At 89, Berniece Blees never thought she’d star on the pages of a popular calendar. But the Bremerton woman is Ms. October.
“I thought it was quite an honor,” said Blees. “It’s something I never thought would happen at my age.”
Blees and 11 other women from Washington are on the pages of this year’s Washington Women in Trades 2015 calendar. The annual calendar, a fundraiser for the Women in Trades organization, honors “Rosies,” women who worked in the shipyards, ammunitions and airplane factories, and one who worked on the Manhattan Project at Hanford. Of the 12 women, three are from Kitsap County.
Blees, who grew up in Crosby near Seabeck, worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard from 1943 to 1946 as an electrician, reading blueprints and making and pulling metal cable for ships.
“I worked the swing shift,” she said. “When I started, I made $4.65 a day.”
It was the best job available for young women, many of whom were doing jobs men would be doing, if they weren’t serving in the Armed Forces during World War II.
Where Blees grew up, there was no electricity and no indoor plumbing or toilets. It was very rural and she walked two miles to catch the school bus. She graduated from Silverdale High School (now Central Kitsap High) in 1943, at age 18 and then went to work in the shipyard.
“I walked that far to catch the bus to the shipyard, too,” Blees said. “There were only about 10 girls who worked in the electric shop. We all wore hard hats and hard-toed shoes.”
Eventually, she and two other women rented a small house in Bremerton to be closer to work. Blees went from being a mechanic learner to reading blueprints to boarding the ships and pulled wire cables to the guns.
“We’d crawl into some very small places and pull heavy cable through the ship to attach it to 40 millimeter guns,” she said. “It was very hard work.”
Sometimes Blees said she felt guilty taking a job that society thought belonged to a man.
“But there weren’t enough men for all the work,” she said. “When we pulled cable, we worked right alongside the men. We had to keep up with them.”
The women were respected, she said.
“We never had any problems,” she said. “We worked hard and the men knew it and they let us know when we did a good job.”
In 1949, Blees met and married a Marine. She worked at a sewing factory making ski pants and then worked at Harrison Hospital in Bremerton for 22 years. She had five children and now has 14 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
In her early years, she played Slo Pitch softball and she can still fit in to her red letter sweater from Silverdale High.
And she’s just marked 10 years working for Walmart, first as a greeter and now as a sales associate. Her husband, John, died nine years ago.
What takes up most of her spare time these days is keeping up with her professional sports teams including the Seahawks and the Mariners. Her house is filled with signed baseballs, t-shirts, bobble heads and more.
She has kept a scrapbook of items from her days working at the shipyard – her work ID and her lunch card, photographs of all the ships she worked on and the “Thank You” cards.
“Every time a ship left that we’d worked on, the ship would give each of us a note thanking us for our work,” she said.
Ms. December
Ms. December is Edna Estep of Bremerton. At 18, Estep made torpedoes at the American Can Company, which was taken over during the war by the Federal Government. She was the only woman at the Missouri plant that was trained to operate an internal grinder. Her job was to hollow out heavy springs. Following that, she worked as a government typist in Dallas and later was sent to Hawaii where she started as a mechanic’s helper and ended up in an office job.
“Hawaii was quite the place in those days,” said Estep. “We’d dance all night long and then we’d go to work. When it was break time, all the women would run to the lounge to see who could get the couch to take a nap.”
Estep was born in Kansas City and was the only daughter of a nurse and a street car conductor. Always a “tomboy,” she spent summers outdoors with her brothers. The family had a farm in Humansville, Missouri during the Depression. She attended a one-room schoolhouse and graduated from high school at age 16.
After the war, she moved back to Missouri and worked as a receptionist and Girl Friday for a doctor. In 1947, she married Vonnie Dale Estep. He was a Navy man and they moved from coast to coast, from Navy base to Navy base. They had 22 houses in 23 years. But when her husband retired, they chose to live in Kitsap County, in Port Orchard. Her husband died in 2000 and in 2004, Edna moved to Bremerton where she lives today.
Ms. July
Ms. July Mitzi Butcher is also a longtime Port Orchard resident. Early in the war, Butcher and five other women jumped in there back of a pickup truck and rode from Yellowstone to Salt Lake City where she got a job at Remington Arms. For the next 18 months, she was in charge of tracer bullets, filling 50 caliber bullets with gun powder.
“If you put too much powder in them, they’d explode and everyone would run for the door,” she said of her job.
She then got the opportunity to work on the government top secret Manhattan Project at Hanford in Washington State. She was in charge of hiring construction workers and lived in separate barracks from the men.
She stayed for 30 years and finished her career at the Hanford testing uranium and plutonium.
Originally from Montana, after high school Butcher attend a Normal School and become a teacher. But she found work as a maid at a lodge in Yellowstone before going to Salt Lake City.
She met Fred Butcher in 1947. He also worked at Hanford and they were soon married. They lived in Richland for 65 years, raised five children and have three grandkids.They retired to Port Orchard where she still walks and plays golf. She loves reading and said she was pretty sure she’d read all the books in the Richland Library at the time she lived there.
The calendars honor the Rosie Legacy and women who broke the barriers to get women in trades. To order a calendar, go to www.wawomenintrades.com.
