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Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Rosie Gets Her Due (http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_rosie11.79ef5d.html)

Riveters park to honor home front 'veterans'

By MARY BENDER

They served their country during the 20th century's biggest war, toiling on the home front rather than the battlefields of Europe, Africa or the Pacific. Their "uniforms" weren't the Army's olive drab or the Navy's "Cracker Jack" white and blue, but rather denim slacks cuffed at the ankle, work shirts and sensible shoes, their tresses wrapped in a bandanna or hair net.

It may not have been considered flattering feminine attire, but with their welder's torches or rivet guns, they redefined womanhood while helping America's fighting men keep the world safe for democracy.

The U.S. Census Bureau, in its annual list of Veterans Day statistics, doesn't include these "Rosie the Riveter" alumni among its tally of 1.7 million living female veterans. But by building the battleships and fighter planes that powered the Allies to victory in World War II, the women who labored in defense plants from 1942 to 1945 could be considered honorary veterans for their service to the GIs on the front lines.

A long-overdue tribute to their service, the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park, is taking shape in the Bay Area city of Richmond. A memorial to the women, the youngest of whom are octogenarians, was dedicated in 2000.

The waterfront city was home to the massive Kaiser Shipyards and a Ford Assembly Plant that was transformed during the war years to produce tanks. It will take years for a museum and all of the park's planned elements to be built or restored, as its collection of wartime memorabilia is still evolving and most of the vintage buildings on the Richmond waterfront await restoration.

In the meantime, the National Park Service and the nonprofit Rosie the Riveter Trust are busy gathering artifacts and oral histories from the women -- and sometimes their children and grandchildren -- and fighting the clock as the Rosies' ranks thin with each passing year.

The war ended 61 years ago, but memories from that era are etched strong for the women who performed what was considered "man's work."

Finding Rosie

Mary Phay was a transplant from Brownfield, Texas, when she started work at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach on her 19th birthday. The Rancho California resident is among the "Rosies" who submitted accounts of their wartime work to the Richmond collection.

The museum also contacted Yucaipa resident Dolores Bennett Barlow, 84, seeking information about her wartime stint as a riveter at Douglas plants in Long Beach and Bakersfield.

"My first paycheck was for $33.83," said Phay, who was a single gal named Mary Edith Hudson back then. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I'd been working seven days a week
and making $7.50," she said, recalling her job in a hometown drugstore. "My only other job was picking cotton on our farm in west Texas."

On Wednesday, Phay thumbed through a 4-inch-thick scrapbook that she and her husband, Ted, compiled about their years working at Douglas.

A paycheck stub from Oct. 28, 1942, shows Phay's starting salary was actually $33.80 a week, but being off by 3 cents isn't bad for an 83-year-old who says her age sometimes makes her forgetful. Sundays were Phay's lone day off from the assembly line, where she worked as a riveter on planes including the DC-3. She had never done industrial work before.

"They sent us to school for two weeks -- how to use the rivet gun, how to drill holes, how to use the skill saw," she remembered.

Barlow, whose late husband, Joe, also worked at the Douglas plant, recalled her duties on the airplane assembly line. "Here I am in this hot fuselage, riveting ... the (airplane's) skin on the studs."

Each worker had to complete her task before the plane body, mounted on a track, moved past her work station.

As a young newlywed in 1942, she was up for the challenge of learning to use power tools.

"I wasn't intimidated by a darn thing. I'm Irish and a Leo," said Barlow, who has two sons, a daughter and three grandchildren.

"Somebody just showed you what to do," Barlow recalled. "I'm mechanically inclined anyhow."

Her father worked on Navy submarines, and her mother became an air raid warden in Long Beach, so doing her part for the war effort came naturally to Barlow.

War Worries

The fear of enemy attack in California was so great that defense plants, including Douglas Aircraft, were disguised to avoid detection, especially from spy planes, Barlow and Phay recalled.

"The plant was on Long Beach Boulevard and Carson Street. There was a netting that went over the parking lot, and it was camouflaged to look like it was the countryside," Phay said.

Homes and businesses also took precautions, especially after sundown. "We were not to have lights on at night," Barlow said. "If you went to a restaurant or a little ice cream parlor, when it got dark they turned out the lights."

Barlow and her husband were transferred to Bakersfield, where Douglas converted a sports stadium to an aircraft plant, and she worked until World War II ended.

Phay, meanwhile, made a career of building military airplanes and commercial jets at the Long Beach Douglas plant.

Wartime check stubs, taped to the yellowing pages in Phay's scrapbook, show Douglas boosted her hourly pay from $1 to $1.05 in March 1945, and to $1.10
that July.

Phay even saved a small doodle she drew 64 years ago, of herself in jeans and kerchief, her Douglas badge clipped to her shirt and a beaming smile across her face. The caption reads: "New Job, Oct. 1942."

Afterward

With the surrender of the Japanese in August 1945, America no longer needed  its Rosies.

"When the war was over, they came in the door and said everybody could go home," said Phay. "I was laid off at the end of the war. I got married and had two little boys."

But when Phay's marriage soured, the young single mother returned to Douglas Aircraft. She met and married Ted, and he adopted her two boys, Gregory and
Mark.

The Phays have six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. And they're planning a visit to Richmond to see the memorial to home front "veterans" just like Mary.

World War II Home Front National Historical Park

LOCATION: It is built on a site that includes the former Kaiser Shipyards  which manufactured 747 ships during the war -- and the former Ford Assembly
Building, which produced tanks, jeeps and armored personnel carriers.

ADDRESS: 1401 Marina Way South, Richmond, CA. 94804

TRIBUTE: The Rosie the Riveter Memorial is 441 feet long, the length of each Liberty ship produced at Kaiser Shipyards during World War II. The memorial includes a timeline, photos and memorabilia about women's work on the home front during the war

HISTORY: In 1998, a Richmond city councilwoman asked the local congressman for help in creating a memorial to honor the wartime contributions of American women who built military ships and airplanes. The National Park Service got involved later that year, and soon Congress approved a bill that then-President Clinton signed in October 2000

INFORMATION: www.rosietheriveter.org and 510-507-2276; also National Park Service Web site, www.nps.gov/rori/index.htm

DONATIONS: The Rosie the Riveter Trust, 117 Park Place, Richmond, CA 94807, 510-236-7435, info@rosietheriveter.org. To submit wartime stories or memorabilia, call 510-507-2276 .

SOURCE: Rosie the Riveter Trust, National Park Service