Courtesy of the Del Mar Historical Society
Marge Dunham (left) and Mary Marquez, who worked at the Del Mar assembly plant during World War II making tail subassemblies for B-17 Flying Fortresses, posed near the racetrack for this 1943 photo.
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DEL MAR – During World War II, the community was transformed from a playground for celebrities to a town committed to aiding the war effort.
Many people signed up for active duty, and those left behind were active on the home front, according to an account in "Del Mar Looking Back," a book by Nancy Hanks Ewing published in 1988 by the Del Mar History Foundation.
"The townspeople were very dedicated to the cause," local resident Margaret Dixon said in her interview for the book.
By December 1943, two years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a temporary assembly plant had been established at the racetrack and was in full operation.
"The Del Mar Turf Club made available 500,000 square feet of space at the fairgrounds under the grandstand and clubhouse and in the exhibit buildings, for aircraft subcontracting," Ewing wrote. "Thus the Del Mar Turf Club Aircraft Division, run by (Bing) Crosby (and Pat) O'Brien was created."
The company had a social club, known as Bing's Bomber Builders.
Many local women were hired to work at the racetrack assembly plant. Marge Dunham and Mary Marquez, both in their 20s, had worked at the Del Mar Drug Store on Camino del Mar before donning their bandannas and signing on to rivet tail subassemblies.
"The Del Mar Racetrack was used as a production facility for B-17 bomber tail ribs, which were then shipped up to a Long Beach facility to be assembled," longtime Del Mar resident Don Terwilliger, 74, said in a recent interview.
The Long Beach facility belonged to the Douglas Aircraft Co., which became one of the nation's biggest defense contractors during World War II. During peak war production, the company made 3,000 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers under license from Boeing, according to a 1994 article in Blueprints, the Journal of the National Building Museum.
With men leaving jobs to fight in the war, factories were desperate for workers. The U.S. Government began a campaign to recruit women to build ships, planes and weapons and undertake other typically male professions.
An aircraft worker from New York, Rosalind P. Walter, was the inspiration for a song written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1942. They coined the moniker "Rosie the Riveter," according to a 1997 article in The New York Times. The song included lyrics such as:
While other girls attend their favorite cocktail bar,
Sipping dry martinis, munching caviar,
There's a girl who's really putting them to shame.
Rosie is her name.
She's making history working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
Sheridan Harvey wrote about the evolution of Rosie in an article on the Library of Congress' Web site in its Journeys and Crossings pages. A government commissioned poster, designed by J. Howard Miller in 1942, depicted a woman in overalls with flexed arm muscle and hair secured in a polka-dot bandanna.
A later illustration of Rosie by Norman Rockwell appeared on the cover of a 1943 Saturday Evening Post, making Rosie the Riveter a national phenomenon, Harvey wrote.
After the war, the number of working women never again fell to pre-war levels, Harvey added.
In 1944, the racetrack assembly plant was phased out, and Marquez and Dunham returned to their jobs at the Del Mar Drug Store.
By the summer of 1945, horse racing had resumed. The stands were full on Aug. 14, 1945, wrote Ewing, when O'Brien made a formal address to the hushed crowd that the war was over.
