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(Continued from page 34)
• The Willow Run Bomber Plant, a 332-acre former Ford Motor Co. factory west of Detroit that churned out nearly 9,000 B-24 Liberator bombers during World War II, is slated to be torn down unless a group can raise $3.5 million by Thursday to convert at least some of the structure into a new, expanded home for the nearby Yankee Art Museum.
• "The younger generation needs to know what people went through and be able to go and see what they did and how they did it for our country," Larry Doe, a 70-year-old Ypsilanti Township resident who has given to the cause, said recently before joining other donors for a trip on a B-17.
• Although women performed what had been male-dominated roles in plants all over the country during the war, it was a Willow Run worker -- one of an untold number of women in its 40,000-person workforce -- who caught the eye of Hollywood producers casting a "riveter" for a government film about the war effort at home.
• Rose Will Monroe, a Kentucky native who moved to Michigan during the war, starred as herself in the film and became one of the best-known figures of that era. She represented the thousands of Rosies who took factory jobs making munitions, weaponry and other things while the nation's men were off fighting in Europe and the Pacific.
• ___
House of cans: 1 man's quest to throw nothing away, even beer cans, becomes Houston landmark
• HOUSTON (AP) -- A child of the Great Depression, John Milkovisch didn't throw anything away -- not even the empty cans of beer he enjoyed each afternoon with his wife.
• So, in the early 1970s when aluminum siding on houses was all the rage, he lugged the cans he had stored in his attic for years downstairs, painstakingly cut open and flattened each one and began to wallpaper his home.
• "The funny thing is that it wasn't ... to attract attention," said Ruben Guevara, head of restoration and preservation of the Beer Can House in Houston's Memorial Park area. "He said himself that if there was a house similar to this a block away, he wouldn't take the time to go look at it. He had no idea what was the fascination about what he was doing."
• Milkovisch passed away in the mid-1980s, but his wife, Mary, still lived there. Her sons would do work from time to time, replacing rusty steel cans with new ones and (Continued on page 36)
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