Boeing retiree Hildred Piel was invited to the 787 rollout party at Seattle’s Qwest Field. Instead, she’ll spend today – 7-8-07 – at a family anniversary celebration.
No matter. A Boeing rollout bash is old hat to the Everett woman.
Piel, 84, has incomparable memories of May 13, 1944. On that Saturday, the 5,000th B-17 bomber built after the attack on Pearl Harbor was rolled out with great ceremony at the company’s Plant 2 in Seattle.
Dubbed the “Flying Fortress,” the B-17 was a warhorse in the World War II battles of Europe. The 5,000th B-17, christened “Five Grand,” was extraordinary both for the nonstop work it represented and for its unconventional paint job – it was covered with signatures of thousands of Boeing workers.
“I painted my name on the belly,” said Piel, who retired from the Boeing Co. in 1982.
In 1944, she was a secretary at Plant 2 on East Marginal Way adjacent to Boeing Field. Her husband, Earl, who died in 1999, was a Boeing machinist there. He, too, signed the B-17, and appeared in Life magazine along with his wife and hundreds of co-workers.
An amazing photograph from the rollout was published in Life in May of 1944 with the headline: “5000th Fortress.”
At home in Everett last week, Piel pointed out her smiling face in a sea of workers pictured in the magazine.
The photo can be viewed online on Boeing’s Web site.
“They put them out really fast,” said Piel, adding that her husband worked seven days a week on the bombers.
How fast? Think about it. In roughly 900 days from Dec. 7, 1941, until May of 1944, Boeing workers made 5,000 bombers. According to a Boeing Web site, “At the peak of B-17 production during World War II, 34,000 Boeing workers produced a Flying Fortress every 1.3 hours.”
Wow. It’s apples and oranges, of course, but it’s fascinating to consider that orders for the Everett-assembled 787 Dreamliner number in the hundreds – so far.
“During the war years, we worked six or seven days a week. There was rationing of shoes, meat, sugar and gas. We all had our victory gardens,” she said. The couple lived in Seattle and didn’t have a car.
With so many young men off fighting, the airplane factory was packed with female workers – the “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon. Piel said her husband didn’t want her working in the factory. “He didn’t want me out there in jeans,” she said.
Piel’s Boeing career took her from the B-17 era into the space age. In Kent with the company’s Space Systems Division, she worked with the team involved in building the Lunar Roving Vehicle, a dune buggy for the moon. It was first launched in 1971 and was used on Apollo missions 15, 16 and 17.
She was once allowed to touch the vehicle known as LRV and believes her fingerprint may have made it to the moon.
“I had a wonderful job and worked for wonderful people. I couldn’t have had a better life,” Piel said.
And what of the 5,000th B-17? A 1944 Boeing newsletter said the bomber was accepted by the Army, signatures and all.
The plane survived the war, according to the book “B-17 Flying Fortress Units of the Eighth Air Force (Part 2),” by historian Martin Bowman. But Bowman wrote that the Five Grand was cut up for scrap at a reclamation plant in Kingman, Ariz., “before it could take its rightful place as a memorial in the city of Seattle.”
Times have changed greatly. We’re now part of a global economy. Piel is pleased the 787 will be put together in Everett. “It would seem foolish to put it someplace else,” she said. “We’ve got the building right here.”
Revelers in Everett and at Qwest Field today surely must marvel at what their Boeing forebears accomplished. “I like to say the B-17 won the war,” Piel said.
Life magazine’s 1944 caption summed up the frenzy to keep those bombers coming:
“After a brief ceremony, the plane was pushed out onto the apron by its makers,” Life reported. “Then everyone went back to work.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
See photo online
The Life photo can be viewed online at www.boeing.com/companyoffices/financial/finreports/annual/00annualreport/gallery02.html.
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