Word: shofner
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Dates: during 1943-1943
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Trim, dark-eyed Anne Josephine Shofner gave a party last week in Portland. Ore. She fed baked beans to the city's politicos, Navy brass hats and scores of grimy workers. On her guest of honor, decked out in roses, glutted with pigiron, she splattered champagne. After the party, the guest-a $70,000 Lectromelt furnace-went hotly to work turning out steel for Mrs. Shofner's steel casting plant...
...Shofner, 43, only steelwoman on the West Coast, has had little time for ordinary partygoing. Married in 1919, she took over her husband's railroad brake-shoe foundry at Linnton, Ore. when he died four years later. Mrs. Shofner did not like the cut of the brake shoe, patented a better one, sold her tidy little business for $200,000 in 1937. She bought a first-class ticket to Europe, but soon found she was less interested in cathedrals and art galleries than in the sooty, sprawling plants of the Ruhr, of Milan. She fell in love with steel...
...contracts, poured her first steel eleven days after Pearl Harbor. To meet Navy production schedules (for valve fittings, aircraft-carrier arresting gear, submarine net cable-guides), Mrs. Shofner deliberately overloaded her melting furnaces a full 100%. This was dangerous, but she put her faith in a skilled crew and a silver medal (the Virgin on one side, Christ on the other) sealed in the foundation of the furnaces. Said she: "God's on our side and anything that comes out of these furnaces fights...
...Lectromelt furnace, and expects to quintuple capacity. Now she plans to enlarge the tiny kitchenette in her plant, where she turns out quick meals for late-working employes, and hopes to can some of the vegetables she grows in the big Victory garden behind the plant. But Mrs. Shofner is no housewife at heart. She says: "The most beautiful thing in the world is a red-hot steel casting in the making...