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Emmy Lou Packard  2/5/79 - page 3, section 3

I also designed a pamphlet called Vandalism, for the American-Russian Institute, showing Nazi damage to churches and other fine architectural masterpieces in the Soviet Union. (I have one)

[[marginalia]] neighbors, 1943, anecdotal [[/marginalia]] (My apartment was on Corbett Street, on the North slope of Twin Peaks, the top floor of the home of the head of the Music Department Bill Knuth at City College (check). He and his wife Eleanor who also taught, had three sons who played with mine. Above on the hill another couple, Bill and Evelyn Erb lived. I didn't meet them until a very small serious boy knocked at my door one day and started a most adult conversation about music and books. He asked me if I'd like to hear his French records. I said I'd be delighted and he brought them down. Babar the Elephant in French. His name was Guy, and he was about four years old and less than three feet high. A few days later His parents knocked on my door and introduced themselves. "We thought we'd better get to know you," Guy's father said, "Since Guy says he's going to marry you." The Erbs had a great collection of folk music records, and their home was a very pleasant place to be. I went to their 50th wedding anniversary a few months ago. Their son Guy had flown home from Washington DC, where he is, of all places, on Dr. Bryzinsk's (sp) staff. Guy spent several years in the African department of the UN, in economics. He also helped run the presidential campaign for Fred Furth when he (Guy) was working for or in Nelson Rockefeller's office.... Guy, of course, never discusses politics beyond polite and diplomatic fencing. I gave him a good paperback expose on conditions in Latin America. Hope he read it.)

[[marginalia]] Kaiser Shipyard paper [[/marginalia]] About 1943 or 44 I joined the staff of the Kaiser shipyard paper Fore 'n Aft, at the suggestion of several former Pelican writers I had worked with in college. My eyes were giving out from the strain of drafting all day, so the shipyards were a welcome change. My first trip out to the Richmond shipyards was in the early evening, and I still remember the excitement of the big yards working at night. Flooded with light, the huge strange shapes of prefabricated ship parts cast long shadows, red lead and pale green zinc chromate undercoats of paint a background for the shipyard workers working in three shifts, day, swing and graveyard. Big cranes called "whirleys" moved back and forth on tracks carring heavy parts - complete forepeaks huge brass propellers for the AP-2 &AP-3 troop transports. These were called Victory ships and were faster than the old Liberty ships or rust-buckets.

This shipyard period was one of the most interesting and positive in my life in the United States. For once a vast number of Americans were united and enthusiastically engaged in a struggle to end fascism in Europe. We were allied with the USSR with Stalin at the head, with a strange bedfellow not leading the Chinese forces adequately: Chiang Kai Check (see the Stillwell Papers), DeGaulle in France, Churchill in England and Franklin Roosevelt. For once the Russians were heroes in our capitalist newspapers (this ended almost the day that VE-day(Victory in Europe) was announced. Suddenly the American press(with of course the exception of the progressive and communist press) began to use words like Stalinazi, already attempting to warm up the cold war.)

[[marginalia]] shipyards  shipyards [[/marginalia]] The ____ thousand people in the Richmond shipyards came from all classes of people. There were many teachers, college professors, housewives, the first really big influx of black people from Southern states, and professional shipwrights, welders, electricians, machinists painters and other crafts; anglos, Filipinos, Chinese, Native Americans One night riding back on a bus to San Francisco crowded with shipyard workers tired and some a little drunk, two men got into a drunken argument about an army serial number. Finally the tall, hard-hatted bronze-skinned serious man said "You better watch out. Because I'm an Indian and you'll never know where that arrow came from!" A few minutes later they were dear friends again.) I saw a young architect who had chosen to work on the hot slab in the plate shop - one of the toughest jobs in the yards. Heavy steel angles twelve or more feet long were heated red hot on the hot slab. Then men with heavy sledge-hammers had to quickly hit the angle iron and bend it to fit a jig placed on the slab, making the ribs for the ships. The eager but slightly-built architect only lasted a week on the hot slab. It took physically powerful men for that work. I made a number of drawings and a final painting of men working on the slab, but it was destroyed in a fire and the photograph of it lost. I made hundreds of drawings all over the yards as I walked around getting stories for Fore 'n Aft. Some of the drawings were used