World War II interrupted Chauncey Del French's writing career when in 1942 he and his wife, Jessie, answered America's urgent need for workers in the shipyards. The Frenches were among the tens of thousands of workers recruited by Henry Kaiser under the U.S. Maritime Commission for the nation's wartime shipbuilding program. The memoir that Chauncey Del French began while working as a pipe fitter in the Kaiser shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, is a compelling firsthand account of how the war changed the lives of those at home. In addition to providing a world of detail about the process of...