When and Where: 7 p.m. Nov. 14, First Unitarian Church, Eliot Chapel, 1011 S.W. 12th Ave., Portland; 7 p.m. May 1, 2008, Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St.

Cost: Free

Information: goodworksister.org or 503-228-6389 . Video is available at

It isn't the glory of helping in the war effort that she recalls.

"What does a 16-year-old know about patriotism?" asked Gallagher, 79, of the St. Johns neighborhood. "I didn't work on ships. I just rode a bicycle around the yard. I enjoyed it except when it rained."

Gallagher is one of a rapidly dwindling number of women who remember those World War II shipbuilding days when their men went to war. Leaving their laundry and kitchens and putting the babies in day care, they donned overalls, heavy gloves, boots and hard hats and welded Liberty ships in Vancouver and Portland.

They were the "Wendy the Welders" of the Pacific Northwest, the sisters of the "Rosie the Riveters" who worked on munitions and war materiel elsewhere.

Portlanders Sandy Polishuk and Barbara Gundle and the Northwest Women's History Project have preserved those days in a video called "Good Work Sister! Women Shipyard Workers of World War II: An Oral History." It's available for $35 through goodworksister.org , and will be shown in Portland on Nov. 14 and in Vancouver on May 1, 2008.

The new video is a reincarnation of a slide show the women produced in 1981 and 1982 by interviewing dozens of women workers from the shipyards in Vancouver and Portland.

"We were feminists, and it was a story that needed to be told," said Polishuk, a long-time Portland activist, writer, librarian, textile artist, teacher and radio producer. The women brought the show back last year, remastered it and added fresh cuts of period music.

They invested their own money, $100 or $200 each, in the video and were impressed by the strength of character of the women who built the ships.

"One of the reasons that I enjoyed the shipyards so much was because it is something that we (women) weren't allowed to do before," says JoAnn Hudlicky, a shipyard worker, in "Good Work Sister!"

"I particularly went into it not because of any patriotism, but because of need," says Kathryn Blair on the video. "I had a marriage breaking up at the time, and had to go to work. Office jobs were like $70 a month, and you could make around $200 a month working in the yard, doing this."

Recognition

For its work on the video, the women's history project will be honored today at a banquet in Oakland, Calif., with the Nonprint Format Award by the national Oral History Association.

"The award is a very big deal," said Polishuk, a frequent featured speaker in Portland and author of a book published in 2003 on a tough woman labor organizer, "Sticking to the Union: an Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila." Born and raised in Seattle, she has lived in Oregon for most of her adult life. She's been a peace, labor and women's rights activist since the 1960s.

For Gallagher, going to work in the shipyard came naturally after her mother and stepfather, Jessie and Joe Whealdon, took jobs on the shipbuilding crews.

"I didn't want to stay home alone," she said, so she quit school and rode a bus at 7 a.m. from her home in Hazel Dell to the shipyard, where she worked 10-hour days until 1946. She took home about $29 a week, she said, which worked out to "47 cents an hour or something."

About 120,000 men and women came to Vancouver in those days to build ships and defeat the Germans and Japanese. In the peak year, 1943, there were 38,762 workers at the yard.

The shipyard lay on the Columbia River, just downstream from today's Marine Park. It produced baby flattops, tank landing craft and Liberty cargo ships. The first ship, the S.S. George Vancouver, was launched July 4, 1942. The last ship was outfitted in May 1946. From the yard came 141 ships and the launching of a health care system, Kaiser Permanente, which still serves the public today.

Women workers, in jobs once reserved for men, earned an equal share of the credit for the work, although they were laid off immediately after the war was over.

Gallagher's two brothers - Army Lt. Milton and Sgt. Mervin "Buddy" McAtee - were killed in the war.

"That was crushing for my mother," she said, and her mother died shortly after the shipyards closed in 1946.

Gallagher was laid off on May 1, 1946, and went on to marry twice and have a daughter, Carol Ashby, who lives in Orchards. She worked in a warehouse, sewed swimming suits, developed film, checked groceries and went on to become a property manager and investor.

But the days in the shipyard remain a peak, pleasant memory, Gallagher said.

"I enjoyed it. I was 16 years old. It was my first job," she said. "I thought I was queen of the hill."

Did you know?

The new video "Good Work Sister!" tells in 136 images the story of women in the Portland and Vancouver shipyards during World War II.

The video was produced by the Northwest Women's History Project, which comprises Sarah Cook, Susan Feldman, Barbara Gundle, Amy Kesselman, Tina Tau McMahon, Madeline Moore, Sandy Polishuk, Lynn Tayler, Valera Washburn, Barbara Whittlesey, Karen Wickre and Lisa Siegel.

The women made a slide show after interviewing dozens of women shipyard workers in Vancouver and Portland in 1981 and recently converted it to a video with music, a narrative and photography.

Welders like this woman worked in the Kaiser Shipyard in Vancouver during World War II.

Esther Gallagher, 79, shows a photo of herself when she was 16 years old, working as a bicycle messenger in the Kaiser Shipyard in Vancouver in 1944. She loved the job, joining her mother and stepfather among the thousands of workers.

If you go

What: Showing of "Good Work Sister!"

When and Where: 7 p.m. Nov. 14, First Unitarian Church, Eliot Chapel, 1011 S.W. 12th Ave., Portland; 7 p.m. May 1, 2008, Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St.

Cost: Free

Information: goodworksister.org or 503-228-6389 . Video is available at