I asked at the luncheon for memories, and these are what came in, by letter, by e-mail through the daughters, and in one case on the back of a Christmas card in August. I fixed the spelling and nothing else. Where somebody remembers it differently than I do, I left it alone. That's what memories are. — R.C.

Ruth tells everybody I hit that sailor with my lunch pail on V-J night. It was a thermos, and it was empty, and I didn't hit him, I pushed him, and he sat down in the street and laughed. Ruth was laughing too. She just doesn't put that part in.

I bucked for Ruth for two years. People ask what it was like. You held a piece of steel against the back of a rivet while somebody on the other side hit it with an air hammer, a few thousand times a night, and at the end of the shift your arms buzzed all the way up to your ears and your teeth felt loose. I could tell from the sound of her gun whether Ruth was in a good mood. When she was angry she drove them faster and they were perfect. I asked her once to get angry more often. She didn't think that was funny either.

I was thirty-four when I started at Hallett and the girls called me Grandma, which I didn't appreciate then and appreciate even less now that it's true. I'd been a seamstress at a shirt factory, so I could read a pattern, and a blueprint is just a pattern for metal. In three months they made me a leadwoman. I had twelve girls. I taught every one of them to drill a straight hole, and I can still tell you which ones never learned.

My husband was 4-F with a bad heart and worked at the brass mill all through the war, and people said things to him on the bus. He never said anything back. He died in 1961. I've been driving since 1927 and have had one accident, and it was the other man's fault, and I'll thank Ruth to stop putting my age on the Internet.

I was sixteen in January of 1943 and you had to be eighteen. My cousin Eileen was eighteen, and she had a baptismal certificate, and she was working at the telephone company and didn't need it. So on paper I was Eileen for the rest of the war, and Wanda everywhere else, and I answered to both.

They started me as a messenger, running blueprints and time cards and change orders all over the plant, and I must have walked twenty miles a week on that concrete. In the summer of 1944 they put me on a drill press, and that's where I stayed. Mr. Farmer, the foreman, called me into his little office the week of the layoffs and said, "Harbison, you can tell your cousin Eileen she did a fine job." He'd known the whole time. He never said a word. I've thought about that man more in fifty years than he'd ever believe.

I came in 1944, right out of high school, when the older girls already knew everything, and they made sure I knew they knew. My job was cleaning the burrs off the drilled holes with a little hand tool before the riveters got the panel. It's the most boring job in an airplane. I did it for fourteen months and I've never been bored a day since, because nothing could be that boring again.

My brother was in the Army in Italy. My mother lit a candle for him at church every morning and I bought a bond every pay day with his name on it, as if that would help, and maybe it did, because he came home. The best part of Plant Two was the dances the company held in the cafeteria on Saturday nights, with a band of men too old to be drafted. The girls danced with each other mostly. We were better at it than the men, anyhow.

Growing up I knew my mother had "worked in a factory in the war," and that was all I knew. She didn't talk about it. Then in 1975 a woman called on the telephone, and my mother went to a lunch, and she came home talking, and she has not stopped since.

She ran the tool crib on days, which means she handed out every drill bit, rivet set and bucking bar in the place and wrote down who had it, and she got every one of them back. She says the men tried to walk off with tools more than the women did. She says she always knew who. She still keeps track of who borrowed what from her, including a casserole dish my husband took to a church supper in 1979. I drive her to the luncheon every year. She is 88 and she counts the silverware at Gennaro's before she sits down.

My mother died in February. When my sister and I went through her cedar chest we found, under the wedding linens, her Hallett badge with her picture on it (she was nineteen and looks about twelve), her little E pin, and a cigar box of pay envelopes with the pay stubs still in them, every one from the spring of 1942 to the fall of 1945, in order, with a rubber band around each year.

The last envelope still had the layoff notice in it. She kept that too.

I went to the luncheon in August in her place. Mrs. Casella read her name on the Last Roll and everybody stood up, and then a woman I had never met came over and told me my mother could buck a rivet better than any man in Bridgeport and wasn't shy about saying so. I believe that. She was never shy about anything. Thank you, ladies, for keeping a chair for her for twenty-four years.

My mother was proud of the work and angry about how it ended, and she was both of those things until the day she died, in 1997. She said you could be told you were doing something important for your country on Monday and be told on Friday that your country would rather have a man doing it, and the same company would print both.

She went from Hallett to the telephone company, where she worked for thirty-one years and retired as a supervisor. She told me once that on her first day there she walked in, looked at the switchboard, and thought, "Well, at least nothing here weighs fifteen pounds." Mrs. Casella says she was the fastest riveter on graveyard. I say she was the fastest anything, anywhere. I am sending this in for her because she would have, and because she'd want her name spelled right: Bernice, not Berniece.