Four women were assigned to each cabin, except that soon—as more recruits began arriving, throughout April 1943 and into May—cots sometimes had to be squeezed in, to make room for an extra person. At first the camp offered no food service, so—as the women began training for their mysterious new occupation—they took some of their meals in Dayton. The city boasted several fine-dining establishments, including the Biltmore Hotel’s Kitty Hawk Room, named after the place in North Carolina where the Wright brothers—Dayton natives—made the first airplane flight. On weekends, the women could ride the elevator to lunch on the fifth floor of Rike’s, a department store, which was a treat because of the elegant presentation. In those early weeks the women sometimes had dinner in the basement of the ward room at camp, where they found that tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches made a perfectly satisfactory supper.
The women were billeted at a place called Sugar Camp, a thirty-one-acre property named for the magnificent maple trees on the grounds. For much of its history the state of Ohio was agrarian, and the trees at one time had been tapped for maple syrup. Dayton had been transformed during the War of 1812, when it served as a mobilization point for American attacks on Canada and British troops in the northwest U.S., bringing banks, businesses, and factories. This continued during the Civil War, when it served as a supplier for the Union Army. The city nurtured more than its fair share of inventors and entrepreneurs, including not only Orville and Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneers, who had their bicycle shop here, but also Charles Kettering, who invented the automobile ignition system. Kettering’s self-starter was the reason Dayton had a General Motors plant. It also had Dayton Electric; the headquarters of Frigidaire; and Wright Field, used for aviation and testing.
But the mainstay of the economy was the National Cash Register Company, which owned Sugar Camp. NCR made the machines that kept American commerce running—accounting machines, adding machines, and of course cash registers, which were big and bright and gleaming, as splendid and ornate as fairground calliopes. NCR sold its machines all over the world; it had set up its first overseas sales office before the twentieth century even started. Over the years, NCR’s founder, John Patterson, had acquired huge swaths of land, including the Sugar Camp property. Patterson was a pioneer of modern sales culture, and before the war, the camp had served as a summer retreat for NCR salesmen, who spent intensive weeks taking classes, listening to motivational speeches, competing for cash prizes, and learning about things like annual quotas and regional sales territories and the stages of selling.
But gleaming cash registers required materials that were needed by the military, and NCR’s ninety-acre industrial campus had been converted to producing the machinery of war. Around the country, major companies like Ford, IBM, Kodak, Bethlehem Steel, Martin Aircraft, and General Motors were cooperating with the war effort, producing weapons and war materiel and helping develop systems. So were universities like Harvard and MIT. NCR was fully committed: One hundred percent of its operations were war-related work.
Seeing as how there was nothing, just now, for the salesmen to sell, Sugar Camp had been turned over to the Navy women, six hundred in all. Though their project was secret, their presence in the town was not. NCR was not above seeking publicity for its contribution to the war effort, and comely uniformed women were a good way to do this. NCR had sent the photographer to the train station and continued to document the women’s daily lives and NCR’s warm hospitality toward them. The photos, which found their way into the NCR company newsletter, captured images of the WAVES marching, lounging, swimming, singing, eating—everything, that is, but doing their work.
The women labored seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, in shifts. Three times a day, more than a hundred of them would muster at Sugar Camp and march four abreast into Dayton, up hills and down, in snow and rain and sunshine, passing a house where a girl they called Little Julie would come to her window and wave at them. Before long, people in Dayton were saying you could set your clock by the sight of the WAVES marching. Their destination was the NCR main campus, located about a mile from Sugar Camp. A cover story was devised to explain their presence. “The WAVES will take courses in the operation of special accounting machines,” announced the NCR newsletter. It struck some of the women that the people of Dayton must think they were remarkably stupid, to take a whole summer to learn to use an accounting machine.
The NCR complex dominated downtown Dayton, occupying an area the equivalent of eleven city blocks. The facilities were so extensive that in addition to its yellow brick buildings and the offices and factories they contained, NCR had its own water wells, its own electrical power plant, its own movie theater. The women worked in Building 26, a modest structure tucked away from the rest that formerly housed a night school offering classes to NCR employees. Behind Building 26 stretched a spur of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Armed Marine guards now lived in Building 26 and patrolled it, to make sure no unauthorized persons gained access. The women were locked inside the rooms where they worked. They were permitted to put on cotton smocks and to take off their white gloves and work barehanded.
They sat at big tables that had been installed in the former classrooms, the same seating arrangement every day. The rooms each held about a dozen people. Hanging from a cord that plugged into the ceiling, or nestled in a little dish on the worktable before each of them, was a soldering iron. On the table before each woman was a wheel made of Bakelite, brass, and copper. Shortly after they arrived, their supervising officer—female—taught the women how to use a soldering iron to fashion a little interlacing basket of wires that attached to each wheel. The wires were short and of varying colors. The women fashioned the wires according to diagrams, wrapping each wire around a prong and putting a dab of solder where the tip of the wire connected to the contact point of the wheel. Each woman would take the hot soldering iron and melt the solder, and when it cooled, she would tug the wire to make sure the seal held. It was exacting work, and their supervisors warned them there was no room for mistakes.
It took a while to become adept—some never did and were given easier jobs involving circuitry—but most of the women were good with their hands and mastered work that was no more difficult than making lace.