Industry & Innovation
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Industry & InnovationShell of Its Old Self
In 1945 the Willow Run bomber plant emptied. The government interviewed nearly all seventeen thousand workers on their way out; then, in the columnist's word, they melted away. When the plant came back in 1946 as the Kaiser-Frazer automobile works, the story had names — two industrialists, a banker, a magazine, fifty-three million dollars. This is the gap between what a place remembers by name and what it remembers by the thousand.
Source · The Ypsilanti Daily Press, March 2, 1946, p. 5 -
Industry & InnovationBomber City
By 1944 the Associated Press put Willow Run's output at close to one heavy bomber every working hour. The workers came by the tens of thousands. And the town spent 1942 arguing about a city for them that the government swore it would not build — and then had to.
Source · The Ypsilanti Daily Press, June 25, 1942, p. 1 -
Industry & InnovationAn Exceptionally Opportune Time
For two and a half years the Kennewick Courier-Reporter covered the largest construction project in Washington State without being able to say what it was. On August 9, 1945, it found out — along with everyone else, and on the same day.
Source · The Kennewick Courier-Reporter, August 9, 1945, p. 1
