Mitzi Mars Butcher saw Hanford as her ticket out of rural Montana.

After growing up on a Fromberg farm, she yearned to visit more exciting locales.

But the farm girl never made it beyond Washington after she clambered off a crammed bus at the bustling Pasco depot in October 1943.

A couple of months later, Hope Sloan Amacker arrived at the same stop hoping to help win World War II.

The private first class in the Women's Army Corps intended to do whatever needed doing, from secretarial duties to military intelligence work.

For Geneva Owen Hammer, Hanford Engineer Works gave her and her parents badly needed jobs.

She was 17 when she quit high school to be a coffee girl in Mess Hall No. 1.

Little did she know her exodus 50 years ago from Missouri's Ozarks would help achieve her dream of being a nurse.

Hammer, Amacker and Butcher were among an estimated 4,000 women to come to Hanford in the early 1940s.

They came from all over the United States to aid their country, to find a job or just for an adventure.

They came on their own, with friends, parents or husbands.

Most never planned to stay.

But they did, forming the foundation of present-day Richland after they married other Hanford workers, moved into "alphabet" houses and started families.

Even more unexpected, their work at Hanford sparked lifetime careers in fields they never dreamed of entering.

Women accounted for just 9 percent of the nearly 51,000 workers at the Hanford Engineer Works during its peak in 1944.

But they were left with a sense of accomplishment and a kinship that came from being thrown together under oppressive circumstances in an desolate area.

Most were clerks, secretaries, nurses and teachers, or they worked in the mess halls and barracks.

Weekly salaries began at $26 for typists, $40 for cooks, $41 for lab assistants and up to $50 for experienced nurses.

Meanwhile, experienced engineers and inspectors and designers, primarily men, earned $146 to $173 weekly.

Just two of Hanford's top managers were women, said Hanford historian Michele Gerber.

Some exceptions and other Hanford notables included:

-- Buena Maris, the dean of women from Oregon State College, hired to look after Hanford's female workers. She was the only woman who regularly attended the staff meetings of the site commander, Col. Franklin T. Matthias.

-- Margaret M. Shaw, director of nursing on the project and Capt. Arlene Schiedenheln, who commanded a contingent of 24 members of the Women's Army Corps.

-- Leona Woods Marshall, a young physicist from the University of Chicago, who worked with Enrico Fermi on the startup of B Reactor. Marshall performed many test calculations for improving the reactor's performance and later wrote The Uranium People.

Marshall and Schiedenheln were listed in the "Top 10 Women of 1945" by Mademoiselle magazine.

-- Reva Matthias, wife of Col. Matthias, who was well-liked particularly because she stood in line for her food rations like any other housewife, Gerber said.

-- Reporter Jane Jones Hutchins with the Richland Villager newspaper, who started a charitable program to help a war-torn European city, Tiel, Holland. The town received 11,000 pounds of clothing for Christmas 1946 because of Hutchins' efforts. And her sister city concept caught on throughout the United States as a way of helping hundreds of other communities.

Many other women who came to the secret site were less well-known, but their lives were forever changed by Hanford.

For Mitzi Butcher, Hanford represented an adventure beyond teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Joliet, Mont.

As World War II heated up, Butcher and four girlfriends went to work in a Remington Arms munitions plant in Salt Lake City.

"I felt a lot of women could teach, but that sounded exciting," she said. "I just wanted to do something different and do something new."

Eighteen months later the plant closed and Butcher, then 25, was transferred with two bold friends to a mysterious project in Washington state.

She wondered what she'd gotten herself into when she stepped off the bus at Pasco into a knot of military and construction workers waiting for the 45-minute ride to Camp Hanford. Many of the men were unkempt.

"We huddled in a corner until our bus arrived. I never saw so much flotsam and jetsam," she said.

Her schedule at Hanford's employment office was typical for women there.

She worked six days a week from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. "It'd be dark when I went to work and dark when I left."

Her office was the first stop for nearly everyone arriving at Hanford.

"They'd get off the bus at our door," she said. "And I never saw so much human debris in my life."

The zoot suiters fascinated the country girl with their huge hats, balloon pants, flashy shirts and gold fobs with a chain dangling to their knees.

But those "city boy" types didn't last long with the hard, dirty work.

"So many people who got there didn't like it," Butcher said. "But I loved every minute of it."

By June 1945, construction had slowed and Butcher was transferred to the analytical labs.

"Everyone was thrown into it blindly," she said. But she enjoyed the work and stayed until she married a reactor operator and they began a family in 1950. She raised five children, then returned to the labs in 1962, staying another 19 years.

"I had fun at work. Sometimes it seemed I enjoyed it too much," said the Richland woman.

For other women, Hanford was only the stepping stone to other careers.

Geneva Hammer came reluctantly to Hanford in the fall of 1943 after being homesick for her parents.

Her father left Missouri to drive buses to the B Reactor. Her mother sold cigarettes, magazines and candy in a Hanford beer hall.

For the first few months, Hammer and her mother shared a room in one barracks and her father lived in another because no family housing existed. Because Hammer was just 17 and Hanford was under a thick veil of security, the teen had to be escorted to and from any building, including to her mess hall job serving coffee.

"It was weird for me because I wasn't free to go anywhere."

The mess hall operated 24 hours and four coffee girls worked each shift, endlessly putting out steaming pots of java on the long tables. She worked 10 a.m. to 6 or 8 p.m.

Then Hammer went to work in a California shipyard and back to Missouri. But in less than a year she missed Washington and her family, so her father sent her $150 to catch a train to Pasco.

That's when she heard of a special course for training nurses at the newly built Richland hospital, now Kadlec Medical Center.

She had wanted to be a nurse since age 11, when she helped a sickly grandmother.

Kadlec's program was the start of Hammer's 39-year nursing career in Richland.

Over the years, she worked with handicapped children, served as a surgical technician and cardiologist's assistant and ran Kadlec's electrocardiogram department for 12 years.

Hammer, who married a Hanford firefighter and raised four children, still lives in Richland and works with allergist A.G. Corrado and cares for Tri-City AIDS patients.

Other women who came to Hanford, like members of the Women's Army Corps, found a place where they could help their country at a time when women's military roles were limited.

"I think this was the most exciting thing I could have been involved in," said Hope Amacker.

Amacker had grown up in Middletown, Ohio, and was a 23-year-old telephone worker when she enlisted in the Army in 1943.

"I had to help win the war," she said. After finishing basic training, her commanding officer told Amacker to be packed and ready to leave on an hour's notice.

The destination was a secret, but she was told to prepare for sand up to her boot tops and ski slopes within a 2H-hour drive.

"It sounded really adventuresome," recalled Amacker, who arrived at the Pasco train station at 3 a.m. on New Year's Day 1944.

Her first assignments for the Women's Army Corps were in the transportation department and for military intelligence monitoring telephone calls to and from Hanford.

Then Amacker was assigned to the public-relations office - a fairly quiet place until the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

A press release explaining Hanford's mission had been ready for three or four months and kept sealed, Amacker said.

Though she did not know the big secret, she was told she would be called in unexpectedly. The call came to the WAC dorm at 7:30 a.m. Monday, Aug. 6.

Phones were ringing crazily when she arrived at the office. Lt. Milton R. Cydell, who was Hanford's public-relations officer, at times that day had as many as 15 calls waiting for him at once.

The next day, they set up another office, Amacker said.

Radio and newspaper writers and photographers were arriving from all over the country seeking interviews with scientists and the military.

"It was exciting," she said.

The office didn't calm down for two weeks. "Then we started winding down and looking forward to getting out of the Army."

She was discharged at the rank of staff sergeant in 1946, but returned to the same office as a civilian.

She married a Du Pont chemist the same year and went to work for General Electric's Richland city manager until 1952, when she quit to raise two sons.

Remembering her time at Hanford, the Kennewick woman said, "It was the greatest experience I could have had outside of going into combat. It was a lifetime experience.

"We were made to feel like we were contributing to the war effort. I never felt I was just a peon."