Blast from the Past: Riveting Women

ASSEMBLING PARTS: Powell River Boeing workers on a float plane. Left to right, Freda Mohr (nee Parsons), Jean Northy (nee Thompson), Mildred Ross (nee Dice), Dodie Alderson (nee McGillvray), Barbara Manwood, Lynette (Sis) Hayes (nee Toll), and Isobel Aubine. Photo taken between 1942-45.

WITH FILES BY KAYLA REED

This past summer at the museum, our research support officer, Kayla Reed, researched women who worked at the mill during the Second World War. In an online exhibit, she details what their lives were like post-war, after employment with the mill.

“In this photo is a group of young women sitting atop a PBY; the type of amphibious plane for which the Powell River Company was contracted to assemble parts. On their faces are expressions of joy and excitement, and in this moment they are experiencing the finished product of their work. Each of these women were employed by the PR Company, and although not all of them worked in the Boeing plant, it was their combined efforts in many departments which kept the mill running throughout the Second World War.

Susan Tyler, Bert Toll and Sis Hayes, 1967.

No more than a year after this photo was taken, the war ended, Subassembly Plant #185 closed, and men returned to their jobs in the paper mill from overseas. This group of women who had clearly displayed their competence working in an industrial environment would now move aside, returning to the role expected of them by society as caregivers and homemakers.

This is the life that most women returned to when the end of the war came. In the early 1950s, only about a quarter of Canadian women were part of the workforce, a number which would grow in the decades to come.

Westview Airport. To the left of the image is a road. That was Sis Hayes’s right of way to the strip from her home on Manson Street. There was a small hangar on the left of the photo where she housed her plane. Photo taken between 1948 and 1952.

After spending so much time building airplanes, one of the women pictured in the photograph: Frances Lynette “Sis” Hayes, nee Toll, decided that she would learn to fly one herself. She took her first solo flight in 1946, and by 1949 she was the first woman to be a licensed pilot in Powell River. Over the next four years a group of aviation enthusiasts came together to form the Westview Flying Club, and in 1953 Sis was elected as the group’s first president. Living on the corner of Manson and Field St allowed her spend time at the newly built airport which officially opened in 1952.”