Rosie the Riveter and Henry J. Kaiser

Day Trip to Rosie the Riveter and WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.

It has been a busy summer with teaching summer school and getting ready to start teaching history, civics, and economics at a new school in August. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t take the opportunity to take a few day trips around California. One Saturday earlier this summer, Sheila and I took a drive up to Richmond, California, to visit the Rosie the Riveter and WWII on the Home Front National Historical Park.

Richmond, California is just north of Oakland and Hayward on the east side of San Francisco Bay. The area was once heavily industrialized and it has a noteworthy history from World War II. Just a few miles further northeast is the Port Chicago Naval Magazine Memorial (a topic for another trip report) in the city of Martinez, and a little further northeast is the city of Pittsburg, California, where Camp Stoneman was located. Camp Stoneman was a staging area for troops shipping out to the Pacific Theater during WWII and during the Korean War. Notables departing from there included the 503rd PIR during WWII and my dad during the Korean War.

Richmond was an excellent choice for this park. During WWII the city was home to four Kaiser shipyards and a Ford plant that built tanks and jeeps. In all the city could boast 56 different war industries. The yards were built from scratch beginning in 1940. Thousands of workers flocked to California from the Dust Bowl, the South, and all over the United States. The city of Pittsburg grew from a population of 24,000 to 100,000 in a matter of months. Families lived in tents and trailers until the city's infrastructure caught up with the population boom. Housing, schools, and medical facilities had to be built along with the mad rush to produce the equipment of war. Some of the workers had construction experience

from the large Depression era projects like Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams. But very few had any experience building ships and many had no industrial experience at all. The yards on the west coast were integrated. Thousands of workers were African American and Hispanic. Twenty-five percent of the workforce were women, living up to the familiar icon "Rosie the Riveter." And although it was not easy, great strides were made for and by labor, civil rights, and women. People came together to do great things for the war effort. The ultimate example is the Kaiser Shipyard construction of the liberty ship Robert E. Peary in 4 days, 15 hours, and 25 minutes, a world record accomplished in November of 1942.

The genius and drive behind these accomplishments was a man named Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser started out as a road builder in the 1920s. He was a key player in major building projects like the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River during the Depression. Kaiser was an entrepreneur in the truest sense. He bid and won a contract to build ships for Great Britain in 1940 without having a shipyard to build them in. He brought his construction crews down from the Grand Coulee project to begin work on the shipyards in Richmond. When he needed cement and couldn't get it, he started a cement plant. When he needed steel and couldn't get as much as he needed, he built steel mills. When his workers needed medical care he built a hospital and sponsored a health plan, again something never before offered to workers. Kaiser Permanente medical consortium has survived to be one of the giants in the medical services industry today. Henry Kaiser was a problem solver, no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, after the war the Kaiser yards closed. As a result, Richmond went through tough decades of poverty and crime. However, during the latter part of the twentieth century, much of the abandoned industrial infrastructure was removed, and an environmental cleanup took place. Where three of the four Kaiser shipyards stood is now a public marina, park, and blocks of new condos and townhouses. Rosie the Riveter is a partnership park between the National Park Service and the city of Richmond. The city built the Rosie the Riveter memorial in Marina Park in 2000. A bike path connects the memorial to the NPS visitor center next to the Ford plant and Shipyard number three whose buildings are still standing. It is only a one mile walk between the two. It is a pleasant walk with views of the San Francisco skyline. The visitor center is a nice little museum where you will learn more about World War II on the home front and the Kaiser Shipyards. You can also go on board the SS Red Oak Victory, a victory cargo ship being restored and docked at the pier by Shipyard #3.

Still a work in progress, eventually the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front Historical Park will include a sample of worker housing, the child development centers built for Kaiser workers, and the first Kaiser Hospital. It's hard to imagine what the area looked like with four shipyards and a Ford assembly plant all working at full capacity. But the park is certainly worth the trip. To know more, I definitely recommend a book I picked up in the gift shop:
"Build 'Em by the Mile, Cut 'Em off by the Yard, How Henry J. Kaiser and the Rosies Helped Win World War II" by Steve Gilford. 

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park

Day Trip to Sequoia NP or "A Tale of Two Trees"

The vacation part of my summer has consisted of a few day trips and overnighters rather than a long trip. It's a good thing, California has a lot to see. Since we live only an hour and a half drive from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and my daughter had not been there since she was very young, a day trip to see the big trees again was a logical choice to start out the summer.

The sequoia tree or "Sierra redwood" should not be confused with the coastal redwoods in northern California's Redwood National and State Parks. The coastal redwoods grow taller, up to 379 feet. However, the sequoia grows in heights up to 311 feet and have thicker trunks and branches. So in mass the sequoias are larger, and live to be older at up to 3,200 years. Reminiscent of the Griswold's family vacation, we set out to visit the two largest trees in the world, the General Grant Tree and the General Sherman Tree.

Highway 180 will take you from Fresno to the Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park in about an hour and a half or a little less if there is no traffic. Lucky for us we are early risers and were the second car to arrive in the parking lot about 7:30 in the morning. There is a short walk of about a half mile on a paved path (completely ADA accessible) around the General Grant tree. The General Grant tree is the second largest living tree in the world at 267.4 feet tall and a trunk diameter at the ground of 107.6 feet. Although these famous named trees are a huge tourist attraction, if you arrive before the crowds it is still a peaceful walk in nature and you stand a good chance of seeing some wildlife. We saw a mule deer, chipmunks, and squirrels. You also stand the chance of seeing a black bear. Some other visitors told us they had spotted one.

After a quick stop in the Kings Canyon Visitor's Center to look at the books, we drove the fifty minutes down the General's Highway (198) to visit the General Sherman tree that is located in Sequoia National Park. The General Sherman is the
largest tree (by volume) in the world. It is approximately 275 feet tall and 106.4 feet around its trunk at the ground. The walk to the Sherman tree is a little more challenging, about a mile with an elevation drop of about 300 feet. Then of course it's a mile climb back up to your car. But the Sherman tree is still ADA accessible with a special parking area closer to the end of the trail for cars with

handicap placards. By the time we got there (around 11:00 am on a Friday) there were already a large number of tourists. This includes several tour buses full of visitors speaking French and German. Most people are well behaved and courteous. But like anywhere else you go, the more people trying to see the same thing the more frustrating it gets. So we finished our day with a scenic drive down from the mountains on Highway 198 through Visalia then back up to our home in Fresno.

Image from nps.gov.

If you've seen one sequoia, have you seen them all? Well, maybe. No doubt it is hard to tell from the ground which trees are taller or bigger around. It is more impressive to me to see the forest rather than the trees. What I mean is that in the groves of sequoias located in the Sierras there are some impressive groups of trees and some individuals that I find more attractive than either the Grant or Sherman tree.  They have an interesting history. Protected before the area was made into a national park and before park rangers were in service, these trees were originally guarded by the United States cavalry. And of course there are other things to do in these national parks besides standing at a large tree looking up. Years ago, before the bad knees came on, the wife and I hiked into the mountains on several occasions. There is indescribably beautiful scenery in the mountains, away from the giant trees but also away from the crowds. But everyone should come to visit the giants at least once.When you do look at them, you might wonder, like I do, why anyone would have wanted to cut them down.

Since it's hard to capture these giant trees in one photograph up close, here's a couple of videos courtesy of my daughter's iPhone. First the General Grant tree:

And the General Sherman tree: