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A LOT of Boeing workers stay home every day. They can manage this because their house is their factory. They are shut-ins who didn't want to be shut out of the war.

Even with their limitations, these people wanted to help do some of the work. So now not only are they doing war work, but they're the solution to one of Boeing's most urgent supply problems.

This supply problem was simply a matter of keeping a grip on stock already on hand. Every month twenty tons of screws and rivets are discarded or spilled on the factory floor, and are swept up with the shavings and metal scrap. The bits of metal are remelted, but screws and rivets are too scarce to be tossed back in the pot.

The screws have to be sorted according to head and thread as well as size. But where was there anyone who would examine tons of them-screw by screw?

HOME WORK

Then one day came the request: "Do you have any kind of work at Boeing that my invalid daughter could do at home? She's anxious to do something, but she can't get out of the house."

Salvage-minded Boeing people thought of the tons of jumbled screws and scrap piled up at the Jordan Street terminal. "Could she sort out a bunch of screws right at home?" they asked doubtfully.

She agreed to try it, and a couple of sacks of screw scrap were delivered to her house. A week later the load came back, sorted and tied up neatly in cloth sacks. Company inspectors examined them, declared the job a success.

While just one person's work wouldn't make much of a hole in the mountain of screws, there might be other shut-ins who could do the job. Boeing men discussed this prospect with the Goodwill Industries, who agreed to take the scraps and screws and find people to sort them.

That was over two years ago, and now there are more than fifty invalids handling the job. The work is delivered by truck and the shut-ins set up shop on the sofa, in bed, or on the kitchen table. Altogether they turn back to Goodwill inspectors several tons of sorted, usable screws a month. After a double-check the screws are returned to Boeing, re-inspected and put in stock.

The invalids work as their health allows. They spend from five to thirtythree and a half hours a week on sorting.

The "Mrs. Ida Jane Crawford Branch Plant", is typical of the half hundred invalids running their own little businesses. Confined to a small wheel chair, she still does all her housekeeping, is an expert at fancy needle work and spends her spare time, about six hours a day, sorting bolts and screws.

A SCIENCE TO SORTING

Another "sub-contractor" is J. M. McDonald. Undismayed when he was grounded by arthritis, he took on the sorting job to pay for his own home.

"Screws with stripped threads are pretty easy to spot," he explained, demonstrating his "scientific" method of sorting. "The ones you can't pick out at a glance have a characteristic shine that gives them away. I look at the suspicious ones under a magnifying glass."

"I like doing this kind of work," he added, "because when I hear a Fortress flying over the house I can feel that I've had something to do with it."

Along with the shut-ins' salvage work, a shop at the Goodwill plant manned by near-octogenarians turns out several additional tons of reclaimed screws per month. The crew consists of fifty elderly men who are unable, because of physical handicaps, to handle a steady job.

Dextrous 69-year-old Joe Clay, who works at the Goodwill plant, claims he was a slight-of-hand artist for fifty years.

WOOL PULLER

"I sure used to pull the wool over their eyes," he chortled. "I was a clown, animal trainer and all-around circus man as well. I saw Europe with Buffalo Bill, toured the Lyceum Circuit here, traveled with Houdini, Thurston and Barnum and Bailey."

Seventy-five year old Mrs. Lena Noyes, who has lost a leg and lives in a wheel chair, says, "My friends think I'm a little too ambitious about working, but I manage to do some sorting."

This job has turned out to be one easily and speedily handled by handicapped people. Now a lot of those who ordinarily would just be sitting on the sidelines, can count themselves as contributors to the war.

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