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Mullins
Editor's Note: The following is the first in a series of articles about local women who served as "Rosie the Riveters" during World War II.
ELKINS -- Women who entered the workforce and became "Rosie the Riveters" during World War II took on a variety of jobs across the country, but it was the aviation industry that saw the greatest increase in female workers.
More than 310,000 females found jobs in the United States aircraft industry in the year 1943 and one local woman, Katharine (Sheets) Mullins, was a part of that workforce.
After graduating from Elkins High School in 1942, Mullins worked at W.T. Grant in Elkins until November 1942. Feeling the need to help the war effort and seek out higher pay, Mullins packed up and moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to live with her older sister, Glenna.
Once arriving in Monument City, Mullins promptly got a job working at the Glenn L. Martin Airplane Factory. After working her way up the ladder, Mullins was made a supervisor at the factory, where she oversaw 18 women in a sizable purchasing department, which was filled with 150 file cabinets.
The ladies would zoom around on small stools to reach their cabinet of need in the department. Mullins, who spent four years at the factory, was making $50 per week at the plant and was able to fly or take a train back to Elkins whenever she became homesick.
Mullins later told her daughter, Janet Mullins-Kittle, a story about how the facility was so big that she once got lost delivering some important papers to an area called "the basement." This area was not a basement, however, but the part of the facility where airplanes were constructed and repaired. She said as she wandered the facility trying to find her way back to the purchasing department, she ran into Dice Harper, an old friend from Elkins who helped lead her back to the office.
As a single woman during the war, Mullins was very happy to do her part by working at the factory, Janet said. She had told her daughter that she prayed like many others that this would be the war to end all wars.
"My daughter-in-law did an interview with my mother for a college class when she was in school, and I never knew all of the things she did back during the war until I heard the interview," Janet said. "She talked about all the sacrifices people made during that time and how hard it was to get food and clothes. And to hear all the things she did back then was great."
After returning home to Elkins, Mullins spent more than 40 years working in the Randolph County school system. She was a secretary at Elkins High School for many years before going to work for the Randolph County Board of Education.
She was married to her husband, Paul Mullins, for 50 years. The couple had two daughters, Janet and Joyce.