12.19.99

20. Rhode Island's industrial products were world-famous at the turn of the century. Some of the biggest names: Coats and Clark thread, Nicholson Files, Gorham silver, Corliss steam engines, American Screw Co., Brown & Sharpe tools -- and of course Rumford Baking Soda.

21. Women's fashion in the 20th century boils down to taking it off. Women's clothing around 1900 could weigh 20 to 30 pounds or more; a little black Spandex number today is better measured in ounces. Menswear has hardly changed at all -- except for that disastrous foray into leisure suits in the 1970s.

We started the century with women in corsets and men in hats; we ended it with most of the young'uns tattooed and/or pierced.

22. The telephone was extremely popular in Rhode Island, for those who could afford it, but the mill workers in cities like Woonsocket and Providence didn't really need phones.

They got all the news they needed on the front porches of the double-, triple- and quadruple-deckers built in working class neighborhoods. Families -- or at least people who spoke the same languages -- formed micro-villages in each multi-family.

23. Aquidneck Island joined the rest of the state on Oct. 24, 1929, when the Mount Hope Bridge opened. Built of 2,620 miles of steel wire and 40,000 cubic yards of concrete, the $3.6-million span was the largest suspension bridge in New England at the time. Tolls on opening day were 60 cents one way or $1 round trip; more than 14,000 pedestrians and 5,000 cars paid up willingly.

The tolls were abolished last year.

24. In the postwar boom it seemed like everybody got a car -- at least, after Detroit switched back from making tanks to building cars. Rhode Island, urban and rich at the turn of the century, loved cars from the very start.

By 1950, there were about 200,000 cars and trucks; by 1960, that number was 310,000. Today it's more than 961,000 -- painfully close to one car for every person living in the state.

25. Antoine Gazda was a shadowy Austrian immigrant who arrived in Providence in 1940 carrying one of the world's most guarded secrets -- the blueprints for a 20mm turret gun that could shoot Japanese and German bomber planes from the air as if they were clay targets. The Oerlikon-Gazda gun was built in small machine shops and converted textile mills in Providence and the Blackstone Valley. By the end of World War II, nearly every vessel in the Allied fleet carried Gazda antiaircraft guns.

They were never lovely. What they were was portable, durable, flexible, cheap, and fast to build. They helped America win World War II.

And they were designed at Quonset Point.

Between 1941 and 1946, the U.S. Navy made or bought more than 160,000 Quonset huts . They made them with screens for the South Pacific, with insulation for northern Europe. Most measured 20 feet by 48 feet; the real big ones were 40 feet by 100 feet -- "elephant huts'' -- for warehouses.

By all accounts, the long humpy shape was inspired by British Nissen military huts; some say credit should go further back, to the cylindrical long houses devised by North American Indians.

During the war the ubiquitous huts served as barracks, mess halls, hospitals, latrines; scores became offices on the Mall in Washington. After the war, they were houses for returning veterans and temporary classrooms in the overflowing schools and colleges.

They can still be spotted around the country, as churches, banks, theaters, offices, barns, schools, homes, and bowling alleys. And at Quonset Point, some are even on the National Register of Historic Places.

A yearlong Providence Journal series about life in Rhode Island.
Produced in cooperation with the Rhode Island Historical Society.