MARCH 29, 2023 www.wintertexantimes.com 4 WINTER TEXAN TIMES Serving Valleywide for 35 years Sales • Parts • Rentals • Service ezridegolfcars@sbcglobal.net www.easyridegolfcars.com 2508 W. Interstate Hwy 2 Mission, TX 78572 Before You Leave Come By & See The New 2023 Yamaha Drive 2 PTV EFI 4 Year Factory Warranty Easy Ride Golf Cars 956-580-3370 Dealer We Appreciate You! Safe Travels - See You Next Fall A Lifetime Becoming a Rosie Winter Texan earns unique honors Alamo Palms’ 98-year-old Louise Unkrich didn’t have white hair when she did the work that would bring her national recognition. Actually, she was a dark-haired teenager. Typical of other young women whose lives changed course in the early 1940’s, Louise left her Swedesburg, Iowa hometown at 19 to find meaningful work about 250 miles away. Her job would be to assemble parts for B-26’s and B-29’s at the Glenn L. Martin bomber plant south of Omaha, near Bellevue, Nebraska. “The war was on,” she said. “My boyfriend was in the Navy, and I wanted to help.” A Focus on the Job When Louise first arrived, she joined four other women who were “grateful” to sleep on cots set up on a local family’s enclosed porch. They were driven to work by the homeowner, who also worked at the new 17,000,000 sq. ft. plant at Fort Crook, now Offutt Airforce Base. It would be a few months until Louise would move into a room in another family’s home. To earn the 70¢-an-hour starting union wage with no benefits, she stood for eight hours a day assembling ailerons. (She described this airplane part as a 10-foot aluminum flap on the wing’s back edge toward its tip. Ailerons move up and down to allow the pilot to control the plane’s horizontal movement, as well as its speed.) Each aileron consisted of three parts with approximately 1,000 predrilled holes. Once its aluminum “skins” or pieces were overlapped and their holes lined up, the aileron’s parts were fastened by a riveter on one side and a bucker on the other until the elongated, tuna-shaped flap took shape. On her four-person team (two women and two men), Louise worked as the “bucker.” That meant she held a 4x2x2-inch steel bar against the back of each pre-drilled hole. When a large aluminum rivet was air-gunned through the hole, it squashed against her bar. Louise said that if she didn’t hold the bar perfectly flat, the back of the rivet wouldn’t be flattened evenly, and the rivet would need to be drilled out and re-driven. Workers were well aware that mistakes slowed the war effort. She said her hands were often very sore from holding the bar during the repetitive work. But she said, “I had a job to do, and I did it.” What Louise liked best about that job was “working with the team and making something worthwhile.” Wartime Recognition Employing over 14,500 workers at peak production, the Martin plant would earn much recognition. She said there was a lot to be proud of at her workplace. On a personal level, Louise’s four-person team assembled an aileron in one eight-hour shift, setting a plant record. The bomber-building plant itself earned “White Star” awards from the military for on-time production. Because of the plant’s reputation for quality work, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr. visited the Martin assembly line to choose the B-29 Superfortress he would pilot over Japan. From that plane, his crew dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In his autobiography, he said, “I looked upon this airplane as one of the best B-29’s ever produced.” (He named that aircraft “Enola Gay” after his mother.) Louise said she can understand why he complimented the quality of work at the Glenn L. Martin plant. “We all tried to do our very best when I was there,” she explained about the expected work ethic. “If something needed to be done, you See ROSIE pg. 18 At left, Louise Unkrich answers her daughter Trish’s questions about her life during World War II and how she became a “Rosie” decades later. Photo by Dennis Zanetti Well before her Rosie presentation to an Alamo Palms’ audience, Louise Unkrich shares a photo book of her recent trip to Hawaii, where she was honored as one of five original Rosies. Photo by Dennis Zanetti
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