YESTERYEAR: Evansville Red Cross Chapter by Pat Sides
In 1952, the Evansville Red Cross chapter organized an emergency committee of civic leaders to oversee a drive to replenish blood supplies in military hospitals, bringing in a bloodmobile from Indianapolis to visit local industrial plants. The United States was at war with Korea, which prompted a critical shortage in the country’s blood bank. Briggs Indiana Corporation on East Columbia Street, which manufactured automobile bodies for the Chrysler Corporation, was one of the sites visited by the bloodmobile. This image shows Red Cross staff busily preparing Briggs employees to donate their blood, as “Evansville continued to break one record right after another,†according to the local Red Cross chairman.
