Now behold the day of the war industries,” wrote famed Kansas editor William Allen White in 1942. “Towns like Wichita, Pittsburg, Parsons are being transformed.” And transformed they were. Wichita, seemingly overnight, changed forever from what one citizen called a “sleepy little cow town” to a booming city that “shook off the doldrums of the Great Depression to become one of the nation’s busiest military production centers” in the wake of World War II.