Rosie the Riveter Home Front Festival by the Bay

Tom Butt E-Forum

Click here for photos of events.

A whirlwind of activities that began on September 22 and ended today, September 30, drew thousands of visitors to Richmond to participate in the first Home Front Festival by the Bay and the Launching of the Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Historical Park.

The events straddled the entire southern waterfront from Marina Bay on the east and Shipyard 3 and the Red Oak Victory on the west. Shuttle buses ferried participants to and from the various locations.

The weather was perfect the entire weekend, delivering clear and sunny days. The entire schedule of events went off with almost perfectly, with everything beginning and ending on time.

Friday morning began with an Ambassador Rally hosted by the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and attended by Chambers of Commerce representatives from throughout northern California at the Ford Building Crane Way. Friday night was a sellout Gala Fundraising Dinner hosted by Rosie the Riveter Trust, the non-profit partner of the National Park Service for Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Historical Park.

Saturday morning began with another sellout, a pancake breakfast at the Red Oak Victory, followed by the “Launch the Park” festivities attended by hundreds on the waterfront of former Shipyard # 3 at the foot of Canal Boulevard. While the ”Launch” was winding down, the music was cranking up near the Rosie the Riveter Memorial where a crowd of over a thousand was building to sample food, visit vendor and public service booths, enjoy the sunshine and take cruises on historic ships.

Saturday night action switched back to the Ford Building Crane way for another sellout, the USO dance with a big band orchestra and sing dancing. A big hit was the men and women of historical clubs from all over the Bay Area who arrived in vintage cars and vintage WW II uniforms.

Sunday morning began at 10:00 AM in Marina Bay at Lucretia Edwards Park for 5K and 10K runs. In the 5K, Councilmembers Jim Rogers, Ludmyrna Lopez and Tom Butt all took first place in their gender and age brackets, and Shirley Butt took first place in hers.

Back to the Ford Building Crane Way, the Home Front Worker reunion was in full swing, with hundreds of Rosie and other Home Front workers and their families telling of their personal experiences.

In Marina Bay Park the food and music was going aging by noon, and another perfect day of sunshine was underway. Down by the waterfront, there were cruises on the historic ship Alma and tours of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s yacht Potomac as well as the Sea Scout Ship Northland.

From the West County Times:
REMEMBERING ROSIE
Many revisit Richmond of 60 years ago, help christen historic park By John Simerman

STAFF WRITER Contra Costa Times
Article Launched:09/30/2007 03:01:16 AM PD

RICHMOND -- None of it smelled much like history back then.

Not their work in the machine shops or down in the cramped double-bottoms of warships, not the torch spray that seared their eyes or the tight housing or the rationed food. Not the company health and child care, the decent paychecks or the union cards.

Ask the Rosies.

They will tell you: The point wasn't women in the workplace, racial tolerance or planting the seeds for social change.

"It was the fear of people not coming home," welder Bethena Moore later wrote. "It was what the ship was going to do -- bring back boys and bodies ... You would not want to make an awkward weld. You had to make it perfect; there were lives involved."

But the years lend perspective, and on Saturday, with a clear view across the Bay and back more than six decades, several of them gathered at the former Kaiser Shipyard No. 3 to proudly help christen the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park.

Wartime shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser's granddaughter, Katie Kaiser, cracked a champagne bottle wrapped in a stars-and-stripes cloth across the bow of a faux Liberty ship at 12:44 p.m. as spectators waved colored ribbons and cheered.

Actors dressed in World War II-era military uniforms and shipworker leathers filtered through the crowd. To the south, hundreds of festival-goers gathered near the 7-year-old Rosie the Riveter memorial at Marina Bay Park to eat, drink, hear live music and soak up the sun. Others took tours on the Red Oak Victory ship under restoration while some toured the bay on the Tall Ship "Alma."

The three-day festival runs through today with a morning fun run, music, tours and demonstrations aimed at drawing adults and children into the history of the city and its place in World War II history.

"For me, it's coming full circle," said Betty Reid Soskin, standing under a bright blue sky at Shipyard No. 3.

Soskin worked during the war at a union hall for shipworkers on Barrett Avenue. She was 20 then.

Now she's 86 and a National Park Service ranger, telling stories of an era when Richmond turned almost instantly from a quiet town of 23,600 to a bursting industrial hub of 100,000, many of them transplants from the South.

Tens of thousands of shipfitters, welders, riveters, tackers, painters and electricians would churn out 747 warships. They finished one, the SS Robert E. Peary, in less than five days.

Only later did historians, and Soskin, look at that period as a watershed for women and for race relations.

It was a time of "complete turmoil," said Soskin, and "accelerated social change, the likes of which we've never seen. It swept right through.

"Telling this story honestly and real gives us this baseline with which to measure social change over all those years. That's what's so important about this park."

Some Rosies see that time in Richmond less as the start of a sweeping shift and more simply as a symbol of a nation that came together.

"The feeling for us was this total pulling together. It didn't matter the ethnicity at all. We didn't sense that at all," said Betty Hardison, who worked then on finding scarce Richmond housing for shipworkers. Then she looked around the former shipyard Saturday and paused.

"It seems just like yesterday."

The park service has ambitious plans to make the sprawling, "scattered-site" park a locus for telling a wide-ranging American story through the sights, sounds and letters of the thousands of Rosies whose stories they have gathered, said park Superintendent Martha Lee. That effort is ongoing, she said.

"We're embracing all we can. We're losing time," she said. "People are dying."

The new national "park" remains a work in progress and covers 10 sites, some public and others privately owned and as yet inaccessible, including the former Kaiser field hospital that is considered the launching point for what would become Kaiser Permanente.

Among the next key steps are a visitor's center planned for the historic Ford building, which should open within two years, Lee said.

"We need a place, seven days a week," she said.

The idea is to use Richmond's homefront story as a way to tell the nation's. The seeds for revolutions in child and health care were in many ways planted in the city.

Parts of the tale remain "under a Band-Aid," she said, including the history of Japanese internment camps during the war. Others, like that of Richmond's thriving 1940s' music scene, beg to be told with sound and images, she said.

"There's no one story," Lee said. "Everyone's story is different."