From Drip to Ship

The Hell Hat was launched last week at the Albina yards at Portland (Ore.). She is a PCE submarine chaser.* She is named for a woman, who is nicknamed after her hat. The woman is Jean Muir, Oregon Journal reporter.

Blue-eyed, thirtyish Jean Muir used to write club and society notes, found them "so much drip." Nineteen months ago she asked for and got another assignment: writing about the 125,000 workers who make her native Portland one of the shipbuildingest centers of the U.S. Her "By the Ways" column is crammed with names of men & women pipe fitters, torch-scissorers, crane wanglers, and with what they do on & off the job.

The Muir technique ignores Henry Kaiser and other bigwigs. Instead, she runs such shipyard society notes as a swap offer found on the wall of a dock men's room: "One wedding ring (unused) for a pair of boxing gloves." It was Jean Muir who discovered the swarming Braukmiller family--15 members working in the yards and averaging $996 a week (TIME, July 26). A national contest of welderettes was partly her doing.

Jean puts showmanship into her work. In a realm of slacks, grease-coated sweaters and tin hats, she scrambles up & down hull scaffoldings in swank feminine regalia. In the bedlam where tankers, invasion craft and baby flattops are put together she is "Hiyah, Jeannie" or "Hello, Journal.''' At the Albina yards she got another name--"The Hat." The hat is a high-crowned mink job, which she made herself.

* Patrol Craft Escort: 180-foot convoy guardian, tonnage secret, cost about $1 million. PCEs bear such names as Hell Harvest, Hell for Hirohito, etc.

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