Building a Ship in Four Days

On July 6, 1942, I turned 18 years old. I had to be 18 years old to work at a shipyard. The Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, California had already hired me and I was waiting to turn 18 to start my new job. On July 7th, I reported there to work.
Kaiser had three shipyards along the waterfront in Richmond. They were yards 1, 2, and 3. I worked in yard 2.
The type of ships that were being built at Kaiser at the time were called Liberty Ships. Our shipyard was competing with other shipyards to see who could build a Liberty Ship the fastest.
After the keel was laid for the ship that our shipyard was building, almost everyone working at the shipyard was assigned to build it.
A lot of the parts on the Liberty Ships were prefabricated.
The building of the ship was chaos. Everyone was working on top of each other. When I had to go take my burning torch to go burn something, there would be a stack of welder’s lines and other burner’s hoses on top of my hose. I couldn’t pull my hose out until I stopped and untangled my hose from the rest.
I watched some of the welders do their job. Everyone was in a hurry. A welder would take a welding rod and lay it in a crack to fill up the crack. That way it looked like he filled up the groove with weld. Filling grooves like that made those places weak, which would soon cause cracks.
We build the ship in four days and then it was launched into the bay to be outfitted with the finish materials, such as toilets, sinks, bunks and everything it took to make up a ship.
Our shipyard got to say that they built a ship faster than any other ship that had been built.
I heard much later that when the ship was out at sea and got full, that it started to crack apart. Dad