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Some former workers say the South Portland shipyard offered the best paychecks they would see for years.

By SETH HARKNESS, Staff Writer August 12, 2007

It wasn't patriotism alone that drew 30,000 workers to the South Portland waterfront during the wartime shipbuilding boom.

Besides producing hundreds of Liberty Ships that sailed across the world's oceans to help win World War II, the massive industrial undertaking also created good-paying jobs at a time when Maine's economy was still mired in the Great Depression.

Many veterans of the New England Shipbuilding Corp.'s yards said they realized the Liberty Ships were an important part of the nation's war effort, but their immediate motivation for seeking work in South Portland was financial. Most can recall to the exact penny the hourly wages they earned at the shipyard.

"My real reason for being there was the money," said 91-year- old Gordon Windle of Auburn, who left a job at a Lewiston bleachery in 1941 to work at the shipyard. "I went from 43 cents an hour to something like 80. The most I ever made at the shipyard was $1.20, and to me that was like heaven on earth."

Many other former shipyard employees, most in their 80s and 90s, recalled the shipyard primarily as a place of economic opportunity, where someone who didn't know bow from stern could immediately find a job and double their former salary. Many people worked six or seven days a week, but former workers said they were happy to do so.

"Work was just scarce at that point," said Nicholas Davis of Westbrook, who spent five months at the shipyard as a shipfitter's helper in 1942 before joining the military. "I heard older men talking. They said it was the first time in their marriages they could start paying some bills off."

Gus Barber, 86, of Cape Elizabeth, began welding the inside of Liberty Ship hulls in 1941 at a starting wage of 65 cents an hour. "I made more money than my father did," he said.

When the war was over, Barber, who later founded Barber Foods, said it was a tough transition back to lower-paying jobs.

"Everyone was happy. They all had new cars," he said. "When the yard closed, everybody was missing those wages."

The pay might have been exceptional, but workers at the shipyard earned their money. Much of the work was dirty, physically demanding and fast-paced. When he was a 16-year- old high school student, Paul Zdanowicz spent a summer working at the yard to increase his strength on the advice of his basketball coach.

Zdanowicz got a job unloading freight trains at the end of the spur line, now part of the South Portland Greenway, that fed directly into the yard. That summer, he handled thousands of kegs of steel rivets and heavy cylinders filled with gas for the shipfitters' cutting torches.

"I think those tanks were about 169 pounds," said the 80-year- old Scarborough resident. "The reason I remember that is because that's what I weighed at the time."

Even so, Zdanowicz, who went on to become a school superintendent in Massachusetts and Ohio before retiring to Maine, said it was a long time before he saw paychecks like the ones he earned that summer.

"I was a schoolteacher with a master's degree and many years of experience before I was able to equal what I could make at the shipyard," he said.

Staff Writer Seth Harkness can be contacted at 282-8225 or at:

sharkness@pressherald.com