Description
Eva J. Vassar was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1922; her father was a minister and her mother was a schoolteacher. Having always aspired to go “far, far away,” Vassar signed up with the National Youth Administration to be trained for wartime industry. After training, Vassar traveled to Seattle, where she found work repairing damaged ships in the Bremerton Shipyards. Vassar recounts her experiences with wartime Jim Crow as she traveled through the South, dormitory life with the National Youth Administration in Bremerton, the skills and challenges of welding inside and outside large ships, and the sense of pride and patriotism of watching the repaired ships leave port.