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thedrifter
02-24-04, 05:51 AM
Corsair story to be retold

Women, men who built WWII plane in Akron tell cherished memories ahead of June reunion

By David Giffels


In August 1945, an announcement came over the loudspeaker at Goodyear's Plant D:

The war is over. Take everything with you. We're locking the doors.

There were rousing cheers and tears, and then, goodbyes. Hundreds of men and women, young and old, some in blue ``Rosie the Riveter'' coveralls and head scarves, some in white shirts and ties, filed out of the cavernous Corsair plant next to the Airdock, past signs painted like 8-balls with the slogan, ``A plane every eight minutes.''

A one-legged man bade farewell to his line partner, a tiny West Virginia girl who'd bucked rivets inside the narrow tail section of the fighter planes. A busy father said goodbye to the elderly couple he'd watched working side by

side, night after night, filing sheet metal. The deaf workers -- Goodyear's ``silents'' -- waved farewell.

They all trooped out together onto Triplett Boulevard, then parted ways. One piece of their life had ended. Another began.

Walter Nonamaker, who'd learned how to handcraft parts for the cockpit dash, went home to his family on South Street.

Ellen Bond slipped a classified blueprint into her handbag, a mildly scandalous souvenir that she figured wouldn't do any harm. After all, the war had ended.

Front doors opened all over Akron and beyond, welcoming home people who had fought the war both far and near.

Helen David, recently married, was already home on Bloomfield Avenue, having quit a short time earlier when pregnancy overtook her job riveting air scoops on the wings.

Akron had been a center of manufacturing for the war effort, bringing a distinct change to the work at the city's rubber factories. Machine guns had been built at Firestone, rubber rafts and life preservers at Goodrich, Mickey Mouse gas masks at Sun Rubber. And Goodyear Aircraft had devoted itself to bomber parts, wheels and brakes, blimps and Corsair fighter planes.

The history of the Akron-built Corsairs remains one of the proudest and most distinctive wrinkles in Akron time. Goodyear built about 4,000 FG-1D planes for the Navy and Marine Corps, plus 18 of the later F-2G model. The production, which ran from 1942 to 1945, is etched into the local memory in great part because the process reached so deeply into the local neighborhoods and suburbs, and because the Corsair's legend has endured.

The lightweight, single-pilot plane had the most powerful engine and largest propeller of any fighter, slicing through the sky at more than 400 mph. Its most distinctive feature was the ``gull wings'' that folded into an inverted V, allowing the fighters to be packed tightly onto aircraft carriers. The deep blue Corsairs were a familiar presence in the Akron skies, as test flights buzzed overhead and the planes left Akron Municipal Airport for the Port of Columbus.

Its most famous fliers, Pappy Boyington's Black Sheep Squadron, have been the subject of books and a TV series. The Corsair, nicknamed ``whistling death,'' is a favorite of aviation buffs. And whenever its story is told, Akron has a chapter.

Stories to be preserved

Two years before Pearl Harbor, 60 people worked at the Airdock. By 1943, new buildings had been erected and Goodyear Aircraft's employment rolls eventually swelled to nearly 40,000 people who worked on Corsairs and other aircraft projects under government contact.

But when the war ended, the machinery came to a halt. Many of the workers were women who returned to their households. Others gave way to the returning soldiers. Still others, who'd migrated from other states for wartime work, drifted back to West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Alabama.

For 60 years, the Corsair workers have told their stories around dinner tables and with grandchildren propped on their laps. But now, with many of the workers in the autumn of their lives -- the youngest are in their late 70s -- a reunion is taking shape. As part of its Aero Expo 2004, the Green-based Military Aviation Preservation Society is hunting for anyone associated with the Goodyear-built Corsairs: test pilots, draftsmen, production workers and others. The society, better knows as MAPS, plans to honor them in a ceremony the weekend of June 18.

So long removed from the intensity of their wartime work, they will once again be able to touch three of the planes they built, including the only F2-G still in operation. They will also have a chance to meet three members of the Black Sheep Squadron, finally closing a circle that began in Akron and ended over the South Pacific.

Job changes man's life

Walter Nonamaker, 98 years old, will be able to tell those pilots about the parts he made for their planes, carefully shaping and fitting the metal until it was a perfect fit.

He will be able to tell them how this work changed his life's direction, after 19 years driving trucks and snowplows for the Ohio road department. He was tired of being rousted from bed in the middle of snowy nights, and proud to take his place at a table in Plant D, next to the legendary Airdock.

``I never had one part that I had to do over. It was a good job,'' he said, then laughed. ``It was a sitting-down job.''

Nonamaker would work on a part for a while, filing the metal to match the template on a blueprint, then head out past the paint shop to where the nearly finished planes were parked outside. He'd pass men smoking cigarettes in the dark near the railroad tracks and climb a ladder to the cockpit of one of the Corsairs. Setting his piece into place, he would mark the edges where it needed more work. Then back to his table, more filing, until the fit was right. The piece would go into a wire basket at his side, and he'd start on another.

continued........

thedrifter
02-24-04, 05:52 AM
Model plane for Christmas

Nonamaker's work was one segment in a long, complicated process. It began at drafting tables in the Airdock, known as Plant A in Goodyear Aircraft's alphabet soup of buildings. Men and women sat in long rows in a huge room with glass along one side, making drawings on starched linen.

Ellen Bond got a job there after doing well in her math classes at West High School. When she graduated in 1942, she was chosen for a Goodyear scholarship in the Junior Engineering program at the University of Akron.

Working on the linen, she drew schematics for the oiling system. The drawings were transferred to blueprint, and a copy accompanied every Corsair that left the Akron plant. Sometimes Bond would take a scrap or two of leftover cloth home to her mother, who embroidered the pieces into handkerchiefs.

Bond made close friends in her department, even becoming a bridesmaid for one of her co-workers. But after World War II, she got busy at a new drafting job at Babcock & Wilcox, where she met her future husband and forged a new life.

She hasn't seen a Corsair since the day she left Goodyear in 1945. Her son bought her a model last Christmas; his friends chided him for giving a toy plane to his mother, but he knows how important that part of her life remains. She was young then, her life full of possibility and filled with the pride that pervaded war work. Now she's 79. The model sits on her television set, and the blueprint she smuggled home 59 years ago has become a treasured heirloom.

``The older you get, the more sentimental you get,'' she said. ``I have my kids, but since I lost my husband, those memories are the only thing I have to live for.''

Fun after the work shift

Another memory began on Oct. 1, 1942, when Helen Argenio's parents drove her to Akron from their home in East Liverpool. The 19-year-old walked into the Goodyear recruiting office at the AC&Y Building on East Exchange Street and was hired on the spot. She didn't even own a pair of slacks, and hurried down to the O'Neil's store so she'd be outfitted to begin work the next day. When she reported to Plant D, the structure was unfinished, with a heavy canvas covering its open end. The workers had to wear coats as they began cranking out the first of more than 4,000 planes.

Argenio's first job was riveting the hinged part of the Corsair wings. Later, she moved to Plant D-3 on Seiberling Street, where she riveted the air scoops that mounted into the wings.

The town never shut down, she recalls, and when her shift ended at midnight, ``we went out and partied.'' She and her co-workers went bowling at the Olympic Recreation Center on South Main Street and the lanes at Goodyear Hall. One winter night, her supervisor, who lived near a pond, called home to his wife and asked her to make hot chocolate and spread blankets out on the living room floor for his crew, and they all went ice skating.

Argenio married her first husband, Emmett David, during the war. He died in the '50s, and she remarried in the '70s. She has kept memorabilia from her Corsair days: newspaper clippings and her old pay card showing a handsome wage that eventually topped $1 an hour. She has a Rosie the Riveter T-shirt and another shirt emblazoned with a Corsair. She has a photo album, a book and a model she keeps in its box.

Her husband, Fred Argenio, is an aviation enthusiast, and her daughter, Linda Kendall, works at the MAPS museum. So the 80-year-old has seen her share of preserved Corsairs. Whenever she has her picture taken with one, she always positions herself in front of the air scoops.

But as close as her relationship to that time has remained, she has lost touch with the people who shared it with her. That's why this reunion is so important, not just to her, but to the uncounted others who share her story.

Very quickly, this piece of our Akron legend will leave its living history behind and will become frozen in time. The MAPS museum has been collecting oral histories as part of its ``Project Scrapbook,'' gathering as many as possible before it's too late.

The end of the war brought a new flurry to individual lives, as families reunited and new families began. Argenio is hard-pressed to remember the names of the people who worked alongside her in the Corsair plant. But she has the wedding card they gave her, signed ``Bulkhead Dept.''

She opens it, still crisp and pretty after all these years.

You've both built castles in the air,

Now may your dreams come true.

The Military Aviation Preservation Society is hosting a "Corsair Homecoming" during Aero Expo 2004 the weekend of June 19-20. Organizers are seeking people associated with Goodyear Aircraft's Corsairs in World War II. They'll be recognized in a ceremony and given free tickets to the air show. The society is also seeking sponsors for the show and the runion. To register call the MAPS museum at 330-896-6332 (Akron) or 330-494-3577 (Canton).

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David Giffels' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He can be reached at 330-996-3572 or at dgiffels@thebeaconjournal.com.

http://www.ohio.com/images/ohio/ohio/8015/64244047155.jpg

Beacon Journal file photo
More than two dozen FG-1 Corsairs, lined up behind the Goodyear hangar, make an impressive sight. The planes, said to be the fastest carrier-based fighters in action today, will make a much more impressive sight when they spread their wings over Japanese territory. This line-up is part of a day's delivery from the Akron plants of the Goodyear Aircraft Corp.


http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/8013242.htm


Sempers,

Roger
:marine: