LOCAL 

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Sunday, July 25, 2004

Original depot workers confident in program

By AMYJO BROWN of the East Oregonian


HERMISTON — Linda Gilleese remembered the shards of glass she picked from her co-worker’s clothing immediately after their office windows shattered, a result of an explosion on the Umatilla Chemical Depot in 1944, the only fatal accident in the history of the depot.

It happened in March of that year, at igloo B1014, as workers unloaded 500-pound bombs from a truck to the storage structure. All six workers near the igloo died.

Gilleese, an 18-year-old employed then by the depot as a clerk and a typist, recalled that the moon was still out that morning when she arrived at work. The wind was blowing, and it was cold, she said. At about 9:30 a.m., she and another woman in the office were in the lunchroom, sitting at a table and talking.

Then the building rumbled. Gilleese yelled “It’s an earthquake” and started to dive under the table. Seconds later she heard the KA-BOOM that rattled towns miles away, tottering house foundations, upending shelving and breaking dishes. In Gilleese’s office, the windows exploded, and the lights went out.

“Suddenly we were in total dark, and we knew something had gone wrong at the depot,” she said.

Gilleese told her story Saturday morning to a group of about a half dozen women who had surely heard it before. Like Gilleese, the women, all in their late 70s or older, had worked at the depot during its early years, a time when it employed most of the residents of Hermiston and Umatilla to handle the loads of munitions shipped in for temporary storage as World War II heated up. For more than 30 years the women have been meeting twice a month for breakfast at the Pheasant Café on Main Street in Hermiston to share depot-related memories.

Now, as the depot is about to begin destruction of its remaining weapons stockpile and as the numbers in the group grow fewer with the passing years, the women’s reminisces are more poignant.

They are proud, they said, of the work they did (and that of many of their husbands and friends) at the depot. Their time in the depot’s work force coincided with the time period when women were being brought into the work force to fill the positions of the communities’ war-bound young men. They are sometimes called Rosie’s Riveters, but they immediately shook off any notion that they were “feminists” of the time.

“We were just working women,” said Norma Quick, 83, a former medical clerk from the depot.

“And we knew better,” added 81-year-old Fay Moses, who started in 1942 and retired in 1983 from a variety of positions at the depot. “The depot was much better than working downtown, much better than being a secretary.”

Moses was the first woman to gain employment at the depot, in August of 1942, as a typist.

“It was interesting,” she said. “I went in the office and it just quieted down. But they were extra nice to me. The thing I remember most is that the boss would come in and wink at me before he went into his office.”

She, too, had her fun, she said. One day as she left the depot at the end of her shift, she blew a kiss at a new, young male employee she noticed. Years later, the two were married.

The women did face difficulties in getting promotions and moving out of the typist positions, but it didn’t last long, they said.

“What dictated it was that all the men were going off to the service,” Quick said.

Soon, women were driving trucks and operating fork lifts. In fact, Gilleese said of the six workers who died in the 1944 explosion at igloo B1014, one was a woman, Alice Wolgamott.

After the accident, Gilleese’s supervisors had all depot employees, male and female, clock out so that they could determine through a process of elimination the names of the workers killed.

“It was quite the deal,” Gilleese said. “We didn’t get home until 2 a.m.”

Despite having experienced such an incident at the depot, Gilleese — and the other women — said they have absolute confidence in the ability of the current work force to safely close a chapter in not only Eastern Oregon’s history, but also the nation’s.

“The safety record at the depot has always been something else,” Gilleese said.

The cause of the accident was never determined, but U.S. Army investigators speculated in their report that the workers may have dropped one of the bombs as they moved it off the truck.

The accident certainly got attention in the area, the former depot workers said. A few employees at the time quit out of fear. But life went on. Most people living in the area trusted that the accident was an anomaly.

“The people who are out there, they have respect for the weapons,” Moses said.

“They are not afraid of the chemical weapons,” said 78-year-old Betty Green, who started work at the depot in 1943 and who spent nearly 31 years as an accounting supervisor in the finance department.

“You know who is afraid?” interjected Quick, 83. “The people most worried about the depot? Portland.”

Quick has a theory for why the depot has had a relatively clean safety record.

“You can buy this theory or not,” she said. “But I think it’s because most of the people who moved into the area came from the middle west.”

They were all workers, ex-farmers from rural areas, she said, and they brought their work ethic with them when they traveled West.

“They just worked to work, to make a living and to do right by the world,” she said.