WORLD WAR II JOB RIVETED INTO MEMORY; GOAL OF HELPING MAKE AIRPLANES, NOT FILMS, LURED RANCHER'S TEEN DAUGHTER TO HOLLYWOOD.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

Red-haired Alma Dunham was an Antelope Valley alfalfa rancher's daughter two years out of high school when a girlfriend talked her into getting a job at Lockheed's Vega Aircraft Co.

The pair shared a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment with another young woman, and they rode city buses to and from a swing shift. From 3 to 11 p.m., they assembled four-engine B-17 bombers and were among the tens of thousands of men and women who turned Burbank into a cog of America's Arsenal of Democracy during World War II.

``That was an exciting time of life,'' said the former riveter, now Alma Hungerford, a gray-haired grandmother and wife of a retired Lancaster chiropractor. ``War shouldn't be exciting, but there were a lot of people around. I loved that job.''

She smiled at the remembrance of being a real-life Rosie the Riveter. ``We were having fun just being away from home and trying something different.''

As 19-year-old Alma Dunham, she took an aptitude test that concluded she was agile. After very brief on-the-job instruction, she went to work attaching de-icing boots to the tails of Boeing B-17 bombers, which Lockheed was helping to make through its Vega subsidiary.

She later riveted B-17 bomb bays, the part of the plane that carried 500-pound bombs to be dropped on Nazi factories.

And she riveted the empennage and fuselage of twin-engine PV-2 antisubmarine planes. She used a rivet gun from outside while a partner inside the aircraft pressed an iron bar against the base of the rivet to be fastened.

A lot of her work was drilling out bad rivets installed by other workers, then inserting new ones.

``It's a wonder we won the war,'' Hungerford said. ``Some of the people were really bad. We drilled out a lot of rivets.''

That's one reason why she examines the rivets she sees when she's on an airline flight.

``I think, gee, that was fun. Even though it was hard, it was fun.''

The assembly facilities were crowded, noisy buildings. At the peak in 1943, more than 94,000 people worked for Lockheed and Vega in plants that covered 7.7 million square feet of floor space.

``You couldn't hear somebody right behind you,'' Hungerford recalled.

She came back with one war wound: a scar on the right upper eyelid, cut open when she walked into a metal frame used to hold an airplane under construction.

Another time, woozy after a trip to the dentist, she fell off a bomb bay she was riveting and landed flat on her back on the concrete floor. Her rivet gun skittered under another work station, scaring the workers.

She went to a plant ``sick bay'' but was sent back by two workers who mistook her for a goldbricker with a hangover. So the lead man on her crew got her a chair and told her sit out the few minutes left in their shift.

``He was very nice,'' Hungerford said.

Hungerford didn't encounter any resentment from male aircraft workers.

``We were just part of the crew,'' she said. ``They were all very nice about it. We never felt any different. Men and women worked together on things.''

After work, she and her roommate often went to what was then the world's largest bowling alley: 52 lanes on Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes the singing Mills Brothers were the only other bowlers, using a lane at the far end of the alley.

On weekends, the young women took the train home to Lancaster, sometimes sitting on soldiers' luggage because there were no other seats.

Hungerford worked for Lockheed-Vega for a couple years. She can't remember exactly how long. Then she went to work at a grocery store on Hollywood Boulevard.

She no longer worked at Lockheed when she met her future husband at a dance at the Hollywood Palladium.

Bill Hungerford, a soldier, kept calling her for three weeks, but she wasn't impressed. Sent overseas, he wrote her letters. That worked.

Married, they settled in Lancaster in 1954 before the birth of their second son and have stayed.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1) Alma Hungerford was Alma Dunham when she lived in Hollywood and riveted World War II aircraft in Burbank.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer

(2) Alma Hungerford, a riveter when the world was at war, is a grandmother and wife of a retired Lancaster chiropractor.

Photo courtesey of Alma Hungerford