WWI & WWII's last "Rosie"?

[Kit]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002292939_florence30m.html
 
 Monday, May 30, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.
 
 Last surviving "Rosie" still tells riveting stories
 
 By Nancy Bartley
 Seattle Times staff reporter
 
 THE SEATTLE TIMES
 
 To Florence Abrahamson, manufacturing de Havilland warplanes was "just duty."
 
 Florence Abrahamson was only 15 when she went to war for the first time.
 
 She was a married mother of three, with a son in the Navy, when duty called again more than 20 years later.
 
 Now 102, Abrahamson is being honored by legislators, officials in her hometown of Aberdeen, and by Seattle's Museum of Flight as one of a number of "Rosie the Riveters" who worked on Boeing and de Havilland airplane assembly lines during wartime.
 
 Abrahamson, however, is among the rarest of them all: She is the Northwest's last surviving "Rosie" from two world wars — and perhaps the only one anywhere, Museum of Flight officials believe.
 
 An upcoming trip to Seattle for the recognition ceremony and a tour of Boeing, all part of the museum's week of Memorial Day events, have significance for Abrahamson: For the first time, she will actually see a finished version of the B-17 bomber she worked on during World War II.
 
 For the Aberdeen woman, whose blue eyes loom large behind her spectacles, it's all much ado about what, to her, was "just duty" and "what anyone would have done."
 
 "Here is a gal who worked in two world wars," said Polson Museum Director John Larson. The rarity of that "just blew us away."
 
 The museum selected Abrahamson as this year's "Pioneer of the Year" for her contributions to the community and for her long history in the Grays Harbor area. Abrahamson's work life began shortly after her father died, which left her mother a widow with five children to support. Abrahamson and her brother were the two eldest.
 
 In 1917, at the beginning of America's entrance into "The Great War," the Grays Harbor Commercial Co. in Cosmopolis, one of the first sawmills in the harbor and located where the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill is now, needed help manufacturing de Havilland warplanes. While Abrahamson's brother was readily accepted, the company was torn over whether to hire women.
 
 When Abrahamson was hired in 1918, she dressed in overalls — daring attire at a time when proper ladies wore long skirts — and walked to work at the factory every morning from the family home less than a mile away.
 
 She spent her days making spruce lath for the de Havilland DH-4 biplane, the only U.S.-built warplane to see World War I combat. Her life was regulated by the steam plant's whistle, which signaled the start of work, lunch and end of the day.
 
 World War I was different from the war that followed, she said.
 
 Although Grays Harbor citizens — including her husband-to-be, Hugo Abrahamson — served in the military, the fighting in Europe seemed more remote than that of World War II.
 
 After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Aberdeen citizens shaded their windows at night. The Boeing Aberdeen factory was camouflaged with trees on the roof. Japanese submarines lurked off the coast. And American warplanes patrolled the harbor.
 
 By then, Florence and Hugo were married and living in house they built in 1925. He was working at a mill, and she was employed at a small grocery when the new war effort called.
 
 She tied a red bandana over her hair, donned a pair of slacks and became a riveter, fastening the aluminum skin onto B-17s. But as she placed rivet after rivet, she always wondered what the final plane looked like, with all those carefully laid rivets stitching the aluminum together as precisely as if she had been cross-stitching a sampler.
 
 She was so fast that co-workers asked her if she was "trying to win the war all by yourself." And she proved herself so capable — despite being left-handed in an occupation set up to accommodate only the right-handed — that she became an inspector, checking the work of others. Later, she would help make components for more than 5,000 B-29s.
 
 Now, Abrahamson's day of discovery is closing in.
 
 "The important title being bestowed on you must fill your heart with fond memories and a warm sense of pride for your enormous wartime contributions," state Rep. Gigi Talcott, R-Tacoma, wrote to her. Her efforts are "appreciated by every American who has experienced liberty and freedom."
 
 Thursday, Abrahamson will join a number of other Rosie the Riveters as guests of the Museum of Flight. Sporting her Boeing security badge from World War II, she will be accompanied by four of her six grandchildren for a tour of Boeing and the museum's B-17G "Fuddy Duddy."
 
 Abrahamson's husband died in 1974 and the last of her three children in 2004, but she is adored by her surviving grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. All have heard her colorful stories: Her assembly-line days; the ordeal of taking a driver's test for the first time at 57, after her son taught her to drive in a Pontiac so large she nicknamed it "the beast." After failing once, she passed the test on her second try but slammed the cranky license examiner against the dash when she braked too hard.
 
 "I wake up at night thinking about it even after all these years," she said.
 
 And no one will forget her arrest — sometime past the age of 60 — for a fishing violation.
 
 "I was caught fishing in a fish hatchery," she admitted sheepishly. Fishermen friends kept advising her to go farther up the Satsop River. "How was I to know it was part of the hatchery?"
 
 Afterward, when she showed up at church, the congregation "sang the prisoner's song" when she walked in, she recalled. And there was a fund drive at some stores to help her pay her fine. The judge ultimately dismissed the charge as long as she promised to "fish somewhere else."
 
 She figured that was good advice and went to Westport, Grays Harbor County, where she then won a 1964 fishing derby with a 48-pound salmon.
 
 She smiles in satisfaction at the thought. Just like she does when she thinks of those days during the war when she could fasten a rivet quick as anything.
 
 Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com
 
 in a letter to Florence Abrahamson
 
 Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
 
 
 -------------------
 insert:
 
 Museum of Flight schedule
 
 
  -----------------------
  PHOTOS:
 
  During World War I, Florence Abrahamson, left, shown in 1918, donned overalls — daring attire at a time when proper ladies wore long skirts — and headed off to a factory to manufacture warplanes.  (photo)
 
 
  To Florence Abrahamson, manufacturing de Havilland warplanes was "just duty."
  ---------------------------

[Kit]

 
 http://www.komotv.com/stories/37143.htm
 
 
 'Rosie The Riveter' Reunion In Chehalis
                
                [size=-1]                May 31, 2005                
                
                By KOMO Staff & News Services                                [/size]
                                                                                

                                                

                                               

 CHEHALIS - The women who helped build the planes that won World War II are together for a special occasion. Collectively they are known as 'Rosie the Riveter'. The women gathered to be re-united with the plane they helped build.

  Helen Holloway asks, "Were you a Rosie?" Jean Jaquay responds, "I was a Rosie." "Where did you work? At Boeing's in Chehalis?" "No, in Wichita, Kansas."

  They called themselves "Rosie the Riveter" which is a name that takes in all of the women who stepped up to build those warplanes.

  Helen and Jean are reminiscing with Peter Lahmann, whose grandmother was a riveter. Lahmann is dressed as a WWII Army pilot and tells the ladies, "And my aunt was a bucker. She wasn't a riveter. She was only 16 years old so she was inside backing them up."

  Jean says, "If you were driving rivets, you had to have somebody back there backing them or it wasn't any good putting them in." Helen says, "Yeh, that was a two man job, I mean, two woman job."

  They were the women who answered the call when the men were called away to duty.  

  Rosie the Riveter Frances Nugent says, "I never ever thought of myself as a Rosie, but I guess I was. They always assumed that I was a riveter, but I was a mechanic not a riveter."

  Rosie the Riveter Dorothy Powell says, "I think we all felt good about doing something to help. The fellows, everybody had somebody in the war. My husband was overseas."

  Helen climbs aboard a DC-3 saying, "My first time."  But the DC-3 is not the plane they came to see.  

  It is the B-17. Boeing had a plant in Chehalis to build the wings employing 700 people. The plane made a visit in 1944 so the women could see the finished product.

  Rosie the Riveter Ethel Nelson says, "Oh it was really great to see what we worked on and had accomplished. Yep, it was really great."

  This is the same rainy weather they had back in 1944 for the first visit of the B-17. But today the clouds are not going to cooperate and the B-17 is going to pass this ceremony by. The star is not going to be here. Instead the stars of the show are the Rosies.

  "Gee, I'm such a celebrity all of a sudden," Nelson said. The planes did heroic things but they never would have made it off the ground without these women and their rivets.

  The B-17 flying fortress is at Boeing Field in Seattle right now and it hopes to make it to Chehalis by the end of the week.
 ------------------------------------------------------------------
 

[Hunterbug]

Thanx for sharing that Kit. What an amazing story.