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By Root 1049 0

working odd jobs in various quotidian establishments, including a dry cleaner, to help pay the rent, her brother Charles remembered. In later years, she would come to regret deeply that she had never gone to college. She would make sure that her daughter, faced with a similarly abrupt change in life circumstances, was able to stay in school. Madelyn would be the one, too, who would subsidize the education of her grandchildren in one of Hawaii’s most respected private schools. But if she thought during that time in California about going back to school, it was not an option. She needed to make money. What was more, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she and Stanley were back in Kansas, just eighteen months after leaving. Six weeks after Pearl Harbor and a few months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, Stanley enlisted on January 18, 1942, as a private in the U.S. Army. According to his enlistment records, he gave his education as “four years of high school” and his civilian occupation as “bandsman, oboe, or parts clerk, automobile.”

The war jolted southeastern Kansas out of the Depression in much the same way that the oil strike at Stapleton Number One, the discovery well at the oil field in El Dorado, had jolted Butler County a quarter-century earlier. Profits from the oil boom had financed a fledgling aviation-manufacturing industry in Wichita, where aviation pioneers such as Clyde Vernon Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman had helped win Wichita the title “Air Capital of the World.” The Stearman Aircraft Company, then a subsidiary of Boeing, had landed its first major military contract in 1934. Now the attack on Pearl Harbor strengthened the case for decentralizing the defense industry, and Wichita became one of the biggest defense aviation centers in the country. In 1941, the government began construction on a new Boeing plant in Wichita and picked Boeing to produce the B-29 Superfortress, the aircraft later used in the firebombing campaign against Japan. Employment at Boeing soared to 29,795 in December 1943—up from 766 two and a half years earlier, according to Wings over Kansas, a website on Kansas aeronautics. The plant operated around the clock. The population of Sedgwick County nearly doubled over five years. Huge temporary housing complexes with names like Planeview and Beechwood sprang up. Next to the Boeing plant, Planeview alone had a population of twenty thousand. Boeing had fifty-six bowling teams. There was a nine-hole golf course and tennis, badminton, and shuffleboard courts. The company bused in workers from as far away as Winfield, Kansas, and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Others commuted by car pool from places such as El Dorado and Augusta. The defense-aviation boom, like the oil boom, would prove fleeting. In 1945, after the suspension of B-29 production, Boeing laid off sixteen thousand workers in a single day. The new plant closed, and employment at Boeing Wichita dropped to about one thousand. But while the war lasted, wages were high and, with men off at war, nearly half of all the aircraft production workers were women. Nationally, eighteen million women are said to have entered the workforce between 1942 and 1945, many of them because of government campaigns to lure housewives into full-time, war-related work. Women became financially independent and took on male responsibilities, in many cases for the first time. Madelyn Dunham was part of that change.

With Stanley away in the Army, Madelyn moved in with her parents in Augusta and commuted by car pool to a job as an inspector on the night shift at Boeing in Wichita. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama described his grandmother in that period as Rosie the Riveter—the icon of wartime womanhood, in overalls, painted by Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The prodigious work ethic that would enable Madelyn decades later to work her way up from a low-level bank employee to vice president of the Bank of Hawaii must have been in evidence at Boeing. She became a supervisor, Charles Payne remembered,