The Jack Miller Archive

From personal interview with Junior (Allen Lawrence) Jack's younger brother. Junior said Jack had gotten his machinist certification.
Location: San Francisco Naval Shipyard

Also see “Hunters Point Shipyard: A Community History,” Page D 6

"The Hunters Point community, which boasted three dry docks, small shipbuilding firms, taverns, stores, boulevard cafes, and shrimp markets in 1940, was transformed into a vital contributor to the war industry in the years following Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Navy's acquisition in 1940 of the Bethlehem Steel Dry Docks, which became Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, necessitated development of the district's infrastructure and the base itself.

Between 1939 and 1946, the Navy invested $87 million at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, including the completion of vast public works and ship building. Sixty buildings were constructed, 199 ships repaired, and over 12,000 units of housing built. Heavy construction to support six dry docks also occurred at Hunters Point. The most profound transformations, however, took the form of demographic changes brought on by the war's labor demands.

Faced with nationwide wartime labor shortages, the fully operating shipyard offered many opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen, manual laborers, and apprentice blacksmiths, joiners, painters, coppersmiths, electricians, machinists, pipefitters, shipfitters, boilermakers, welders, and sheetmetal workers. In the early 1940s, California's booming war industries acted as a beacon for workers from all over the nation. Active recruitment was conducted to meet the demand. Federally funded relocation programs, under such auspices as the War Manpower Commission, recruited 15,000 to 16,000 Black workers to the Bay Area shipyards by 1943. In a mere three years, the number of Black families in San Francisco swelled from 2,000 to 12,000. The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard labor force swelled from 8,024 in 1943 to 18,235 in August 1945.

News spread by word of mouth across the Depression-strapped country. It became known that California and the Bay Area offered consistent work that could be easily secured. And the workers came:

'They were brought from the South and the Midwest; from all the gas stations that had mechanics to the machinists who were making farm implements...[they] were brought into the war effort by train into San Francisco. They were promised at the time jobs for any family members that qualified, and the family [was] moved by rail into the area and a house was supplied for them....So the Navy built many homes on top of the hill out here at Hunters Point (Brown, 1995).'"