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‘Aloha’ Symbolizes Kaiser Permanente’s Entry into Post-war America

posted on July 27, 2010

By Tom Debley

Front and back covers of launch program for the S.S. Burbank Victory, July 28, 1945 (Courtesy of the National Park Service, Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, Launching Program, RORI 3169)

Director of Heritage Resources

The world was changing dramatically 65 years ago this week. The war in Europe was over, and Japan would surrender within a few weeks. In Richmond, Calif., the last Victory ship built in the Kaiser Shipyards was readied for launch on July 28. Above the ship, the S.S. Burbank, the word ‘Aloha’ in giant letters was suspended between two cranes.

An orchestra played Hawaiian music, guests wore leis made from fragrant pikake blossoms, and Henry J. Kaiser’s wife, Bess, cracked the traditional flower-wreathed bottle of champagne across the bow.

“In launching the last of the Victory ships, we are not registering a finality,” said Kaiser, “but beginning the second phase in the achievements of our industrial family.”

Looking on were Kaiser’s two adult sons, Edgar and Henry Jr.

It was said 10,000 people were on hand, including shipbuilders who had worked on the very first Victory ship.  They sang “Aloha” to Mr. and Mrs. Kaiser and, as the S.S. Burbank slid down the way into San Francisco Bay, flowers tossed from the deck showered the crowd.

The symbolism of the “Aloha” theme has only grown over time. The Hawaiian word is used to say both goodbye and hello. America was saying farewell to World War II, and greeting the post-war world. Henry Kaiser was leaving shipbuilding and embarking on new ventures—including opening the Permanente Health Plan, later renamed Kaiser, to the public. And he was advocating for national reforms that would make health insurance available to all Americans.

Indeed, days before the launch of the S.S. Burbank, Kaiser announced he had drafted a legislative proposal that he presented to several U.S. Senators to create a national program of voluntary prepaid medical care.

“…The greatest service that can be done for the American people,” said the preamble to Kaiser’s 1945 proposal, “is to provide a nationwide prepaid health plan that will guard these people against the tragedy of unpredictable and disastrous hospital and medical bills, and that will, in consequence, emphasize preventive instead of curative medicine, thereby improving the state of the nation’s health.”

These events also were coupled with opening the Permanente Health Plan and Hospitals to the public under the leadership of physician co-founder Sidney R. Garfield. Thus, this week became the springboard for the 65 years—to date—of continually defining the future of health care with the growth and leadership of Kaiser Permanente . (See: Opening a Prepaid Health Plan to the Public 65 Years Ago this Month.)

This would be Kaiser’s ultimate legacy.

The Kaiser family at the launch of the last Kaiser Victory Ship, July 28, 1945.

As the preeminent California historian, Kevin Starr, has noted, “After all the things he did—the great dams he had built, the great waterways, the unprecedented work in the shipyards—Kaiser knew that this was the thing that would last.”

Or, as Kaiser, himself, said on several occasions in the last years of his life in Hawaii, “Of all the things I’ve done, I expect only to be remembered for…filling the people’s greatest need—good health.”

National health care legislation failed in 1945 and many times thereafter, but Kaiser, Dr. Garfield and their successors have persisted in advocating for heath care for all ever since and saw President Obama sign the Affordable Care Act last March 23. That came exactly 65 years and 20 days after the official date of Henry J. Kaiser’s original “Proposal for a Nationwide Prepaid Medical Plan Based on Experience of the Permanente Foundation Hospitals,” which had been prepared in consultation with Dr. Garfield.

Today, Kaiser and Garfield are honored for their contributions on the Home Front of World War II at the Rose the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park for making prepaid medical care “a legacy of the WWII Home Front.”

(Special thanks to Veronica Rodriguez, Museum Curator at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, for locating and sharing use of the program images for the launch of the S.S. Burbank Victory, July 28, 1945.)

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Opening a Prepaid Health Plan to the Public 65 Years Ago this Month, Kaiser Permanente Begins Its Post-World War II Life

posted on July 22, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

This Oakland Tribune clipping is one of many news stories when Kaiser Permanente began opening its doors to the public.

Sixty-five years ago this month the curtain was about to fall on the dreadful years of World War II, and Dr. Sidney R. Garfield and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser were raising the curtain on their plans to expand their prepaid Permanente Foundation Health Plan—later renamed Kaiser Foundation—beyond Kaiser’s employees to the general public.

So it was, in July 1945, that they announced that the “first large extension of the family health plan” beyond Kaiser workers would be in Vallejo, California, about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco.

The idea of going to Vallejo with a Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospital resulted from a grassroots invitation from citizens there—a sort of populist request for prepaid medical care. That should come as no surprise. The new medical care program—nicknamed “a Mayo Clinic for the common man” by one writer of the era—had been a hit with workers in the wartime Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond and was getting nationwide media notice.

“I don’t see why this can’t be done everywhere, for everyone,” said one shipyard worker. “This should be for everybody,” added another. “We must organize and demand this not only for us workers but for all their families. It should be for everybody in America.”

Against that backdrop, Kaiser Permanente was invited to town by a tenants’ council of the Vallejo Housing Authority to provide care for residents of eight large wartime public housing dormitories. A doctor was assigned to each dormitory and a clinic was set up within an existing public health service infirmary.

Meanwhile, with the cooperation of local physicians, a citizen’s committee had unraveled wartime bureaucracies to get the government-sponsored Vallejo Community Hospital opened in 1944. It was needed because the Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo and the nearby Benicia Arsenal ordnance facility had drawn thousands of wartime civilian workers. The city’s few doctors had been swamped by a flood of new patients.

However, with the war ending, the government was no longer willing to support a community hospital. The military-style facility—long, low buildings spread over 30 acres—closed after the war ended in August, leaving thousands of civilian families without medical care.

Before long, the not-for-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan needed a full service hospital in Vallejo. So, on April 1, 1947, Kaiser Permanente re-opened the 250-bed Vallejo Community Hospital as its own, having first leased it as surplus property from the Federal Works Agency. Later, it bought the hospital at the site where Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center remains to this day.

“This…marks the beginning of efforts now underway by the Kaiser organization to offer Permanente Foundation facilities to all groups interested in complete prepaid medicine,” the July 1945 announcement read. The existing facilities were those on the Home Front of World War II serving Henry Kaiser’s shipyards and steel mill. They were in Richmond, Oakland, and Fontana in California and in Vancouver in Washington state.

Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center started with rebuilding of the burned out shell of a former hospital, seen here in 1942 with Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, at right, and Ned Dobbs, liaison between physicians and the architects.

A few days later, Clyde F. Diddle, administrator of the Oakland Medical Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Oakland hospital was being opened to the public under four principles: prepayment, group medical practice, adequate facilities, and “a new medical economy.”

“This ‘new economy,’ strongly opposed in part by some factions favoring the traditional family physician-patient relationship, follows the old Chinese practice of paying the physician while you are well,” the Chronicle said.

Added Diddle, “We offer medical service from nasal spray to surgery—and all under one roof. The important thing is that there are no barriers to early treatment. …Patients are encouraged to come in early…”

The Chronicle article also reported that Henry Kaiser was preparing a proposal for Congress to establish a nationwide system of voluntary prepaid medical care.  This would be the first of many continuing efforts to support Sidney Garfield’s dream of health care for all Americans that have continued to the present day.

These historic events are honored today by the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, which includes historic sites of the wartime medical care program. Notes National Park Service interpretative materials: “Today, prepaid medical care is central to American culture—it is a legacy of the WWII Home Front.”

Forecasts in 1945 projected eventually serving about 25,000 people in Vallejo. Today, the Vallejo Medical Centers serves about 10 times that number in California’s Napa and Solano counties alone. The entire Kaiser Permanente multi-state program serves 8.6 million members.

The “official” date for Kaiser Permanente’s opening to the public became Oct. 1, 1945, but the work got under way in earnest starting in July.

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Launch of the S.S. Multnomah Tanker, One of Kaiser’s Last Ships, Was 65 Years Ago This 4th of July Weekend

posted on July 2, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

Sixty-five years ago this 4th of July weekend, World War II was drawing to close and one of the last of the Kaiser-built ships for the war, the SS Multnomah, was launched in Portland, Oregon.

Henry J. Kaiser, who had witnessed his boyhood hero Teddy Roosevelt as the trust-busting President fighting monopolistic business practices, had lived through the Great Depression and he had a vision of a better post-war America.

“If we re-build a world of monopoly and special privilege, we will taste a defeat as bitter as a victory for the Axis powers,” he once said during World War II. “Our task and our hope is to release our energies for creative effort. …It is now our portion to be better-fed, better-housed, better-clothed, better-skilled in all the arts of production than at any time in the history of mankind. It is now our lot to enjoy better health…”

It was for visions like this that Kaiser, whose desire for better health for all Americans became Kaiser Permanente, led a heroic civilian production army of Kaiser employees who set records in shipbuilding never matched before or since.

So we thought it would be a good Fourth of July moment to let you relive those times by bringing you, from our Heritage Archive, a recording of the launch of the SS Multnomah, a tanker named for the county where the main city is Portland, on July 3, 1945 – 65 years ago Saturday.

The Multnomah was among the last of the Kaiser ships launched from his Oregon shipyards.

Launch of the SS Multnomah

Click on left side triangle to listen.

This photo is of the SS Multnomah under her second name, the Esso Worcester, sailing as a privately owned oil tanker.

Click on the bar to hear the launch of the SS Multnomah from the Swan Island Shipyard by Mrs. Martin Pratt, who was the wife of the Multnomah County sheriff. You will hear the crack of the champagne bottle and a shipyard workers quartet, the Singing Sentinels, singing Anchor’s Away as the Multnomah slides into the Willamette River.

Typical launch of a Kaiser ship in Oregon during World War II is show, this being the Liberty Ship William Clark. The steel plate aloft is the keel plate for the next ship to be built, the plates being lowered into place as the just launched ship hit the water.

The SS Multnomah went into private shipping after the war as an oil tanker. It was renamed the Esso Worcester in 1947, the Hess Refiner in 1961 and the Pieces in 1976. The ship was scrapped in Taiwan in 1984 after 39 years service.

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Kaiser Permanente’s LA Harbor Area Blossoms after Humble 1950 Start

posted on June 21, 2010

By Ginny McPartland 

Kaiser Permanente’s post-World War II public health plan was but an embryo in 1950 when famed labor leader Harry Bridges asked Dr. Sidney Garfield to provide medical care for West Coast longshoremen. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had just adopted a health and welfare plan for its members, and Permanente’s prepaid health coverage fit Bridges’ vision. 

The health plan, then called Permanente, already had services in the San Francisco Bay area, so covering the six or seven thousand Northern California dock workers was no problem. But Permanente’s only presence in Southern California was at the Fontana Steel Plant, 70 miles inland from the Los Angeles harbor area where the roughly 3,000 longshoremen lived. 

Kennebec medical clinic in the 1950s

Garfield didn’t have to ponder Bridges’ offer for long. The struggling health plan needed members – desperately. After saying “yes!” to Bridges, Garfield flew into action. He hired a physician to run the longshoremen clinic, found a suitable building in the Port of Los Angeles town of San Pedro and opened for business in about two weeks. 

Today, Kaiser Permanente’s South Bay service area, boasts about 190,000 members, a 255-bed medical center, and medical offices in Long Beach, Torrance, Harbor City, Lomita, Carson, and Gardena. The KP South Bay community is celebrating its 60 years of history on Wednesday, June 23, in Harbor City. 

It’s been a rough ride 

The Harbor area health plan’s six decades of existence can be characterized as a roller coaster ride with its ups, downs, and unexpected turns. The years have brought growth, at times unmanageable, stopgap solutions to facility needs, the San Pedro murder of a popular doctor, and a fire that disrupted operations for a year – not all roses and sunshine. 

The early medical group, led by Ira “Buck” Wallin, MD, worked out of a small clinic in San Pedro and had to fight for legitimacy and for staff privileges at any of the area hospitals. They were blackballed by the local medical community for practicing what was called “socialized medicine” when the “Red Scare” was the order of the day. This contention was typical of the anti-group-practice atmosphere anywhere Permanente Medicine established itself. 

In the beginning, and for many years, the doctors made house calls and took turns sleeping overnight in a blood draw room in the clinic. They were at the beck and call of the longshoremen and their families. Over the first five years, the ILWU became steadily more impatient with the health plan for delaying construction of a sorely needed Harbor area medical center.

Early Parkview clinic in Harbor City

 Meanwhile, the group had expanded to Long Beach – first to an old house and then to the old posh Kennebec Hotel across from the Pike, a popular amusement park in Long Beach. The health plan also opened a Los Angeles clinic and then a hospital on Sunset Boulevard. From 1953 when the Sunset Hospital opened until the Harbor City hospital was built in 1957, patients were shuttled to Los Angeles for hospital care.

After a tussle with the ILWU that threatened the loss of the group, Sidney Garfield and Buck Wallin got the funding to build the Harbor City medical center. The first medical office building, called Parkview, was opened adjacent to the hospital in 1958.

South Bay no stranger to innovation

The South Bay/Harbor City movers and shakers contributed more than their share of innovative ideas over the years. Some examples:

  • In 1964, Harry Shragg, who later became area medical director, was the first in Southern California Kaiser Permanente to perform outpatient surgery, a practice that would become prevalent for its economy and medical soundness.
  • In 1964-65, Buck Wallin and Chief of Medicine William Fawell pursued the idea of discharging patients sooner and providing follow-up medical care in their homes. When Medicare came along in 1965, suddenly (home health care) became one of the ‘in’ things to do.
  • In the early 1970s, Harry Shragg, Internist Jay Belsky, and Medical Group Administrator Ed Bunting worked together to develop a new exam room layout that would leave more room for the patient and the examination table. “It was such a big success that it was adopted and became standard for all of Southern California, Bunting said.

The good, the bad and the ugly

  • In 1967, Dr. Shragg saw the opportunity to help disadvantaged Harbor City people through a local program funded by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Kaiser Permanente used its community service funds to provide medical care for 100 participant families.
  • In 1960, Leon Quattlebaum, a well-liked and respected 36-year-old Harbor City OB-GYN, was killed in San Pedro by a local tough who, unprovoked, punched “Q” in the jaw, knocking him to the cement floor and fracturing his skull. The prosecutor at the murder trial said the only reason for the killing was the murderer’s “malignancy of heart.”
  • In November of 1973, a night fire of unknown origin collapsed the three-story Parkview engineering tower and threatened to destroy Harbor City’s medical records and appointments data. The medical offices and appointment center were up and running again in about a week, said MGA Ed Bunting. But it took about a year to rebuild the burned out section at the center and make the complex whole again.

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As World War II ended 65 years ago, Henry J. Kaiser Led the National Drive to Collect Millions of Pounds of Clothes for Overseas War Relief

posted on May 26, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

Sixty-five years ago Friday, May 28, the New York Times reported that Henry J. Kaiser, as national chairman of the United National Clothing Collection, had announced that more than 125 million pounds had been gathered on the way to a 150-million-pound goal for overseas war relief.

It was a momentous time as America prepared for the first Memorial Day following Germany’s unconditional surrender—VE Day—less than three weeks earlier and the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt only six weeks earlier.

In an example of Henry Kaiser’s spirit of supporting the social needs of people, he had agreed in January to chair the clothing drive at the request of President Roosevelt.

Said the President in a Jan. 22 letter to Kaiser: “…As many war victims have died from exposure and a lack of adequate clothing as have died from starvation… The importance of the cause demands a leader who will stimulate thousands of our people throughout the land to give vast amounts of volunteer service, as well as inspire all Americans everywhere to contribute all the clothing they can spare. I am confident your personal leadership will command the nationwide cooperation needed for success…”

Henry Kaiser had never led such a national campaign before, but took up the cause with the same gusto with which he had built ships for the war, and which had earned him nicknames as the “can-do” industrialist and the “patriot in pinstripes.”

There is enough spare clothing in America’s clothes closets and attics,” he said, “to go far toward relieving the stress of these innocent people.”

By a mid-March kick-off, Kaiser had 2,500 volunteer local chair people lined up on his way to 7,600 for the drive. The goal was surpassed with a total of 150,366,014 pounds of used clothes, shoes and bedding shipped overseas.

Clothing drive poster was used nationwide in Henry Kaiser-led overseas war relief effort.

As if that were not enough, Kaiser repeated the feat after VJ Day— the surrender of Japan on Aug. 14, 1945.

World War II was finally over and Kaiser this time responded to a request from President Harry Truman.

The sponsoring agency for both volunteer drives was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which had been formed by participating World War II allied nations. It was disbanded after the war, with its functions transferred to agencies of the newly formed United Nations, establishment of which had been supported by Kaiser.

By example, Kaiser further embedded into his organizations a spirit of service to the common good that continues to this day within his lasting legacy, Kaiser Permanente, co-founded with surgeon Sidney R. Garfield and open to the public in October 1945.

As one of his biographers, Albert P. Heiner, summed it up: “…Once again, Kaiser had proved he was more than an exciting industrialist, he was a man with a heart.”

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Rosie park in Richmond not just for Rosies

posted on May 19, 2010

By Ginny McPartland   

World War II changed everything. Women dared to strike out for the first time into a man’s world of work. America’s harbors sprouted hyperactive shipyards, and a burgeoning U.S. heavy industry turned out the steady stream of weapons and vehicles needed to outlast our enemies. “We won the war because we out-produced everyone else,” observed Lucille “Penny” Price, a Richmond, California, shipyard electrician during the war. 

Diverse shipyard workers in class

A grateful American society has been thanking the stereotypical “Rosie the Riveter” for her role in war production ever since the war ended 65 years ago. About 25 percent of the hundreds of thousands of West Coast shipyard workers were women, but the park is really dedicated to all home front workers – welders, electricians, pipe fitters, cleaners, helpers – everyone. 

Telling the “Rosie” stories, as well as chronicling the dramatic societal changes the war spawned, is the mission of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II National Historical Park in Richmond. The park sits on the Richmond waterfront where the wartime Kaiser shipyards were situated. 

Celebrating World War II’s home front legacy 

As the nation marks the 65th anniversary of the war’s end this year, the Rosie park celebrates its 10 years as an institution dedicated to keeping the lessons of World War II from being forgotten. Kaiser Permanente, whose medical care program started in the Kaiser West Coast shipyards in 1945, also celebrates its decade-long association with the park to keep the war’s legacy alive. 

The health plan’s contributions to the park’s mission will be formally recognized on Monday, May 24, when the city of Richmond and the National Park Service present Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources Director Tom Debley with the 2010 Home Front Award. Debley is being honored for “initiatives to create and support the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park.” 

Ambulances at the ready in Richmond

The powerful synergy of the national park-Kaiser Permanente partnership was highlighted at a recent party to raise funds for the Rosie the Riveter National Park Trust. Debley was guest speaker and gave his talk about the history of health care reform. 

About 150 people attended the annual event in the old cafeteria on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard No.3, raising $38,000 for various trust community projects. These projects include Rosie’s Girls, a summer camp for adolescent girls; restoration of Atchison Village wartime housing, which is on the National Register of Historic Places thanks to work by the Rosie trust. You can find out more about trust projects at http://www.rosietheriveter.org 

The cafeteria, an ugly duckling the day before, was transformed into a lovely swan by Saturday night. NPS Ranger Elizabeth Tucker, along with Rosie Trust dinner co-chairperson Jane Bartke and others, dressed up the place with a couple hundred posters, photos and other war era artifacts. Rosemary Blaylock, a friend of Bartke, collected products and household items that recalled a simpler time before the war. She made up see-through packets that contained wartime candies M&Ms, malt balls, and bite-size York’s Peppermint patties. 

Among the guests at dinner was a sunny Kaiser Permanente President and CEO George Halvorson and his photographer wife Lorie Halvorson; pioneering Permanente physicians Morris Collen and Ed Schoen, who treated shipyard workers; Diane Hedler, director of Quality for the Permanente Federation and Rosie trust board member; Alide Chase, senior vice president of Quality and Safety; Robert Erickson, retired chief counsel for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals; Glen Hentges, chief financial officer for the Permanente Federation; Clair Lisker, retired hospital nursing administrator and educator, her family including her son Wes Lisker a physician at Hayward Medical Center; John August, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions; Dianne Dunlap, August’s deputy and member of the Rosie trust board; Holly Potter, vice president, public relations and stakeholder management, Brand Strategy, Communications and Public Relations; Bill Graber, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals Board of Directors member; Richard Reed, senior project manager, Health Plan Process Administration; and Mark Aquino, Patient Care Services. 

Of course, the national park service was well represented by Ranger Betty Soskin Reid, our most celebrated local Rosie who worked in the shipyards and is the oldest ranger in the park system; park Superintendent Martha Lee; Ric Borjes, Chief of Cultural Resources for four Bay area park sites; and Elizabeth Tucker, park ranger and all-around get-things-done person. Other special guests of the night were Bernice Grimes, of Walnut Creek, who was a scaler at the Kaiser shipyards,  Mary Gillum, of Portland, Ore., who was a machinist in an Oregon Kaiser shipyard, and Marian Sousa, a draftswoman in Shipyard #3. 

Rosie Marian Wynn, a wartime pipe welder, Marjorie Hill, a Red Oak Victory volunteer, Amanita Cornejo, a Contra Costa College volunteer, and Marian Sousa helped with set-up and clean-up for the dinner. 

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Target of ecstatic Times Square kiss still adorable after all these years

posted on April 26, 2010

By Ginny McPartland
Where were you on August 14, 1945? Not born yet? Most of us weren’t. You may remember the day President Kennedy was shot (November 22, 1963), the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan (February 4, 1964), the day the Berlin Wall was doomed to come down (November 9, 1989). Or maybe for you the biggest day in history was the night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States (November 4, 2008).

Kiss felt around the world

But for the generation that endured World War II (and, for many, the Great Depression), the day the war finally ended has no competition for the most significant day in American, if not world, history. Those left of the Greatest Generation in 2010, 65 years after the war ended, are making a valiant effort to get across to the latest generation why we can’t forget WWII.

I met one of the WWII history ambassadors and an icon –Edith Shain – the other day in Oakland. Her claim to fame is the unscripted role she played in a spontaneous drama in Times Square on the day the war ended. Her shapely legs with a nice turn of the ankle were part of the attraction of the photo of a sailor and a nurse kissing as if there were no tomorrow. She was adorable then, and she’s adorable now.

Tiny Edith is traveling around America at age 91 to spread the word of the WWII legacy. Spokeswoman for “Keeping the Spirit of ’45 Alive” with actor Hugh O’Brien (Wyatt Earp), she’s stumping with the message that “we” have to stick together like Americans did during the four-year nightmare to defeat Adolph Hitler and Japanese imperialists.

Edith Shain, Ginny McPartland

As someone who soaks up everything I can about  WWII, I was excited to meet Edith. I was especially jazzed because Kaiser Permanente is also celebrating our 65th anniversary. The health plan, set up to take care of Richmond shipyard workers during the war, opened to the public in October of 1945. So our heritage work gels beautifully with the Spirit of ‘45 initiatives.

The day the world could breathe again

Edith Shain, 1945

Edith was a part-time nurse and student at New York University on the day President Harry Truman announced the Japanese had surrendered. She and a friend, at work in Manhattan at Doctors Hospital, took the subway to Times Square when they heard the news. Still wearing her nursing whites, Shain joined the crowd in expressing their impossible-to-describe exhilaration that the horrors of world war were over.

Amid the pandemonium, Edith was suddenly grabbed, embraced and passionately kissed by the unknown sailor who’d forgotten his manners in the heat of the moment. Alert photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt and naval photographer Lt. Victor Jorgenson seized the opportunity for the image of a lifetime. Jorgenson’s version was published the next day in the New York Times; Eisenstaedt’s shot appeared on Life magazine’s cover.

Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo has for six decades epitomized the unbridled jubilation of all Americans on that day in history. People surmised the sailor and the nurse were being reunited as a couple at war’s end. But actually, after the kiss the ecstatic sailor went looking for another thrill. “He went one way and I went the other,” Shain said in a 2005 NPR interview following the dedication of a 26-foot bronze statue replicating the famous kiss.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4799520

Sharing the lessons of a world at war

Edith left nursing after the war and became a teacher of small children in West Los Angeles. She took on the mission of education with a vengeance, and today she wants to teach all generations about the lessons of war.
She laments: “The younger generation knows nothing about the war.” She complains our current military actions in the Middle East are not justified and we shouldn’t be there. “In World War II, we were fighting for something.”

The “Spirit of’45” campaign is to bring attention to the war legacy by sponsoring numerous events through 2010 to culminate with special events nationwide on August 14. The organization is asking people to write letters to their representatives in Congress to designate a day in August to commemorate World War II veterans. The group has set up a Web site for veterans and other people to share their war stories.
www.spiritof45.org

Permanente marks 65 years as public health plan

Permanente’s first years after the war were rough. We had a small membership so it was difficult to keep the enterprise going. Things picked up in 1950 when the longshoremen’s union, the retail clerks, cannery workers and other small groups brought an influx of members. Through these 65 years, the health plan has grown to 8 million-plus members in eight states – California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Georgia, Ohio, Maryland (and Washington D.C.) and Colorado.

We will be marking the milestone along with our partners at the Rosie the Riveter National Park in Richmond, especially during the Home Front festival in October. With the park service, we are developing educational displays and other interpretive materials to highlight our shared history and the war legacy.
http://nps.gov/rori

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Henry J. Kaiser: America’s No. 1 Civilian Hero

posted on April 13, 2010

By Tom Debley, Director, Heritage Resources

Henry J. Kaiser was featured as "Shipbuilder No. 1" in a 1943 Real Heroes comic book.

Sixty-five years ago this year Henry J. Kaiser emerged on the American scene as the single most popular civilian hero of World War II, which came to an end in 1945.

It was a Roper Poll that spring that reported that—in the words of Stephen B. Adams, author of “Mr. Kaiser goes to Washington”—the American public “believed Kaiser had done more to help the president win the war than any other civilian.”

A Gallup Poll a few months later found Kaiser at the top of the list of people Americans thought should be president—with Kaiser trailing only Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. It is no surprise, then, that Kaiser was on President Roosevelt’s short list for vice president when he chose Harry Truman in the election of 1944.

Why not Kaiser? One answer comes from Michael Dobrin, guest curator of a special exhibit on Kaiser’s life at the Oakland Museum of California in 2004, who concluded Kaiser was too progressive for Democratic Party leaders.

“…Conservative party insiders—probably sensing coming postwar struggles over civil rights—balked at his overt advocacy of voter education, voters’ rights and support for unions,” Dobrin wrote in The Museum of California Magazine. “His name was dropped from the list.”

The public’s admiration for Henry Kaiser—whose most enduring legacy is co-founding with surgeon Sidney R. Garfield the medical care program that bears his name—lasted up to and beyond the end of his life in 1967. Indeed, he was so beloved that when he died in 1967 mourners flooded his memorial service with more than 20,000 white and red roses – said to be the entire supply of all florists in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was in addition to thousands of orchids and other flora from people in the Hawaiian Islands.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in condolences sent to Kaiser’s family, “Henry J. Kaiser embodied in his own career all that has been best in our country’s tradition. His own energy, imagination and determination gave him greatness—and he used that greatness to give unflaggingly for the betterment of his country and his fellow man.”

Today, of course, his efforts—and the legendary labor of almost a quarter million men and women of all races who worked for him in his West Coast ship building operations—are honored by the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif., which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

In addition, the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California will reopen May 1 with its first major redo in nearly 40 years. Its completely new Gallery of California History will include Henry J. Kaiser. According to the museum, the theme of the gallery will be Coming to California—“an idea that evokes not only the arrivals and departures of people throughout human history and their interactions with the inhabitants already here, but also the notion of coming to terms with the influence of California on our individual and collective identities.”

Late last year, Kaiser also was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and is featured in an exhibit at The California Museum  in Sacramento.

Interested in learning more about Henry J. Kaiser? Here are three good books, any one of which you might find in a local library (or for sale online):

“Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West,” Mark S. Foster, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1991.

“Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus,” Albert P. Heiner, Halo Books, San Francisco, Calif., 1991.

“Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur,” Stephen B. Adams, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1997.

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Harry Bridges and Sidney Garfield: Synergistic Collaboration

posted on March 31, 2010

Harry Bridges at ILWU meeting 1960

By Ginny McPartland
During the Cold War, the average American scorned any ideas that even hinted at socialism. Going against mainstream politics in the 1950s was fraught with danger.

Henry J. Kaiser and Sidney Garfield, MD, took their licks from the conservative medical establishment for their nontraditional ideas of health care. They were called “socialist” even though both were adamantly opposed to “socialized medicine.”  

Their contemporary– and sometimes collaborator — militant labor leader Harry Bridges was accused of being a communist, which he was not, as he fought hard and dangerously for bargaining power for dock workers.  

Marking the 20th anniversary of Bridges’s death this month brings to mind the groundbreaking 20th century achievements of these working class heroes. Despite the opposition, they didn’t back down.  

For Harry Bridges, elevating the worker to the bargaining table was a lifetime passion. His heart was with the “working stiff” who was considered almost like property of the employer before unions. “The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.” 

Born in Australia in 1900, Bridges was inspired by Jack London’s books to go to sea. He jumped ship on his first job because he disagreed with the skipper on the treatment of the seaman. He landed in San Francisco and soon began to organize the waterfront workers.  

His work culminated in 1934 in the San Francisco dock workers strike that resulted in the death of two men, casualties of police bullets. Union members refused to work until they could negotiate higher wages and a method of getting work on the docks without having to pay a kickback. The strikers won and Harry Bridges was set for 40 years as the president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) starting in 1937.  

“A Working Class Hero Is Something to Be” — John Lennon

By 1950, the ILWU had become a strong advocate for its members, and its leadership worked to spread unionism to other industries. The ILWU pioneered health and welfare benefits for its members. 

Enter Sidney Garfield: 
After the War when the Richmond shipyards closed, Kaiser and the Permanente doctors were ready, willing and able to take care of people. Both men had track records of providing affordable care to the working man. The health plan had been opened up to the public in 1945 but the enrollment was small. 

Enter Harry Bridges: 
It was a marriage with great potential. Bridges needed a health plan for his members and Henry Kaiser needed health plan members. Instant symbiosis.
  

In many ways, the goals of the two organizations converged. Bridges wanted all of his workers to have a health assessment and screenings to prevent disease. Kaiser Permanente’s Garfield saw how to accomplish the “multiphasic” examinations for all twenty thousand workers and later set up a way of collecting the results, at first on paper, and then in KP’s pioneering computerization of medical records. In effect, the ILWU members were guinea pigs for what has grown and expanded into KP’s electronic medical records prowess.  

Young Harry Bridges aboard ship about 1920.

Along the way, Bridges helped Kaiser Permanente by writing editorials in the ILWU newsletter supporting the health plan physicians. In 1953 Bridges assailed the San Pedro Community Hospital in Los Angeles for refusing privileges to KP doctors. In 1954, he criticized the American Medical Association for trying to block group medicine. “Group medicine is here to stay,” he wrote. 

In turn, Permanente physicians at times provided medical care on credit for striking ILWU members. Henry Kaiser was in favor of unions. In 1954, Kaiser said problems can be averted “simply by genuine recognition that the right of collective bargaining . . . is sound, essential human relations. I agreed a long time ago that unions are here to stay.” 

In 1965, Kaiser received the AFL-CIO’s highest honor for his achievements in voluntary medical care, housing and labor relations. Previous winners included former President Harry Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  

To view Arlo Guthrie’s tribute to Harry Bridges on Youtube: http://tinyurl.com/y87jt34
 

Top photograph by Otto Hagel, from Men and Machines, 1963; reproduced by permission of the Center for Creative Photography; © 1998 The University of Arizona Foundation
Ship photo courtesy of ILWU Archives, Anne Rand Research Library, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, San Francisco

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Climb the gangplank to learn about World War II’s social legacy

posted on March 13, 2010

Photo courtesy of Red Oak Victory

By Ginny McPartland
If you grew up in the Bay Area, or anywhere in America for that matter, you’re missing the boat if you haven’t been out to experience the Red Oak Victory ship docked on the Richmond waterfront. Granted it’s difficult to find, and in fact, you may never have heard of it. Not to worry, most people haven’t yet visited the Rosie the Riveter National Park where the ship is found.

The Red Oak Victory, built in the Kaiser Richmond shipyards in 1944, is a huge hulk of seaworthy steel that embodies a million stories pertinent to our society’s past. The ammunition ship, saved from scrap in 1998 by the Richmond Museum of History, serves as the chief artifact of the home front city’s museum collection. Volunteers have renovated much of the ship, which carried essential cargo for battles in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. www.ssredoakvictory.com

Richmond, and other Bay Area shipyards, figured fantastically in WWII home front America. The Bay Area was radically changed forever by the phenomenal influx of 200,000 shipyard workers and their families from around the nation. Every type of individual was represented in the newly configured social structure of California.

The legacy of World War II’s sociological impact is fully explored and documented in books and other items in the Red Oak’s museum gift shop. Notable examples are: “To Place Our Deeds” by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore; and “World War II Shipyards by the Bay” by Nicholas A. Veronico.

Red Oak mast

Just a few changes nudged by the war: Women working with men in industrial settings for equal pay; blacks and minorities working with whites for comparable pay; the emergence of professional child care centers; employment for the disabled; and affordable prepaid preventive health care provided by employers.
The medical care program started in the wartime shipyards lives on as Kaiser Permanente and is well documented in Tom Debley’s book “Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care,” published in 2009 by Permanente Press.

Changes in the status of women and minorities largely reverted after the war, but the seeds were deeply planted for the civil rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s.

Now for my confession: I grew up in Richmond, and I had never seen the shipyards or the Red Oak Victory until recently. My first visit to the floating museum was only a few weeks ago. Bay Area Historian Steve Gilford, a director on the museum board, gave me two tours of Shipyard 3 and the Red Oak. My eyes were opened to the treasure that is preserved in the depths of this honey-combed hunk of war grey welded and riveted steel.

The ship experience starts with a climb up the gangplank, a portable, suspended aluminum staircase to the main deck. From there, you step over the raised rims of the hatchways and navigate steel ladders to the various compartments of the midship house and the deckhouse. Down from the main deck you’ll find the museum, gift shop, and meeting room in a cleaned-up cargo hold.

Industrial mixer for batter

Ship's galley griddle ready for pancakes

One cheery way to introduce yourself to the historic waterfront is to partake of the $6 pancake breakfast offered on the Red Oak Victory once a month from April to October. The first one for 2010 is April 11.

To get to the Red Oak Victory, take I80 to 580 West. Stay on the freeway past the Rosie the Riveter park exit and take Canal Boulevard instead. Follow Canal all the way to the bay and wind your way through the industrial area to Berth 6A.

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