LYNDORA — Butler native Bob Heaton has his hometown etched in his memory, including the year and a half he worked at the Bantam factory assembling “duck” vehicles and Jeep trailers during World War II.

Heaton, 86, owns RHGL Inc., a real estate development company in Lyndora. Having worked since he was 11, he’s proud of his work ethic that has spanned eight decades.

He recalled applying for a job at the Bantam factory, which produced the original Jeep, when he was 14 years old with a couple of his high school buddies. At that time, the “victory shift” at the factory stretched from 6 to 11 p.m. during the week to help with the war effort.

Most people were enthusiastic about doing their part.

“There was a very strong lack of men. They were all in the Army, and anybody that was strong enough got into this war effort because there weren’t a lot of people to do these things,” Heaton said.

The victory shift allowed people to contribute to the war effort who couldn’t during the day.

“There was a mix of people. Maybe they worked at a bank uptown, or in a shop, or whatever. They accepted kids. They weren’t so fussy back then about your working qualifications,” he said.

He continued: “We marched into the employment office and told the gentleman we’d like to work the victory shift. ‘Well, OK, how old are you?’ ‘Sixteen.’ ‘Well, sure, we have a place for you.’ And that was it.

“They didn’t check anything. We just told him we were 16, and he accepted that. And he told us to come to work the next night.”

He and his high school friends went to school each day at the red brick school downtown and then drove to the factory to work the victory shift each evening. At the time, Heaton worked 30 hours and made $40 each week, which was a considerable sum for a 14-year-old boy in the 1940s.

“I had a lot of jingles,” he recalled.

By the time he began working for Bantam, the factory no longer produced Jeeps. However, it did make other items for the war, including quarter-ton Jeep trailers, duck boats and torpedoes.

Heaton mostly did assembly line work that involved putting tires onto the ducks, which were all-wheel-drive utility vehicles that had six wheels and could be driven on land and in water. The vehicles used now for Just Ducky Tours in Pittsburgh and other cities have a similar design.

“We were mounting those big tires on the wheels. Now, this would all be done with robots, but it was hand labor back in those days,” he said.

He and a friend were paired on the assembly line and worked together putting on the tires.

“The two of us would put it down on that wheel, and this is where a hydraulic press would have done it in half the time with a lot less labor, but we had to sledgehammer those tires onto the wheels,” he said.

“And then we put a big ring on that to hold them in place. There were a whole bunch of studs that went all the way around it. And we moved it to the next place on the roller assembly line.”

Further down on the line were women, “Rosie the Riveter types,” Heaton said.

They added nuts to the studs. There was another group of women who worked upstairs assembling torpedoes.

“That’s not mentioned very much in the history of Butler. I don’t know why,” he said. “They wore the bandannas on their head. This was when ladies first started to wear slacks.”

Also during World War II, nearly every item was rationed. That included items such as food, gasoline and shoes.

Civilians were allotted only three gallons of gas a week, which wasn’t enough to get by in his car. So he did what he had to do to make ends meet.

“We would take a lunch pail. Back then you’d have glass milk bottles that had a screw on top. And we would take the milk bottle into the plant with us and hide it in our lunch pail. And every night when we came out, each one of us would have a milk bottle full of paint thinner,” he said.

“We’d dump it into the gas tank of this little Chevy, which had a very low compression engine. It mixed in with the gasoline. The exhaust smelled pretty bad, but it ran.”

Victory in Europe Day effectively ended his career at the Bantam.

“The word spread through the plant immediately and everybody just left. Everyone just laid down their tools and walked out. Everybody did.

“And we came up town, and of course Main Street was thriving at that point. Everybody went up town and we went up and down the streets. ...

“We were driving up and down, beeping our horns and yelling. People were running through the streets, dancing in the streets. It was a big celebration.

“The next evening, we went back to work. They didn’t even let us in the plant. That quickly the government shut down all of the contracts.

“They had our checks all ready that next day. We got our proverbial pink slips and our jobs were over that quickly,” he said.