Joshua Hendy Iron Works Short Story

Joshua Hendy Iron Works was a large equipment manufacturer since the gold rush days. Among many other pieces of heavy machinery, Hendy manufactured the large water cannons and pumps that were used for hydraulic mining in the Sierras. After getting shaken out of San Francisco by the 1906 Earthquake, the company settled in Sunnyvale. The once thriving company of over a thousand employees was barely afloat by the middle of the Great Depression with about 60 people employed. That all changed dramatically with the coming of the war. By the time the war was over, there were over 11,000 working at Hendy. Here is the story of one of the early wartime employees:

I thought, “I’ve got to do something for the war effort,” so I decided, “well, it’s either going into the service or coming down here [to Sunnyvale] and get a job in the war plant…”

There were five of us, at the very beginning, but then they employed many more girls. My sister came too as a factory worker. And we were given uniforms, coveralls, and hats, and hard toed shoes, Then I was instructed how to use the pentagraph machine and what we did on the pentagraph machine was engrave the sight that went on the torpedo mount… it had this sight that was mounted on the top to find a range …show more content…
I did learn to make them. And I would make a lot of clothes that I wore, which led me into what was to happen later because I found out that if you could take a piece of material and lay it out properly and cut the pieces out to make full use of the material that you have, and put it all together one piece at a time, following the pattern that comes with the dresses, it would sure help with putting together aircraft parts later in life… You learn quickly. And just the same way you can lay out a pattern, you could follow a