When Kaiser Plants Bloomed on West Coast

What a feeling of sadness the announcement of the closing of Kaiser’s steel plant brings! It is like watching a giant die of Alzheimer’s disease.

During World War II, Kaiser was a major factor in this country’s victory over Japan. Plants and shipyards bloomed overnight all along the Pacific Coast, with particularly large ones on opposite sides of the Columbia River, in Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash. So many workers had to be imported to run those plants that Kaiser built an entire little city, called “Vanport” for them.

Trainloads of workers, both men and women, were brought in to work for Kaiser. A good many came from the Ozarks and Appalachia, both at that time very isolated areas. I still remember the husky, gentle men who said to me, when asked to sign their names, “Ah’m sorry, ma’am, but ah cain’t write.”

And the number who asked me, shyly, if I knew where they could go to school at night to learn that simple skill. Some couldn’t count either paper money or coins; they just held out a handful of money and asked clerks to count out what was needed to pay for something. One man complained to me that he had worked four weeks and had not yet been paid. “They jist give me these li’l ole slips o’ paper,” he said, and held out his paychecks.

One man, after he had been working several weeks, brought his wife and two small daughters in to show me the new “permanents” he had bought them. “We all got curly hayar !” the wife cried, with a smile like sunshine.

Kaiser took those fine people, to whom the machinery of a shipyard was a complete mystery, and trained them quickly and expertly to produce the Liberty ships that carried our troops and weapons across the oceans. Kaiser helped to educate them, and provided health care for them, as witnessed by the Kaiser health program that still offers medical care at reasonable cost.

This country owes a lot to the Kaiser plants and mills and shipyards; without Kaiser we might very well have lost the war. So now Kaiser closes its steel mill, and we buy our steel from Japan.

I guess that’s progress.

LILLIAN MONEY

Manhattan Beach