When I first caught brief sight of the bound collection of The Finger on the shelf at the Great Northwest Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, its name and style led me to believe it must be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s. It wasn’t until I spied the date on the first issue — October 9, 1942 — that I realized it obviously was something quite different
Although the set had been bound together in hardback form, with “THE FINGER” and “OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944″ embossed along the spine, there was no indication of the book’s source, although that it had been carefully bound at all suggested it had come from a collection, of some sort, from somewhere. That binding, however, was free of any label or imprint.
The collection then sat untouched for months before I began to seek out information on The Finger, its origins, and its creators.
A visit to the Oregon Historical Society Research Library in late November, 2003, yielded mainly some sense of the historical context of life at the Portland-area shipyards of Kaiser Company, Inc.
According to a 1944 publication of Kaiser itself called Tanker Champions of the World, intended to commemorate the work done at the company’s Swan Island shipyard:
The first contract to build 56 T2-SE-A1 tankers was signed March 24, 1942, and the first ship steel was received in the yard May 23, 1942. Sixteen days later, June 8, the first steel was fabricated in the Plate Shop and on July 1, the first keel was laid. The hull was launched October 24, 1942, and delivered December 31, 1942.
That ship was the SS Schenectady, “largest ship built on the Pacific Coast, first of a fleet of fine tankers” according to Tanker Champions of the World. Almost a year to the day later, on October 23, 1943, “Swan Island received the Tanker Champion flag for having achieved the highest productivity per way of any American shipyard engaged in tanker construction.”
You’ll notice that the first volume of The Finger runs essentially daily from October 9 until October 24, 1942 — the final two weeks of construction for the Schenectady. And indeed, it is in this context that The Finger receives the only mention of it I could find at the Oregon Historical Society.
During those years, there was a company magazine for shipyard employees called Bo’s’n’s Whistle. And in the November 5, 1942, issue which celebrated the launch of the Schenectady and all that Kaiser workers had done to make it happen (”...launched just seven months to the day after surveyors started laying out the yard, and 115 days after keel laying ... a new national record for this class of ship”), we find this:
In the face of such major obstacles as shortages of vital manpower and materials, notably steel and oxygen, Swan Island management and men have gone ahead in the spirit of “It can be done,” and established a national record for their very first ship.
One of the staggering undertakings on the jobs was the installation of 70,000 feet of pipe ... more than 13 miles, including the mammoth heating coils. Many essential items had not arrived at the last minute, and over a hundred emergency purchase orders ... including rudder, trucks, and bearings were issued in an effort to keep construction on scheduled time. These problems, coupled with an acute shortage of oxygen, were just a few of the difficulties licked in building the “Schenectady.”
Excitement ran high at Swan Island during the last two weeks before launching, and a mysterious small daily publication known as “The Finger” came into being. Reputedly published by a dwarf living in a dug-out under the outfitting dock, this paper put the finger on employees not pitching in to help meet the launching deadline. Cartoons and posters by workmen helped build high morale among Swan Island workers.
Beyond this, little more is known other than what the editor (or editors) of The Finger did or did not reveal in the course of publishing. According to Kaiser Permanente Northwest, their archives from Kaiser’s World War II shipyard operations do not include any material regarding the publication.
Further, a retired Kaiser employee who briefly worked at the shipyards during World War II, himself unfamiliar with the publication, asked at a retiree luncheon in December 2003, if anyone present had any recollection of it. No one did.
For that matter, there was no evidence I could find, beyond the word of the publication’s editors, that The Finger was in fact produced by and for shipyard workers themselves at all.
While clearly not a well-monied effort (one would not expect a paper put out by laborers to be so), hindsight -- or perhaps 21st century cynicism -- makes it just as easy to imagine that it could have been a Kaiser publication posing as a worker-produced effort. In 2024, an archivist at Kaiser did suggest that “the style and tone seem to match Kaiser’s management team from that period”.
Workers chastizing fellow workers, after all, likely would find a better reception in the shipyards than management doing the same. Then again, this was a period of intense wartime patriotism, and it isn’t difficult to imagine workers wanting to keep the pressure up on those amongst them who weren’t performing.
Neither could I determine how many of each edition were produced, who created it, who wrote it, who paid for it, how it was distributed, nor how widely read it might have been.
That changed to some degree late in November 2011, eight years after first discovering it on the shelves of the Great Northwest Bookstore, while making a fresh set of scans of each edition of The Finger, when I noticed for the first time that the header illustration for its original run had been signed by the artist.
Crowdsourcing via Twitter the attempt at deciphering it, the signature — C. Mish — turned out to be that of one Charlotte Roberta Mish, whose work, according to the website of The Sovereign Collection Fine Art Gallery, “included documentary shipyard paintings for President Franklin Roosevelt and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser”.
For what it’s worth, as I learned in June 2023 from a March 21, 2016, blog post by Frank Ezelle, Mish also painted a work of her own titled “The Beginning” which depicts early work on the construction of the very Schenectady at the center of The Finger’s existence.
Armed with the first name I’d ever been able to connect to the publication of The Finger, a search of the historical archive of The Oregonian yielded an article from October 23, 1942, about several methods being used to motivate workers. While the article references Mish in the context of a series of posters she and two other artists drew and which the shipyard printing plant reproduced, and not in the context of The Finger, the article goes on to discuss that publication.
The third device that puts a real stinger into the slackers and promptly pats the hard workers on their backs is a new mystery daily paper, the Finger, which puts the finger of scorn on the boys who fail to earn daily wages and which promptly compliments those who turn out a good job well done. The Finger is published daily by the “Finger Publishing company.” Its editor is reported to be a gnome who lives in the underground utility tunnels and sees all, knows all. Its reporters are the 14,000 workers who turn in their thoughts to General Superintendent Elmer Hann’s offce.
The Finger pits men, crews and shifts against each other, telling exactly what each accomplishes. Thus, the whole yard knows when some let down and others go ahead. There is nothing that escapes the Finger.
This certainly suggests, indirectly, that The Finger was produced in the shipyard’s printing office in much the same way as Charlotte Mish’s motivational posters. According to a May 3, 1995, dissertation by Jeffry Lloyd Uecker, found in June 2023, Mish in fact was the “staff-artist” at the Kaiser shipyards. The Oregonian article also provides yet another name — only the second in years of research — connected to the publication: general superintendent Elmer Hann.
What is clear from The Finger itself is that its October 24, 1942, issue (published the day after The Oregonian mention) was meant to be its final. Having played its own role in pushing shipyard workers to meet the intended launch date for the Schenectady, that issue is marked as a “Five Star Final Edition.”
During a new bout of research in June 2026, a librarian at OHS reminded me that there was a second daily newspaper in Portland: the Oregon Journal, whose archives are available as part of Multnomah County Library’s online research resources. Sure enough, this tip immediately paid off with the most extensive write-up of The Finger I’d ever seen.
In the paper’s October 25, 1942, edition is an item by one Jean Muir: “4-Page ‘Terror’ Points Finger at Bottlenecks”, printed here in full.
The brains of the shipbuilding world have been trying to figure out a way to beat the whistle jumping habit in shipyards in America, how to whip up production and how to weed out the slackers. The best answer, so far, has come from the boys in the yard at Swan Island.
About two weeks ago a little four-page daily publication appeared at the Kaiser Swan Island plant — a stinging, brave and fierce little paper called The Finger.
Printed in lurid mauves or greens or pinks, the publication was a terror and no mistake. It was dedicated solely to the purpose of putting the finger on any slowup or bottleneck in the plant.
It got pretty tough with the boys sometimes. It was no respecter of persons. It never hesitated for a minute to shoutout its opinion, often uncomplimentary, of individuals or crews. But there was a dogged sincerity about that vicious little scorpion of a newspaper and a blazing earnestness in every line that won the respect of the yard overnight.
The identity of the editor has been kept secret — he remains even yet, a mysterious shrouded figure who sees all and knows all. But it was obvious in every word, that whoever published The Finger was a man out there in the yard himself, with a first hand knowledge of everything that went on around the place.
The most heart warming thing about the venture was the attitude of the men who at one time or another found themselves pointed at by The Finger. Not a howl or a backbite among them. Sometimes they disagreed with The Finger’s criticism. Sometimes they decided that there was an element of truth in what was said, and set about correcting things. In every case they took it standing up. Those are true shipbuilders.
The last edition of The Finger appeared on Saturday. Its job, for the time being, was done. Swan Island’s first hull was ready for launching and at the time set. But there’s a rumor about the yard that The Finger is only taking a rest — that whenever a situation arises when a little gentle prodding is needed, The Finger will appear again, as cocky and earnest as ever.
Company executives, who have read The Finger with a sort of fascinated interest, say that they honestly believe it was due in a great part to the belligerent little rag’s contagious and fighting spirit that the hull was ready for launching in the time given.
In the meantime, while they wait for a new appearance of their fighting paper, the boys around Swan Island continue to quote some of The Finger’s gayer ditties — the little ode, for instance, signed discreetly, “B.F.”:
The Lord gave us two ends to use;
One to think with, one to sit with.
The war depends on which end we choose;
Heads we win, tails we lose.
Who was Jean Muir? As it happens, one month after the column above, Bo’s’n’s Whistle itself in its November 26, 1942, edition had something to say on this count in a brief item headed, “She Covers the Waterfront”.
When Jean Muir of the Oregon Journal switched from society chatter to shipyard feature writing, she had an answer for skeptics. “If women can build ships, women can certainly write about them.”
Today she holds special long-time permits to get inside the most carefully guarded gates along the ways. “Maybe management has discovered the worst, that I’m so stupid about technical things that I’m harmless and couldn’t possibly tell any secrets.” Don’t be fooled, Jean’s “been around.” Born in Portland, she grew up in Arizona, traipsed around Europe for five years, collected folk lore in the Balkans, dug pirate’s gold in Florida, and wrote fairy tales. She became interested in ships during a three-months’ trip on an old tramp boat from Jacksonville, Fla., to Tacoma, Wash., and back again.
Nearly two years later, she was profiled by Time in its March 5, 1944 edition in the item “The Press: From Drip to Ship”.
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.
If there’s one person in the world who might have known just who was producing The Finger, you’d think it might have been Jean Muir.
The Oregonian, then, mentions The Finger the day before the shipyard paper's so-called “Five Star Final Edition”, while the Oregon Journal mentions it the day after.
But then, on January 16, 1943, after successful sea trials, the SS Schenectady returned to harbor and sat at the dock at Swan Island. A report of the United States Coast Guard from 1944 describes what happened next.
The fracture started at the juncture of the fashion plate at the aft starboard corner of the bridge superstructure and the sheer strake.
Without warning and with a report which was heard for at least a mile, the deck and sides of the vessel fractured just aft of the bridge superstructure. The fracture extended almost instantaneously to the turn of the bilge port and starboard. The deck side shell, longitudinal bulkhead and bottom girders fractured. Only the bottom plating held. The vessel jack-knifed and the center portion rose so that no water entered. The bow and stern settled into the silt of the river bottom. Sounding taken around the vessel eliminated the alleged possibility of the vessel having grounded amidships to a drop in water level.
On January 25, 1943, a Time magazine article described how the tanker “suddenly broke in half with a thunderous snap, settled in the water with its two-inch steel plates split clean asunder, the midship sections sticking out of the water like crags.”
Nobody knew what caused the break. The FBI, the Maritime Commission, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation and the American Bureau of Shipping started investigations simultaneously, refused to say a word.
Four days after the accident — proving Muir prescient that “whenever a situation arises when a little gentle prodding is needed” The Finger might reappear — it did so in order to rally shipyard workers to the cause of repairing their first tanker. “Maybe we don’t know why the SCHENECTADY broke,” the paper wrote, “but we sure as Hell know how to fix her.”
That said, the eventual U.S. Coast Guard report would attribute the failure to critical welds that “were found to be defective”.
This sudden reappearance of The Finger led to its only other mention in the pages of The Oregonian, in a January 23, 1943, article (which I also only found in November 2011) on the arrival in Portland of several experts to investigate the cause of the loss of the tanker Schenectady.
Swan Island workmen were greeted by an edition of “The Finger,” a morale-building paper which is distributed periodically throughout the plant. This went into a long discussion of the Schenectady incident, naming the ship and pointing out that its design was proven and workmanship of the people who worked in the yard was not questioned.
The article said the special investigating body now here would determine whether the break was caused by weather, handling, design, or faulty steel so that the accident would not be repeated. Swan Island worked were urged to continue their efforts and put out more tankers at a faster rate than in the past to make up for the delay occasioned by the Schenectady’s accident.
Not one to be left out, Jean Muir’s column in the January 31, 1943, edition of Oregon Journal also reported on what The Finger had to say about the Schenectady, noting that shipbuidlers at Swan Island were “rarin’ to go”.
The Finger — that scrappy and anonymous little news sheet that comes out fighting in the Swan Island yard whenever the occasion demands — struck the nail straight on the head in an editorial:
“Our struggle here is against time. We cannot avoid an accident that has already happened not can we afford the time to be gloomy about it or waste moments in regret. This we can do. When we see the Schenectady broken in two and helpless, let us each vow to ourselves that she shall be repaired and that the number of her sister ships shall be limited only by our absolute lack of capacity to do more. Tojo and Herr Hitler are grinning because of this. When the Quebec, the Fourt Moultrie and their 50 sister ships sail out, they won’t be grinning.”
It’s now known, then, that The Finger was not only recognized by the city’s two major newspapers for its efforts, but directly cited by both of them in an article about the loss of the shipyard’s most celebrated tanker.
A couple notes about this sudden reappearance of The Finger in 1943. If the set reproduced here is full and complete, it was not the start of a new run, but intended to be a one-off call-to-arms in the aftermath of the break-up of the Schenectady. Strangely, the issue is labelled as being “Vol. 3, No. 1” — although there is no indication that the paper published at all since the conclusion of its initial run on October 24, 1942.
Stranger still, later that year, The Finger reappeared yet again. An issue dated November 10, 1943 — and labelled “VOL. II, NO. 1″ — begins with the exclamation, “Boys and girls, the FINGER is back!” It offers no particular explanation for this, the second time (to my current knowledge) it suddenly reappeared. The editor does, however, offer an insight into the paper’s operation.
The FINGER is published by yard employees for yard employees, and is free of all editing by the management. Kaiser Company, Inc., has reserved only two rights — that of canning the editor and stopping publication of our little rag if we get too rough. We haven’t been and won’t be a mighty publication, but we can “put the finger” on the guy who isn’t producing.
Which brings us to the third time Jean Muir wrote about The Finger, in the November 14, 1943, edition of her column in the Oregon Journal.
The “Finger” is pointing again. The same scrappy little news sheet that used to be the terror and the delight of Swan Island shipbuilders is circulating again through the yard. The new Finger lost no time in announcing its policy.
After recounting the policy above, Muir offered a refreshed take on her thoughts from the previous year.
For obvious reasons, the editor’s name is a closely guarded secret — the most obvious reason being his own personal safety. The Finger doesn’t pull any punches, in the way of roaring criticism, but it’s not above a complimentary pat on the back, either, for a neat piece of work. The heart warming thing about it is the way each Swan Islander stands up for and takes it when he finds The Finger pointing at him. Not a backbite out of any of them. When the original Finger appeared, last year (at the same time the Swan Island shipbuilders blossomed out in their famous “production beards”), plenty of people disagrees, and loudly, with some of the Finger’s criticisms, but there wasn’t a single whine, not one bellyache out of the lot of them. And production bugs had a way of being ironed out overnight.
There’s one thing the new Finger is fighting for, above all others — the maritime flag for the fastest tanker yard in the country. Swan Island has it now — and Swan Island is going to keep it, says the Finger. Fourteen tankers in November and December is what they need to do the job, they say.
This 1943 run of The Finger included a new masthead logo, more complex layout, weekly instead of daily publication, superior printing, and no particular indication whether or not it was produced by the same team as the original.
At some point in June 2013 (but forgotten until 2023), I’d noticed for the first time that the initials on the new masthead illustration were “EH”. Given the earlier revelation from the pages of The Oregonian of the involvement of Elmer Hann, it was a fair guess that the new drawing was his.
Hann, described by The Oregonian as “general superintendent” elsewhere also has variously been described as “yard supervisor” and “general production manager”. His obituary appeared in The New York Times on March 16, 1990.
During the war Mr. Hann was general superintendent of production st the Kaiser shipyard on Swan Island, Ore. There he trained unskilled men and women to master a simplified welding method in 10 days, instead of the two to three months normally required to learn welding.
Also of note is that arguably the tone of the masthead illustration changes dramatically from one version to the next. The Finger’s original masthead seems meant to convey the publication’s original purported intent: workers rallying workers. In the later revision, the finger now suggests that of a very stern Uncle Sam, and rather than pointing at the goal — building ships — it instead points down sharply at a worker trembling under its attention.
In the middle of June 2026, I sat down to skim through every single issue of Bo’s’n’s Whistle to see if there were any other indications as to the provenance of The Finger that I’d somehow missed. One discovery is that the “EH” of the new masthead in all likelihood is not Elmer Hann, despite Hann’s established link to The Finger.
Starting in its October 1942 edition, there was an ongoing comic strip in Bo’s’n’s Whistle, about the misadventures of one “Stubby Bilgebottom”, a squat shipyard worker with a big nose and dressed always in overalls and hardhat — precisely the appearance of the hapless, fingered worker of the new masthead. The cartoonist? Ernie Hager, whose obituary in 2007 reported that after his discharge from the Army he “worked as a freelance cartoonist in the commercial advertising industry”.
It doesn’t mention Kaiser, but an article from the National Park Service about women shipyard workers (which misattributes a cartoon as being a “Stubby Bilgebottom”) claims that he was “an electrician’s aide”. The edition of Bo’s’n’s Whistle from August 5, 1943, includes a profile of Stubby. It’s perhaps the source for that reference.
Braggadocio Stubby is almost the exact opposite of his creator, tall, quiet Ernie Hager, an engineer’s aide on the graveyard shift at Swan Island. Hager has lived in Portland almost all his life. He is a graduate of Benson Polytechnic School and spent two and a half years as a fine arts student at the Museum Art School.
According to comics historian Allan Holtz in a blog post from April 24, 2019, as the war ended the Associated Press “tried out a new comic strip […] titled ‘Stubby Stout’”. Sure enough, the examples suggest that a rechristened Stubby Bilgebottom went on to become a maintenance man, still in overalls but now sporting a backwards cap in place of hardhat, suggesting Stubby survived the looming finger of Uncle Sam.
While these strips were signed “Hager” or “Ernie Hager” rather than simply “EH”, it would seem more likely for the later masthead of The Finger to be the work of Hager than Hann, whose artistic talents remain unestablished by anything I’ve found. Hager, then, would join Charlotte Mish as an artist doing work for the shipyards who also lent their talents to The Finger, and becomes just the third name I’ve been able to uncover in two decades of research.
In this new run’s December 22nd issue, the editors briefly returned to the subject of Swan Island’s first love, the Schenectady. An item which stands as an ode of sorts describes the ship’s life, from launch through near-destruction, repair, and return to operation. It ends with a salute.
The “Old Lady” is turning out to be a champ. Speeding through war waters to new accomplishments, she probably chuckles to herself and says:
“If the boys back home could only see me now!”
The Finger ended — as far as I know for the final time — with the very next issue. The headline on the top story read, “FINGER FOLDS”, and its front page included a quote from “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”.
Dated January 3, 1944, it was one year and nearly three months since The Finger first appeared during the original construction of the SS Schenectady.