It was the winter of 1941-1942 and the war was just beginning. Dad found a job in Akron, Ohio, at a tire making plant. They would be making butyl rubber. The Japanese controlled all the real rubber coming out of the East Indies in the Orient. A substitute had to be found. Dad brought us a sample of the synthetic rubber when he came home for a weekend. It looked like rubber. It felt like rubber. It would be the only kind available until the war was over.

The job in Akron was too far from home. Dad needed a job closer to his family. The problem was that workers in defense related industries were frozen in their jobs. He would have to get permission to leave the Akron plant. He did.

Dad was an experienced electrician. He was assigned a job at the Willow Run Bomber Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Great! Dad would be able to come home weekends. The pay was good. The downside was having to find living quarters in Ypsilanti. He took a room at a small hotel that catered to bomber plant workers.

My dad was a chauvinist of the first water, so to speak. He thought women belonged in the kitchen, not in the factory. I remember the hard time he gave me when I went to high school. “Unnecessary!” he said. Women didn't need an education to have babies and keep house.”

If you are wondering why I brought up his attitude, pay attention! Dad was to be the foreman over a crew of women wiring the bodies of B-24 bombers. One bomber came off the assembly line every 63 minutes. He must have had a time training those girls on how to do basic wiring 101. Dad had little patience with women. I would have loved to have been a little mouse there. It must have been a sight to see and to hear his cussing out the ladies on that assembly line.

The evenings and weekends that Dad didn't return home were not boring for him. He would find a card game just about anywhere with men in the same lonely situation as he was far from home. Dad was a good card player. He could remember every card played and who played it. A valuable skill if you are playing poker. He won more often than not. One weekend in an all night game, he won enough for a down payment on a farm.

Dad's dream was to return to the area of his childhood and be surrounded with kinfolk. He now had the means to fulfill that dream. He would buy a 160 acre spread in the county of his birth. Dad continued working at the bomber plant for a while. Finally there came an opportunity to work closer to home as a electrician at a factory in a nearby city that made shell casings for big bombs. That would be his last job working for someone else. The farm would require his complete attention for the rest of his life.