This story comes from the most interesting chapter in the 80 year history of Scott Family’s time in the car business. Our founder Raymond P. Scott Sr. converted the service shop of his Plymouth Dodge dealership during World War II to build aileron controls for Grumman F4F Wildcats and Hellcats, as well as catapult carts for Naval ships.
Ray would load the smaller aileron controls into his station wagon and race them up to Grumman’s plant in Bethpage, N.Y. where they were installed in planes that would soon take off to fight over Europe and the Pacific.
I recently posted over 20 historical photos on to our Facebook Fan page and in a caption below the above photo was written, “In the right corner below the “United States” sign is what appears to be one of the classic WWII U.S. propaganda posters. However only the
top left side of the poster is visible and I have combed through 100′s of the posters from that era and have yet to find a match. I have not given up yet though.”
This is where the power of social media took hold. Sconda Fan and fellow car guy, Al Marie saw the photo and decided to help our cause. He did in 3 minutes what I couldn’t do in hours of searching. He Googled “World War II posters” as well as the only visible word in the poster “Men” and he came upon the a vast database provided by Northwestern University. Sure enough, there it was “Men Working Together”, the mystery had been solved.
The poster is officially described as, “A helmeted soldier, a factory worker, and a sailor stand proudly together.” This poster, produced by the United States, Office for Emergency Management, Division of Information, in 1941 was perfect for our converted machine shop because my Great Grandfather’s employees represented the factory workers, doing their part to help the military win the war.
Ironically the three men “standing together” never stood together until 1942 when they posed for a picture taken by Alfred T. Palmer, an Office of War Information photographer from 1941 to 1943. The threesome met at Sergeant Vineyard’s army post (left), and assumed their famous order with welder George Woolslayer in the middle and Aviation-radio Chief John Marshall Evans on the right.
Special thanks again to Sconda Sleuth, Al Marie who helped bring all this information to light and put together one more piece of the Scott history puzzle.
