Where Was Doreen?

Max tells stories.

A decade ago we swapped tales in a diner that is now out of business.

Max called last week.

“Do ya remember?” he started, with an update.

He called to tell me that Doreen had been found and was home at last.

In the middle 1940’s over six hundred B-29 bombers were produced at the Bell plant in Marietta. The new Rickenbacker Air Field became the Marietta Army Air Field.

It’s all Lockheed now but was then the Bell Bomber Plant at the airport.

Doreen Boyer was a tall, angular young beauty with slightly upturned eyes. She and her sister, Marie, signed on as unskilled 70 cent an hour workers when the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour.

The Boyers were dirt-poor survivors who viewed a ten-dollar bill as if it was a bar of gold.

The work force reached nearly 40,000, and a company bus collected and returned workers. The Boyer girls rode a bus from Rome with a detour through Stilesboro.

Doreen worked in an electrical harness shop located in the original two million square foot building. The bosses from Bell headquarters in Buffalo, NY, hovered from loft offices above the back wall looking down on the assembly floor.

Doreen began socializing with one of those bosses. This didn’t go down well with her family and friends, who noticed changes in Doreen.

One Sunday morning, while the family was at church, a neighbor saw Doreen walk down the two-track dirt lane to the highway. A shiny dark car waited, Doreen got in on the passenger side, the car pulled away. She was never seen or heard from again.

Her family was frantic; her mother cried and twisted her apron in her hands. Her father cussed the Yankee bosses. Nothing.

The plant closed after the war. Marie married a Cartersville boy and taught school in Taylorsville. The parents aged prematurely waiting on the front porch and were buried in the Stilesboro Cemetery. The pastor who led their funerals was a Berry College friend of my father.

Marie had kids, mostly girls, who must have wondered about Aunt Doreen. Nearly every family had someone go missing. My family has one, and yours probably does too.

I could hear Max rattling papers as he read the obituary.

Doreen wound up in Buffalo, NY, but she may as well have been on the moon.

You’re right, it was one of those Yankee bosses, but events in the middle, between her leaving and returning, is the story.

joenphillips@yahoo.com