My mother lived in a non industrial town in Pennsylvania. She worked in the library repairing old books. It's not a war effort job, but it needed to be done and it made a man available for the war effort.

My father moved his family to California from Shanghai right before the war started. He went back to close up the house and business but was interned by the Japanese before he could make it back. My mom had no word of him for several years and supported herself and two small children by working in a local cannery office. I wasn't born until after he was freed and repatriated (a long process that involved a lengthy stay in Australia) after the war.

My aunt, who will be 94 in October was a "Rosie the Riveter"!

At the time our city was a large steel producing city. My mom was rejected to work in the mills because she was to short and under 100 lbs. So she went to work in a bakery test kitchen. Hopefully some of those packaged baked good made it to the fighting men. A lot of people went missing during the war. My mom had an aunt whom immigrated to the US from Poland and then went to live in France. The war broke out and she was never heard from again.

Such interesting stories! I don't know our family's stories during the war. My grandma was born in 1940 so maybe I'll ask her.

My mother had just had her 3rd baby (me) when war broke out. I enjoyed the short PBS series called Bomb Girls. It was the story of a British factory changed over to making bombs during the war. My father's sister, single and in her early 50s, worked in a veterans hospital in some clerical capacity. I grew up in Caterpillar's home town, and the war effort was certainly part of that industry.

My dad was 4F because of a broken leg that became infected when he was about 8. He worked at a company that manufactured wire coils for the war effort. He seldom spoke about that but he did speak about the women that worked hard being replaced by the men coming back. None of it was complimentary toward the men.

My mom was still in high school when WWII ended. I vaguely remember her saying that people with Germany ancestry kept quiet about it during those years. This was Milwaukee, so plenty of people in the same boat, but still she felt intimidated somehow? Now I wish I'd questioned (or listened) to more fully understand her/her family's experience during those years.

Her mother would have been working in those years, but I don't know at what job. I don't know at what point she started working (washing lab glassware) for the medical school. It might have been as early as that.

Fascinating stories. Learning about this era, I am always awed by my parents' generation. During WWII, as an employee of Sperry Gyroscope Co., my mother calibrated gun sites for the US Navy. She worked the night shift and rode the NY subway by herself. My parents knew each other but were not an item until after the war.. Since my mother's youngest brother served in the Navy in the Pacific, she must have felt very committed to her work.

I am listening to a fascinating audiobook called Code Girls, about American women who worked to decipher encrypted messages sent by enemy forces, primarily Japan, during World War II. They were paid less than men doing the same work and were sworn to the greatest secrecy during this time. They did extraordinary work that greatly benefited the war effort as well as freeing men for active duty.

One of my grandmothers moved from Cleveland to Columbus to work at one of the bases (might have been Rickenbacker, or the Defense Supply Center). She had been a stenographer and I believe continued in that role, or as a secretary.. My uncle had enlisted, and my dad, who had been in the CCC, was able to join ROTC at OSU and went through dental school there.

My other grandmother did not work outside the home at that time that I am aware of. She had worked at the paper mill as did my step-grandfather before they married; her three daughters were grown by WW2, all housewives/mothers married --one to a farmer, one to an employee at General Electric, and the last to a jeweler/watchmaker who actually went to Hawaii to work with the Army in 1942. Family legend has it that he was recruited to work on a bombsight. His father went with him, and my aunt did also in 1943.

My mother was in high school and college during the war, but during that time her part time work was as a telephone operator, sales at Sears & Roebuck, and as an occasional fashion model. She said the operator job had a lot of requirements connected to dress and lifestyle, even though the requirements had nothing to do with the work.

Matthias even in the early 70's when I was a telephone operator there were dress rules. I know my skirts were too short but only found that out overhearing someone complain. Was supposed to wear hose and heels but luckily some of the other things like makeup and hair were gone. I did like their instruction manual. In it every thing including how to hold your hand to insert the plug into the board was there. It was broken down into little step by step segments.

My mother was a telephone operator. The switchboard was in the house, which was furnished by Southwestern Bell. It was four rooms with an outhouse out back.

My mother was born in 1925, two of her brothers joined the Marines, one the Navy during WWII.

Seniorgal, didn't you author a longer article on WWII on your blog? Everything you write is so interesting to me, and I seem to recall more about your life during those years.....

Yes, I did write more on my blog. "The War" was a very big life changing event for folks of my generation. Not many of us left who actually lived through it.

My mother was a U.S.O. show girl. They would put on a stage show then change into their formal gowns & dance with the troops.

My aunt worked at Boeing’s. She was small, so her job was to wire in the wings. One day the crew forgot she was inside a wing and started to move it. Auntie said she lost a lot of skin getting out. My mother said there was a man,and his wife that stayed at her house for a short time . He was a spy and she was afraid of him. They never left the house, or went near a window that was not covered. They came late at night, and left late at night also.

My MIL lived in a fraternity house while at college--the guys were all at war. She left Pittsburgh for Iowa State, GO CYCLONES. I doubt her father would have let her escape, get an education, if the war wasn't raging and marriages weren't hard to come by!!

My father was drafted in December of his senior year in high school. My mother was a civilian employee of the Navy and she worked at Westinghouse. I am not sure what she did.

Chi......your grandmother was born in 1940??? Holy cow, you are young. :)

My dad was drafted out of high school. He married my mother who was 16. She finished high school while he was in the service. The war ended while he was in boot camp so he got sent to China. He came home and told mother he was going to use his GI bill to go to college and she should go as well. They scrimped and worked part time to finish. Mom was the first person in her family to finish high school, much less college. They both taught school and were married almost 68 years.

My dad worked in the oil field as a fill-in for an employee who had been drafted knowing full well that when the war was over, the draftee would be offered his job back and dad would be unemployed.

The draft swept the countryside clean of tradesmen such as paper hangers. Mother taught herself how to hang paper by papering the rooms of her own house. After neighbors saw the result, she always had plenty of paper-hanging jobs during the summer. Work went well for her except for one job. It was raining and the air was saturated with moisture. Disaster struck. I was applying paste to the paper and mother was putting it on the walls. She had our work flow organized such that (on ordinary days) the paste had begun to dry to the right consistency so that the paper would stick to the wall and stay in place. That day, the paste would not set and we had sheets of paper sliding down the wall.

My dad was the first married man drafted in his home town. He had worked for the largest employer in town since '36, was drafted sometime in '40. The factory made footwear and had a large 'chemical division', my dad worked on the footwear side. After dad left, my mom went to work at the same plant until the war ended, and never worked 'out' again, as I and my brother came along. My dad served just under five years, in the European Theater.

My dad never talked much about the war, but he told me he knew a man who worked in a specialty machine shop, who came as a small child from Italy. One day while at work, 'government men' came and removed him from his job, saying that due to his ethnicity, he couldn't work for the war effort. It broke his heart, he considered himself an American, not an Italian.