Many of the women already were familiar with machinery. Quite a few had worked as telephone operators before the war. Ronnie Mackey was one. She had grown up in Wilmington, Delaware, where after high school she worked in a fabric showroom, then moved to switchboard work because it paid better. Another, Millie Weatherly, a North Carolinian, had been working alone on the Sunday of the Pearl Harbor attack. Her switchboard lit up as soldiers from a nearby base called home, some of them crying, to tell their parents they would not be back for Christmas. Millie plugged their calls as fast as she could. About a year later her mother remarked, “You know, the Navy is welcoming women of good character and high school education.” And so here Millie was, in Ohio.
Jimmie Lee Hutchison was another. She was a tiny person, just nineteen when she was working at Southwestern Bell in McAlester, Oklahoma. Like every American town and city, her community had been transformed by war, with the arrival of a naval ammunition depot and an internment camp for Japanese American citizens. Jimmie Lee had four brothers in the service, and her fiancé, Robert Powers, was a pilot with the Army Air Force. The Navy sent a recruiter to the Southwestern Bell office where Jimmie Lee and her friend Beatrice Hughart were working. After perusing the materials, the two friends visited the recruiting station. They did not intend to join up then and there. But they liked the idea of helping bring the boys home. By the end of the day both had enlisted, Jimmie Lee by lying about her age.
At Hunter College, where Jimmie Lee took her naval aptitude test, she was surprised to learn she had a knack for reading blueprints. She had never seen one before, but something about the diagrams made intuitive sense. Switchboard work required operators to follow complex wiring patterns. Her good friend Bea also got orders to Dayton, so here they were, working together, once again.
Even those women who had not worked switchboards often came from households where they had developed an easy competence with minor industrial chores like replacing a worn-out cord on an iron. Some were independent to the point of being hard-bitten. There were two farm girls at Sugar Camp who liked to talk about how they went after their brothers with hoes during family arguments, and the way they talked about how they “meant business” with the hoes was unnerving to the other women.
Like their counterparts in Arlington and Washington, the women at Sugar Camp had a variety of reasons for seeking government service. Iris Flaspoller, from New Orleans, was escaping a hasty marriage. She and her husband, August, had married in January 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, when so many couples were tying the knot. They had not yet graduated from high school, and it quickly became clear the marriage was a mistake. They agreed to divorce as readily as they’d agreed to marry. To obtain a no-contest divorce took a year and a day, and Iris figured the U.S. Navy would be as good a place as any to sit out that period. So now here was Iris, whom her coworkers called “Flash,” literally sitting.
During rest periods, the women would put their heads down on the worktable, and the officer in charge, a former schoolteacher named Dot Firor, would read aloud from The Bobbsey Twins or Little Women or some other comforting storybook narrative, and give them twenty minutes to let their minds drift. On the graveyard shift, some would sing to stay awake as they soldered. There was a woman from an Irish family, Pat Rose, who would sing “It’s the Same Old Shillelagh” in the most beautiful lilting soprano.
The women were not told what the wheels they were wiring would be used for. They figured the wheels would be attached to some kind of machine—that seemed obvious—but what that machine did, they had no idea. There were men working one floor above them, constructing a machine the likes of which had never been seen, but the women didn’t know that. They did know this: Whatever the wheels did, it must be important. Circulating among them was a man named Joseph Desch, a Dayton inventor who struck the women as brilliant and seemed deeply involved in the secret project. Once the Sugar Camp cafeteria was up and running, Desch often would visit with them at mealtimes. With Desch over eggs, bacon, and hash browns would be his amiable wife, Dorothy, who was tall and dark-haired and slim and wore the most elegant hats. The pair always were accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Ralph I. Meader, a wiry Navy officer who lived with the Desches in their modest two-bedroom brick Cape Cod and seemed to occupy the unspoken role of designated Navy minder to Joe Desch.
Desch was friendly to the women, and so was his wife, but Commander Meader was friendly in a different way. He flirted and had the hearty, slightly false air of a politician. He was a women’s man and the women developed ways of coping with his attentions. Some would avoid him. Some liked to rub lipstick on their fingers and grab his cheeks and say “Izzy bizzy boo,” which delighted him.
But for much of the time, the women were left to their own devices. They worked hard, but—not having chores to do or houses to keep—enjoyed free time to read, write letters, and use the Olympic-size swimming pool on the grounds of Sugar Camp. In the early morning after finishing the graveyard shift, they would stroll back to camp, savoring the meadowlarks and the fresh smell of clover. One of the women, Betty Bemis, was a champion swimmer who had won several national titles, and men—Joe Desch, Ralph Meader, even Orville Wright—would come down to the pool to watch Betty practice.
The women were warned that when they went into Dayton, they should travel in pairs. Soldiers and airmen lived at nearby Wright and Patterson airfields, and it was fine for the women to date them, but they were not to say anything about their work. Parts of the city were out of bounds. Many German Americans had settled in the southwestern part of Ohio, and while most were loyal citizens, there were lingering remnants of the Bund, the organized movement of Nazi sympathizers. The women were told they could be kidnapped and that German spies would very much like to know what was taking shape in Building 26.
The women did what they were told. They traveled in pairs, and they did not ask questions. They tried not to speculate on what they were making. Even so, it was impossible, during the long hours with their diagrams and soldering irons, not to notice that there were twenty-six wires and that the wheels had twenty-six numbers on them. The numbers went from zero to twenty-five, but it didn’t take much education to figure out this added up to twenty-six.
Twenty-six, of course, was the number of letters in the alphabet.