War helped leave Depression behind
When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Spokane was still shaking off the high unemployment and stagnant growth of the Depression era. Nearly overnight, it became a bustling hub for servicemen and the few servicewomen traveling overseas, and for workers looking to get a piece of a local military boom.
Farragut Naval Training Station – the Navy’s second-largest training facility – was finished in North Idaho in 1942 and accommodated nearly 300,000 servicemen in its short 15 months of use. The Velox Naval Supply Depot, now the site of the Spokane Business & Industrial Park in Spokane Valley, was the Navy’s main West Coast military storage facility. It was commissioned in early 1943 and employed more than 2,000 civilians at the height of operations in late 1944. Galena Army Air Depot, a supply and repair station in Spokane, repaired thousands of airplane engines in two years of service.
Nancy Compau, retired director of the Spokane Public Library Northwest History Room, said Spokane’s military installations – and jobs – flourished because of the city’s inland location and extensive railway system.
“They felt we were less likely to be bombed,” she said. “It was an incredible time to grow up. Thank God, we were never under attack here. We were very fortunate.”
The hydroelectric power of the Grand Coulee Dam, finished in 1942, also made the Inland Northwest an ideal location for industry. Two government-contracted aluminum factories were constructed during World War II, the Mead reduction plant and the Trentwood rolling mill. Seattle-based Boeing Co. relied on the factories for the materials used to construct its B-17 aircraft. Trentwood alone employed several thousand workers and produced more than 375 million pounds of aluminum for war use. Henry Kaiser, of Permanente Metals Corp., would lease the plants from the federal government soon after the war.
“All these people who were having a hard time from the Depression were able to get jobs in these facilities,” Compau said. “You can see what it would do for the economy. Stores were doing great business.”
Compau remembers that rapid wartime growth in downtown Spokane created a “vibrant” area, bustling with new shops and hundreds of servicemen. Movie stars visited the region to drum up support for war bond drives.
Spokane’s population jumped from 122,000 in 1940 to 181,608 in 1960, but business growth outpaced it. From 1941 to 1952, business settled by check in Spokane – a common measurement of economic activity at the time – increased by nearly 250 percent, exceeding $2.5 billion in 1952.
Compau, who was born and raised in Spokane, recalls more modest efforts, too. She said she toured her South Hill neighborhood with a red wagon, collecting bits of scrap tin for the war effort.
“We would go and collect tin cans because we didn’t have aluminum cans back then,” she said. “It was an incredible effort. We would take all of this to school. If we could get gum, we would pull the wrappers off the gum. That was all part of growing up here during the war.”
Compau said nearly everyone in Spokane knew someone who served. Her father left for a tour of duty overseas in 1942, returning in 1945. It’s estimated that nearly 15,000 people from Spokane County – about 12 percent of the population at that time – served in the war.
“Most of us had one parent or another overseas,” Compau said.
Dorothy Rochon Powers, a reporter for The Spokesman-Review at the time, remembers Spokane as a “serviceman’s town” during the war.
She said Davenport Hotel owner Louis Davenport would allow servicemen, many of whom were traveling through Spokane on their way home or stopping over before duty overseas, to sleep for free on the hotel’s overstuffed lounge chairs and couches, floors and carpeted steps.
“The Davenport was the heartbeat of Spokane,” said Powers, who reported on the hotel and often ate lunch there. “Thousands of young military men came to know Spokane because they were stationed here and went through here. They went through to eat or to sleep on the staircase or just to say they had been at the world-famous hotel. The community thought it was a wonderful thing.”
The USO, or United Service Organizations, then at Third Avenue and Monroe Street, provided servicemen with food, as well as hosting dances and other entertainment. Powers was one of many women who took advantage of the jobs servicemen left behind. At 21, she came to Spokane to work as a reporter after graduating from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism.
“It was a very lucky break for me and for other women around the country,” she said. “We were years ahead in comparison with the kinds of jobs you were able to get.”
Florence Otto Boutwell, who has written several books on the history of Spokane Valley, went to work at the Velox Naval Supply Depot in her early 20s. From a family of four sisters, she wanted to do what she could to help the war effort, so she signed up to be a Navy WAVE, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.
“Just about everybody was either in the military or working in some war-related industry,” Boutwell said.Boutwell was assigned to the accounting office and was charged with compiling monthly reports on Velox. She said the facility sparked a mass migration to the Valley, with people moving to the previously rural area to build the depot and work there once it opened.
Jobs created at the military installations gave many people their first taste of more structured employment.
“Most of these people had never been in business except at a general store or something like that,” Boutwell said. “Most of these people didn’t know what nine-to-five meant.”
Boutwell said the resulting local demand for housing was too heavy for the wartime supply of construction materials like steel and lumber. Many homes were divided up into apartments; families and churches offered rooms. Some workers bought property and waited to build.
“When you would drive around the Valley, you would see an expanse of tar paper,” she said. “They had dug cells in the ground and covered them with something, lived in the basement – waiting for the war to be over so they could build a first floor and a second floor.”
William Stimson, a journalism professor at Eastern Washington University and author of two books on area history, said a handful of servicemen who passed through Spokane came back to settle in the area. Classrooms at EWU, Whitworth and Gonzaga overflowed with recently returned servicemen using the GI Bill, signed into effect in June 1944.
“It amounted to a better-trained work force,” he said. “There was an attitude with GIs, ‘Hey we can do things.’ They had self-confidence and worldliness.”
Stimson said many former servicemen started small businesses in Spokane, but as they grew, moved to bigger cities with faster shipping options and larger populations. This contributed to a post-war boom, followed by a sag in Spokane’s growth in the 1960s.
“Spokane needed homegrown industries to be popping up to take over,” he said. “A lot of good ideas were started here, but they went to somewhere else.”