 Henry Kaiser was building ships for the British under Lend-Lease contract before the war. This was early in 1941, as I understand it. It wasn't until war was declared that women—well, no, actually women were working for Kaiser Long before then. My name is Betty Reed Soskin, and I'm an Interpretive Park Ranger at Rosie the Riveter Homefront National Historical Park in Midtown, California. One of his innovations was to replace riveting with welding, which made the ship lighter and therefore faster. He could teach women within two weeks to weld, and then they would all be doing such a small part of such a large job, which de-skilled labor. It no longer was something that had to be specific to a skill, but it was simply part of the job, and by so doing, speeded up production of ships. They had previously taken 18 months to two years to build a single ship. He was turning him up by the end of the war one a day. Henry Kaiser knew that if you took women into the workforce, somehow you had to accommodate families. Though that was segregated, their black families were not included in the child care. He enlisted the expertise of Dr. Catherine Landrist, who was a university professor in University of California, Professor Berkeley. She believed that little children were capable of learning, and what she developed in the Maritime Child Development Centers was what we now know today as the Pretender for Head Start. It was an amazing program she created there, and children were accommodated around the clock. Henry Kaiser was really someone who was a cement contractor, who came here after completing Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee. He had never built a ship. One of the geniuses that he brought with him was Dr. Sydney Garfield, who had been with him at the dams, and it was at Grand Coulee and Hoover that Cindy Garfield developed the first prepaid health plan in order to keep workers healthy. And as I say, I don't believe that Henry Kaiser was a social reformer. I think that he was just a smart industrialist, that he really believed that if he could keep his people healthy, that he could therefore complete his work more efficiently. That's what he contributed to the workplace. The first 79 cents a week deducted from people's salaries, both at the dams and at the shipyards. He could maintain their health. So that was the first preventive health care that was entered into in this country. They worked around the clock on three shifts, morning, noon, and night. All of the business enterprises throughout the city were open all night, the grocery stores, the hospitals, the schools, everything was open overnight. Even child care was 24 hours a day to accommodate the fact that women were in the workforce and that the homes life had been interrupted and put on hold for a long time. Um, light changed for everyone.