We normally think of our ancestry as a branching tree of individuals connected by relationships. You might take it another step and include the important events which brought people together in relationships that formed new branches and generations. In this blog post we take it one step further and talk about an aircraft that brought about a relationship that lead to another generation, my baby-boomer siblings and me. 

The individuals (pictured) in this story were 20 year old Virginia Havens from Denver, Colorado and 26 year old Richard Korns from Dayton, Ohio. The event was the onset of World War II and the shortage of skilled workers as a result of the military draft. The aircraft was the SB2C Helldiver dive bomber with which aircraft manufacturer Curtiss-Wright, the largest in the U.S. at the time, was struggling. The struggle was to simultaneously work out dozens of design kinks while ramping up to war-time production levels with a shrinking labor pool. The butterfly effect of those SBC Helldiver production delays in 1942 brought two distant young adults nearly two-thousand miles apart to both end up at Curtiss-Wright in Columbus in 1944 and to marry the following year. How did the SB2C Helldiver do all this?

In 1942 Richard had been working at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Baltimore, Maryland as a draftsman on the PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat (pictured) for a couple of years. What little we know about his work there was when he shared that he remembered doing some design work on the PBM-3‘s floats that hung under each wing. The other thing he shared shared was that after being in Baltimore for 2 years he missed being closer to home and family and friends. The country wasn’t at war when he moved to Baltimore in 1940 but by 1942 events had changed and war aircraft production was expanding everywhere, including at companies like Curtiss-Wright in Columbus. When he learned of work closer to his hometown of Dayton he accepted a job in the Armament Division at Curtiss-Wright working on the SB2C Helldiver and relocated to Columbus.

At that same time Curtiss-Wright, in cooperation with a nation at war, launched a program to train and employee a thousand women in the design and manufacture of war aircraft called the Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadettes. They recruited women at college campuses around the country while simultaneously readying an intense 10-month aeronautical engineering curriculum set to commence at 5 universities in February of 1943. On the campus of Colorado College a young sophomore named Virginia Havens, like many, was influenced by world events and wanted to contribute. She probably explored several ways to support the war effort but we think her father had some influence in pointing her to the Cadette program. She was interviewed by Curtiss-Wright and was accepted into the Cadette program. The telegram she received on February 9th, 1943 (pictured) instructing her to bring towels, wash cloths, and one extra blanket when she reports to the University of Minnesota.

Things moved quickly and Virginia traveled to Minneapolis just 3 days later on February 12th. From February through December 100 Caddettes lived on campus and studied under the tutelage of the University of Minnesota's School of Engineering. The April 1943 Issue of Minnesota Technolog,  a magazine of the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota, had an article that began “That masculine domain - the engineering buildings - is no longer an exclusive haven for men”. Among many photos was the one pictured captioned “Here Bill Schwarz, laboratory instructor, explains the many intricacies of milling machines to two of the cadets, Frances Baca and Virginia Havens”. That is Virginia on the right. 

By December 1944, Virginia and hundreds of other woman had completed the program in aerodynamics, engineering, and design and began working at five Curtiss-Wright plants around the country. Virginia was assigned to the Columbus Curtiss-Wright plant in the Armament Division, that same Division where Richard Korns began work the year earlier. The photo is from the Columbus Curtiss-Wright plant at the time and shows a sea of drafting tables fading into the distance. Maybe somewhere in that photo is my Dad trying to catch the attention of the new cadette, Virginia, which led to the creation of the Korns-Havens branch of our family tree.