As the Battle of Midway began (June 4, 1942), people at home in Tucson were preparing to help the war effort by taking classes for jobs in defense industries. But there were other things besides the war to occupy people's thoughts.
These articles all appeared in the Arizona Daily Star June 4, 1942, the day before Americans learned of the beginning of the Battle of Midway.
First, Tucson was running out of mechanics to contribute to the war effort:
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TUCSON MECHANIC SUPPLY DWINDLES
There is some evidence that Tucson's reservoir of young and middle-aged men who are potential mechanics for the war effort is drying up, according to C. A. Carson, principal of the Tucson high school.
He sent out an emergency call yesterday for more candidates for the schools of welding and mechanics which heretofore have had a waiting list of applicants who wanted to prepare themselves for jobs in war time defense industries.
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In addition to those at Tucson High, many took classes at the University of Arizona to secure war time employment.
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163 ENROLLED IN CURRENT U. OF A. DEFENSE COURSES
The University of Arizona is training 163 persons in six war emergency courses, figures released by Dr. G. M. Butler, dean of the college of engineering, showed yesterday.
In three machine shop courses, which run 18 hours a day, there are 90 enrolled, 22 of them women. An additional 46 persons are being taught the fundamentals of radio, 24 here asnd the remainder in a class in Phoenix.
A total of 41 persons registered for the 12-week plane surveying course, which began Monday night.
During the past fiscal year 249 persons took the machine shop courses, of which 97 are known to have landed jobs, principally in aircraft plants.
In addition to these courses, a 10-week primary and secondary pilot-training program will be opened sometime this month. The course will be given in both Tucson and Globe.
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Meanwhile, astronomers elsewhere in the world were realizing the moon weighed more than they thought:
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MOON IS HEAVIER WHEN REWEIGHED BY ASTRONOMERS
By Thomas R. Henry
WASHINGTON, June 3 — (NANA) — Astronomer has just reweighed the moon.
It is about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons heavier that had been calculated in the past.
The new determination will become one of the fundamental constants in the astronomy of the solar system.
It has just been announced by Dr. H. Spencer Jones, astronomer royal of Great Britain, to whom the International Astronomical Union assigned the job of analyzing the immense volume of data gathered the world over in the autumn of 1931 when the tiny planetoid Eros made its closest approach to the earth in half a century.
He and his associates at the Greenwich observatory, on the edge of London, have completed the task and a few months ago announced that the sun was more than 100,000 miles further from the earth than hitherto had been supposed.
The new weight of the moon is the second result of their work.
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The number 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 is also known as 2 quintillion or 2 x 1018. (No, that didn't ease the Morgue Lady's confusion, either.)
That tiny planetoid, Eros, that made its close approach to Earth in 1931, is now referred to as a Near-Earth asteroid and was in the news a few years ago when the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft orbited the asteroid and took extensive photographs. The spacecraft then landed on Eros Feb. 12, 2001.
