Joseph Fischer frequently can be found in a basement room of the Richmond Museum of History poring over what he believes is the largest collection of children's art in the country.

The artwork comes from children ranging in age from 2 to 12 who attended the groundbreaking child care centers that opened in Richmond to serve shipyard workers during World War II.

Fischer, an 80-year-old retired lecturer and research associate in education at UC Berkeley, estimates the collection of paintings and linoleum block prints at more than 3,000 pieces in all, spanning the height of World War II to the late 1970s.

"This unique collection may well constitute the single largest well-documented source of children's art in the United States," he said.

He holds up one painting after another, the colors of the poster-paint-on-newsprint still vibrant after decades in storage: a train, a turkey, a battleship with cannons raised, a truck delivering Lux Soap, a cowboy scene, a caricature of Hitler, a smiling sun.

"This is an extraordinary collection of material no matter how you cut it -- historically, artistically, sociologically, psychologically," Fischer said.

The Richmond Museum of History wants to reconnect the thousands of artworks with the people who attended the historic Richmond child care programs, the first of their kind in the United States.

The first preschoolers at the center would now be in their 60s and 70s.

"We're casting our net and asking people who were at the child care centers -- students or teachers -- to contact us," said Donald Bastin, the museum's director. "We're collecting names, getting information, asking permission to interview them between now and September. If we're lucky, maybe they'll remember something they did."

The museum hopes to display the collection at Richmond's Home Front Festival, previously called Festival by the Bay, in September. Selected works also are scheduled to go on display in April at the Museum of Children's Art in Oakland.

That the collection exists at all is because of the foresight of educator Monica Haley, supervisor of children's art for the former Richmond Unified School District, which oversaw the 14 centers opened by the citywide child care program.

"Early in the program, Haley asked a student what his mother thought of the painting he brought home," Fischer said. "'"'She used it to wrap the garbage' was the reply. She determined that every week they were going to select a few paintings and document them."

"I thought these things were treasures," Haley is quoted as saying in a display piece.

Each piece in the collection is stored between sheets of acid-free archival paper and in archival boxes, all expensive but necessary to protect the fragile newsprint.

The creations weren't just preserved, they were meticulously documented: Each work includes the name and age of the student and the date it was made. The collection also includes instructional books, photos of children and artwork, teacher comments, letters and diaries.

Child care centers during the war weren't just an employee perk, they were essential to keeping war workers on the job and avoiding an early generation of "latchkey" kids who lacked supervision. Some of the centers operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week to match the round-the-clock schedules of workers.

The nurseries, most notably the Maritime and Pullman child development centers, were trailblazers in an era when the idea of child care was generally not accepted. They made up the first publicly funded child care for children of working parents. Other centers would be built near war industry sites in other areas of the nation, but only the California centers continued to operate after the war.

At its peak, with 24,500 women on the Kaiser payroll, Richmond's child care program had a total daily attendance of 1,400 children, according to the National Park Service. Centers were established at schools and wartime housing sites around the city.

The Maritime and the Pullman centers, originally sponsored by the Kaiser shipyards and funded by the U.S. Maritime Commission, are registered historic sites and key locations in the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park.

"When you saw public-assisted day care created during the Depression, it was providing child care to the poor and indigent who were out of work," said David Blackburn, chief of interpretation for the East Bay unit of the National Park Service, whereas the shipyard centers "were a response to the desperate need for organized child care for working parents, and in many cases without someone to watch over the need of the children."

The Maritime and the Pullman centers -- the latter renamed for teacher Ruth Powers -- were intended to do more than just warehouse children during a parent's shipyard shift of eight hours or more. Children as young as 2 would be dropped off at the start of a shift; elementary students up to age 12 would attend before and after school.

"The programming they provided and the lesson plans themselves were considered to be innovative and forward-thinking for child development in the '40s," Blackburn said.

The centers were staffed with nutritionists, psychiatrists and certified teachers, and, according to Fischer, there were five teachers for every 30 students.

"It was a model for child care programs," he said.

The art program was structured, yet allowed youths the freedom to create. Children would wear a smock and stand at double-sided easels to paint.

"They were allowed to create art as opposed to being taught how to create it, which was very innovative," said Lucy Lawliss, a cultural resource manager for the National Park Service.

Fischer has been through enough paintings to notice some patterns.

"What's unusual about this collection of material, first of all, is that a lot of it covers an important period of U.S. history -- the home front," he said. "It's a document of American history during World War II, and it reflects the close connection between the war and industrial workers, women and children. Secondly, it's art, and some of it is pictorial, representing the war and all that."

Many paintings show battle scenes, planes, warships and the shipyards. Holiday scenes, trains and cowboys are common, but few pets or family scenes were depicted during the war years.

"These kids lived in trailer camps, and Dad was fighting in the war and Mom was working," Fischer said. "These kids only had one parent for several years, it was probably their mother, and she was working full time. They didn't really have a family life."

The painting continued at the Maritime and Pullman centers after the war, and both the child care program and the content of the artwork reflected changes in postwar life.

"During the war, it was all white children," Fischer said. "After the war, that all changed, especially after 1964 and the (federal) Civil Rights Act."

All of the pictures, singularly and collectively, tell a story.

"Kids are great at expressing their culture, and art is one way of expressing it," Fischer said. "It's amazing to me that this stuff lay fallow for so long."

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