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Jean Nickerson Patterson, from Bushton, Kansas, and a student at Kansas
State University, was chosen along with nearly 100 other college women to
participate in the Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadette Program at Iowa
State College (University) in 1943. Sponsored by the Curtiss-Wright
Corporation, this was a nationwide program designed to ease to wartime
labor shortages, and also included more than 700 female students at
Cornell, Purdue, University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State College
(University), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of
Texas.
The program at Iowa State was an intensive course in
aeronautical engineering. The students received a certificate upon
completion of the ten-month course (February to December 1943), and were
then hired by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation for the duration of the
Second World War. As they completed the course, the Curtiss-Wright
Corporation paid for the students’ room and board, and provided a salary
of ten dollars per week.
More than 90 percent of the participants graduated, and 75 percent
joined the workforce. Patterson worked for the Quality Control Department
at the Curtiss-Wright Plant in St. Louis for nine months before she left
to marry Ben Patterson in 1945. She then worked at Elgin Case Company in
Independence, Kansas, and for the County Engineer. Following her husband’s
return from the war in 1946, Jean went back to Kansas State to earn her BA
in Medical Technology. She currently resides in Clinton, Iowa and has
stayed active in editing newsletters for and attending reunions of the
former Curtiss-Wright Cadettes.
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