Happy Fourth of July

Tom Ricks passes along a great little story:

Henry "Hap" Arnold, the chief of the Air Corps in World War II, was decorating workers at a B-29 factory in Wichita in 1943, and the foreman introduced a woman in her 70s, saying, "This is our best worker." The woman was Helen Longstreet, widow of the Civil War soldier James Longstreet. He had lived a long life and married a young woman.

According to Wikipedia, which doesn't recount the Arnold incident, Mrs. Longstreet actually worked at the Bell Aircraft plant in Atlanta. She married Longstreet when she was 34, in 1897; he died in 1904. She was also an early conservationist, opposed to damming projects on the Tallulah River.