The heads of the factory told Delphine Klaput to guard the aircraft blueprints with her life.
Whenever she needed to bring them out, which was often as a leader of a team of men building planes to be sent overseas, she kept them close so they wouldn’t be lost or seen by someone who shouldn’t know about them. There was a war on, after all.
It was a far cry from her life growing up in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, and she remembers walking through Glenn L. Martin Aircraft factory in Baltimore asking herself, “What did I get myself into?”
Klaput, 101, worked at the aircraft factory during the last years of World War II. From 1944 to 1945, she was one of the millions of young women who took jobs in the factories that built the planes and tanks and ships and trucks that helped the U.S. and its allies win the war…