contribution.

They were at Hoosier Cardinal.

They were Servel and were out of the shipyard, Republic.

Well, you sure had chance for good jobs.

And that was more than what I had been because the women weren't prominent for the most part.

The women stayed home, took care of the babies, cook and so forth.

And that broke the bar.

I think that's probably one that, part of our society made a total turnaround, that women came out of the kitchen and went to work.

I've read some numbers that say that one third of the people working in Indiana during World War Two were women, which is kind of staggering.

Half the employees at the P-47 plant were women.

And about 40% at the shipyard.

My mother never worked outside of the home, but some of my friends mothers went to work where it was so unusual.

So then you heard oh mom’s making bullets.

You know, they filled out any job they needed.

They needed the riveter, they became riveters.

They need welders.

They became welders.

Whatever they needed, the women adapted to it.

The chief hall inspector at the Evansville Shipyard Roman Ritzer.

He was asked by his supervisor, Ritz, what do you think of women welders?

It's.

Well, we got to have em.

And he figured in his mind, go.

Back in the 1940s, any woman that could sew a straight seam could make a good weld.

And he told me he was well rewarded because the women were his best welders.

They were meticulous.

They were careful.

They really took the job seriously.

The first woman was Evelyn Cox from from Princeton, Indiana.

I loved the the picture of the first female welder at the shipyard.

It's sort of an iconic picture of Evelyn Cox, and she's wearing her welding coveralls, but she's still very feminine, and she is sort of that Rosie the Riveter image.

Tough doing her part to win the war, but also very much a lady.

The campaign by the government, the posters that showed women that could be tough and masculine, but still very feminine, with painted fingernails and manicured fingers and makeup, gave the message to women that it's okay to do this, and it's the right thing to do.

A lot of these images were marketed to women in order to get them to have active participation so that their husbands, their brothers, these women knew that they were doing the most that they could do on the home front, the two iconic images are that we can do it.

image by J. Howard Miller.

And then, of course, Norman Rockwell, who has the less famous image of Rosie the Riveter, and she's got her riveting gun on her lap, and she has her feet resting on a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Yeah.

She used to say, it's me.

My name was Rose, so I was Rosie the Riveter.

Well, I never worked in a war plant, but a lot of the women that worked on the P-47 field, they used to call them Rosie the Riveter.

I want to have the Hoosier Cardinal.

And we worked on the P-47 on the elevator part of the plane.

These elevators was all of them.

And, and they had the rows of holes in there where to put the rivet in and pull out your gun.

There'd be a lot of them in one of those elevators.

We got one elevator done in a day.

That's pretty good.

That's all we would get done when we finished a job that came around with our little flashlights and, you know, checked all the rivets.

And once the the inspectors from Hoosier Cardinal did it, then the Army came in and checked everything.

And my partner and me, we did really good.

We'd get a perfect job.

I never thought about it.

I didn't think I did anything special.

I just went to work and I loved my work.

There were also new opportunities for the black population of Evansville, but the door, I wouldn't say was fully open.

I doubt that they had the same opportunity, but there were opportunities because there was a dire need for help as far as African-Americans holding jobs that would have been the better paying jobs.

That's not necessarily always going to be the case.

Chrysler of the War Industries, I believe, did the best at hiring African-Americans and Republic aviation maybe did the worst percentage wise.

But even when blacks were hired into these war industries, they often found themselves doing the lower level jobs.

You had a lot of custodial more.

You had a lot of the lower grade work as what they did.

A lot of them ended up being cooks.

When I work construction work, we had a lot of black labor working for us.

It was supposed to be the case that there wasn't going to be discrimination for companies that held government contracts under the Fair Employment Practices Commission, but it's still going to happen after I move here.

As a contractor, it wasn't too much problem with me, and I was speaking for a job.

A few problem that I would have would be among the workers.

Some of the white workforce was a lot of southern people, and not necessarily wanted to work alongside African-Americans, although we tend to emphasize how much people came together during the war.

here in Evansville, segregation was still strong, and many times white workers actually went on strike in the war industry against having to work alongside black workers.

Even during the war with segregation and racism was pretty, pretty bad here.

When you think about it now and you can't believe how they were treated in the movie theaters, they had to sit in the balcony.

They had their own restrooms, their own drinking fountains.

I went to Central High School and, all the African-Americans went to Lincoln.

The schools were segregated through the war.

The USO was segregated.

The company picnics at the at the shipyards were segregated.

Certain bars blacks couldn't go into.

And eating establishments just like the Jim Crow South.

One thing, oh, that stayed with me a long time, I was working on this restaurant, down on the sidewalk around the restaurant.

We went in there for lunch.

I walked in there with him.

He told the guys we can’t serve him, you know, we can’t serve him.

He said, we’re working right here on the job.

I'm working with these men, and I want something to eat...No... You know, we can’t serve him in here.

The blacks and the whites did not mix.

You didn't.

I mean, that's the way it was.

We lived right next door to a black family, and we were not allowed to talk to those people.

Isn't that terrible?

Now, I would, though every once in awhile, I would go over there and her name was Essie.

That was the lady that lived there.

I go over and I'd say hi, Essie, how are you today?

And I wouldn't tell mom I did that.

Most of the black population was compressed around Lincoln and Governor Streets, and the nickname was Baptist Town because the predominant Protestant group that black folks belong to are the Baptists.

One of the things that kids would yell, driving white kids through there, they'd look out and they'd see a group of blacks out there, and it's a black cloud.

It's going to rain tonight.

Really snotty things.

The N-word was used all the time.

A lot of times, you know, they used a nigger word, sure.

But I know how to do it.

That time.

I knew how to deal with it as a Christian.

And I know how to do this warning and not retaliate.

And things wouldn't blow up like it did with a lot of people.

That generation is sometimes called the Greatest generation, and I say that with some hesitancy.

It was a wonderful, patriotic time.

And for that, yes.

But, you know, we also had heavy segregation, and I didn't know about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans.

There was a lot of, hatred for the Japanese, and they moved them all to California and put them in camps.

I vaguely remember when they put all the Japs in the concentration camps, which I feel bad about now, but at the time I thought, well, that probably maybe makes sense.

I don't know, you know, and those things were going on to we didn't know about those.

And so I'm hesitant to use that, you know, because there were things we did wrong.

In 1942, the first full year of the war, Evansville ended up going from 18,000 regular industrial plant employees to 84,000 men and women working here.

Can you imagine that's a four fold or five fold increase in employment?

Where they going to live, where they going to sleep?

Housing must have been a mess.

Housing was a major challenge.

Evansville was prepared to have workers in the plants, but not so much having workers living around here.

I remember talking to a Rip Brown.

He was the 16th person hired at the shipyard and he talked about he got here early on and he said, then, you know, it was easy to find an apartment.

He said there were 500 apartments in town available for rent when he came here.

But just in like a year or so later, you couldn't find an apartment was very difficult.

The town filled up.

There was not a hotel room.

There wasn't a rental property available.

People came.

They didn't know where to sleep or anything.

If they couldn't find housing in Evansville, they would travel in from Missouri, of West Kentucky.

There was one fellow that, took a pickup truck and added seats to the bed of it, covered it, and he started, I believe it was Madisonville or Hopkinsville, somewhere down 41.

And he picked guys up, headed for the shipyard, and they each gave him a buck to take them to work.

I remember one guy from Missouri came over there and he lived in a and his car out there from down on Pigeon Creek.

People slept in their cars.

If they couldn't find a bed, you get people living in trailers and people living in converted garages and people living in the spare bedroom.

The Carlton and Grand Theaters had extra hours, so people working at the shipyard could get off shift, come to Grand Theater and go and pay admission and sleep.

The Carlton Theater was open early in the morning.

The Grand Theater stayed open late at night till the next morning, and it was only about a 2 or 3 hour gap where you could not go to the Grand or Carlton and get a full day sleep.

People were doing all kinds of thing.

They were rehabbing chicken houses in the back of their house and turning them into apartments.

Mom used to hot bunk.

She would rent a bed and she wouldn't rent an apartment.

She rented a bed.

She would rent it for eight hours.

And when she would get out, another shipyard worker would get in the bunk.

And then after that, another one now whether they changed the sheets in the meantime I don’t know.

all the famous stories that you always hear about people renting a bed.

And the night shift worker would sleep in it during the day, and the day shift worker would sleep in it during the night.

I never know if that's true or not, but I think that if it's not true, it at least illustrates the level of of desperation that people had when it came to just find a place to sleep.

Some of them lived in a lot of, oh, you'd say hard places.

I remember a couple of houses that my dad took me out to show me that were maybe 20ft wide and 12ft deep.

There were like trailers.

There was a trailer camp at highway 41 at Pigeon Creek that was as bad a slum as I've ever seen.

And I've seen pictures of inner city Mexico City.

That's yje way it looked.

It's again part of that necessity of making it happen, perhaps coming out of the depression.

People aren't expecting the best.

They're not expecting to be living at some lakeside resort.

But as long as they get someplace to live to have these jobs, I think that's what they're after.

In the end.

Many houses, you'll have these little cardboard signs in the window “sleeping rooms”.

Everybody in the west side that had a room rented it out.

We had a ten room house and the upstairs we didn't live in.

We had boarders.

It was an interesting time because we had one bathroom.

So anytime anybody had to shower or, you know, take a bath, we had to schedule them.

And we had a lot of people at the table when we ate.

But it was interesting because I met some interesting people and I slept upstairs in a big two story old house on Michigan Street.

We rented the room next to my bedroom to a guy from Kentucky who worked it to shipyards.

My mother, God bless her, she took everybody that knocked on that front door.

She took them in.

They may have to sleep on the floor, but that's all right.

They had a place to live.

Mom could not turn anybody away.

Also, the government is going to go about building housing in various parts of Evansville.

Individuals couldn't build a home, but the government could.

So they built several housing projects up on Fulton Avenue on the north side of Evansville.

This is going to be housing built and over by Evansville College, U of E, there's going to be housing built in there Ratherwood apartments by U of E by the armory.

And there were the Columbia Street apartments and Maryland Street apartment, Riverside Apartments.

And these were strictly military style rectangle boxes.

They were functional, but they weren't any architectural wonder, you know, but they were very functional.

And on the end, there were six large federal housing projects here in the city Gaywood Gardens, Dixie Manor Park Home, and Fulton Square, where the first four, followed later by Diamond Villa and then Mill Terrace, which was a federal housing project exclusively for African-Americans.

These are supposed to be temporary housing, and you can still to this day, find evidence of them around, around the city, all of these six projects, of course, Diamond Villa and Fulton Square, we still have today.

Housing was a crucial need of the war effort.

Fortunately, Evansville was able to meet that.

I think they just accepted it and took them in and did what we had to do.

I don't think anybody expected, praise for it because it was something that had to be done.

We had a war to win, and we did.

And that consequently a lot of people who came here during the war to work became permanent citizens of Evansville.

Then a lot of us stayed.

I met my husband.

He was a best man at my cousin's wedding, and that was it.

While all of this population growth was to have significant positive impacts on the city going forward, at the time, it was also a source of significant challenges.

Evansville was really stressed, more so than most cities.

The schools were totally overloaded in school.

We all of a sudden they had fellow students that we had never seen before.

Transportation became a real bottleneck.

They brought as many busses in as they could find to get these people to work.

Public transportation was something that was used and encouraged, and they ran busses for the war workers, especially when they started building some housing.

The busses at that time ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Bus service was really good.

You can count on the bus being there ever 15 minutes.

It costs $0.07 or more per quarter.

They were full.

Yeah, sometimes it was standing room only.

By the time you got near downtown it was so crowded he would open the door at every bus stop and he would holler, go to the back, go to the back and the aisles would fill up.

The seats would fill up.

And when he got so many packed in there that he couldn't even stand it, he’d say close the door.

And the rest of the way downtown, you.

You couldn't do anything without standing in line that I don't.

I think everyone was proud of it.

Evansville was very patriotic in interviews that I've done with people from World War II to people all talked about how excited they were to be part of the effort, to do their part to help win the war.

But they were also very excited to have a steady paycheck and as much work as they wanted.

I heard a story that there was a guy on a bus that said, you know, I'm working again.

This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to this country.

And some lady assaulted him and said, I have a son in the service, and I'm not happy about it.

Sure, some of them, you know, they're making a lot of money.

I mean, it's good money.

But then if that was the only thing you wouldn't see men and women particularly working not only at their wartime jobs, but then going and volunteering at the Red cross or the USO or wherever it was after they got off their work shift.

That whole, all in it concept was certainly ingrained in people where they were going well above what's expected of them during the war effort.

And of course, some of that the government's really promoting it through wartime posters and wartime propaganda.

I don't mean that to sound negative, but but in the sense that we have to convey this has to get done.

The Germans are making gains.

We're trying to build strength.

Russia's trying to hold on, and Great Britain really needs us there.

And there's a period there.

In most of 1942, we're we're running as fast as we can, but it doesn't seem to be fast enough.

Of course, with the speed that everything was happening, it's almost inevitable that there were accidents and injuries across the United States.

During the war, over 11 million industrial accidents took place.

And here in Evansville, we saw that happen to at the shipyard, for example, there were about two serious injuries every single day, and ten men died there.

And there were numerous accidents in other places, too.

People were working very quickly.

And safety wasn't the issue then that it is today.

Today we have OSHA and we have all the safety rules and regulations, which are pretty darn good.

During World War two, they did not, you know, they didn't have all the government regulations like we do now as far as protecting workers safety.

I went to work for George Koch Sons at their Mount Vernon Avenue plant, where they were fabricating ammunition boxes.

So when I first started on the press and the press came down when it wasn't supposed to, I had my hands in the press pressing everything flat and bam, here comes a press down and came down on my hand.

Well, the thing came down, but it didn't go back up.

And it sat there and hummed.

So I knew I was in shock, and I started yelling for the foreman, and he turned the press off.

And then he took a big wrecking bar and took the bull wheel of the press down so it would go over center and then back up.

When he did that, I hold my hands up and these fingers were like the teeth of a sore bone sticking up here and there.

This thumb was hanging by a thread.

A flash went to Deaconess and they proceeded with surgery.

Took that finger off first 28 days later, gangrene set into this finger and I could take that finger and turn it completely around and not feel a thing.

Went back to surgery and they had enough skin off of the finger.

They took off to make a cap.

And so that is what I ended up with.

There were some accidents that, were unfortunate with the P-47.

There were a couple of P-47 crashes.

Other people were injured.

A few were killed at the shipyard, the shipyard, the type of industry it was, it were conducive for accidents.

I made a study for all of the civilian war deaths in Evansville during World War two, and it was significant.

There were explosions.

There were fires there were crushings.

men and women.

Both were killed.

When you're working around heavy equipment, welding torches, riveting guns, these things are going to be inevitable.

And workplace accidents did happen.

They would have signs up saying, you know, x number of days without an accident.

So they certainly were trying to promote workplace safety, at the same time trying to expedite the building of things as quickly as possible at the same time.

So those two things sometimes could run in opposition to each other.

It was a rushed rush to market, more so then than now because of the urgency of the time.

There was a genuine concern in 42.

People were very worried.

People in Evansville towards the end of 42 had a lot to be worried about, not just because the war was going badly overseas, but because almost every family in the city had some connection to someone who was serving.

There weren't very many families who didn't have somebody connected.

If you saw Gone With the Wind how they used to go and see the war casualty lists and just dread it, well, I felt it.

We all felt that everybody in the West Side that had a draftee had a flag in the window.

If he had 1 or 2 stars, that meant you had someone in service.

That time we had a flag in our window.

One blue star.

Yes, there was always that fear.

Always.

You always felt, God, let them get home, please.

You know, people would hate to hear somebody knocking on the door, in particular if they opened the door and there was somebody in a military uniform.

They, pretty well knew what was going on, what was going to come next.

My aunt and her son didn't come back, Bill.

He didn't come back.

I remember, Anut Annie was sitting in the front yard.

She had those metal lawn chairs, and she was sitting out front.

And the neighbor was sitting there with her.

And this car pulled up out front.

There was two men got out and walked up to her, and apparently they told her.

And when they did, she passed out.

When they told her, I'll never forget her passing out.

And she fell to the ground and they told her about Billy yeah.

I had a cousin that was killed on Okinawa, and I had another cousin that was injured and they put him on the park with the dead, but they found out he was alive, so he survived.

My brother's best friend was, a pilot.

He was shot down.

His name was Holmes.

His last name was Holmes.

And growing up, just in my neighborhood there, I lost four very wonderful friends.

The three most popular, smartest guys in my class had to go to war, and all three of them were killed.

A lot of, younger women lost their husbands, and a lot of mothers and dads lost sons and even some daughters.

It wasn't really a happy time of life.

They had to keep going, doing what you were doing and make the best of it.

Back then, everybody knew that they had to do their part because there was a real evil in the world.

I think it's easy to forget how high the stakes were during World War Two, the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific.

It was black and white.

It was the good guys versus the bad guys.

And I think that in 1942 and 43 and 44, I think they understood the stakes.

The attitude was that the enemy was the devil incarnate, and we had to beat Hitler and Tojo because if we didn't, we were going to be massacred.

They were a people that that had no use for human life.

To our respect, we would have been living in bondage.

We had to win.

the religious community really harped on that, don't lose faith.

We're in this on the side of the good Lord.

Preachers would go out to the civic clubs and preach hope.

The newspapers editorialized, don't lose hope.

We're in this.

We're gearing up.

It'll turn.

And in early 43, it did.

If someone returned to Evansville in 1943, even if they'd only left a year before, they would have found a city that was completely transformed.

The population had grown enormously.

Industry was firing on all cylinders, and the city even had a thriving nightlife.

Okay, there was the Chalk Dells, green River Tavern, Captain Quarters, New Yorker downtown, the Vendome, the Blue Bar, the Club, Trocadero, Trocadero, Grand Gardens.

The deals I can remember my dad talk about the Dells.

It was really a rough place.

If you look for five, five, five, one there, there were a lot of young men coming through Evansville and, you know, with that there were problems.

Of course, they liked to drink.

And there was, of course, the red light district.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was there.

That's where all the prostitutes, when we were in high school, we used to drive down there.

The girls would hide down the guys and pass, you know, the set up and we with the girls.

Oh, they're making so mad.

Evansville was going at the maximum amount of capacity.

They were building houses.

We had the Breckinridge soldiers coming into town over the weekend.

Everybody was employed.

Evansville had become a boom town.