Saw this article, and thought it deserved a repost. All these years later, Mae Krier of Levittown still glows at the thought of the World War II Flying Fortress she considers her own. It was 5 Grand, the 5,000th B-17 warplane made by Boeing after Pearl Harbor. Krier, a teenage riveter in 1944, painted her name on the fuselage, as did her coworkers. They were so proud, they pushed the plane out of the factory door themselves. “OSHA would have had a fit,” says Krier. But America loved it. 5 Grand went to war, autographs intact, though the U.S. Army Air Corps initially considered it unacceptably out of uniform — aircraft had to be painted drab camouflage colors. Krier kept track of the plane carrying her rivets as it flew 78 bombing missions over Europe. “Part of me was going with it, so to speak,” she recalls. “I followed it all the way through, till it was scrapped.” To Krier, those planes represent her youth, a time of action and purpose when ordinary Americans were called to do extraordinary things. Fresh out of high school in North Dakota, she moved with her family to Seattle for war work. At 17, she got a job at the Boeing factory there and quickly moved up to a job riveting wings and engine housings. Though women had not previously been a part of the factory landscape, millions signed on for heavy home-front duty making planes, munitions and other war supplies. The phenomenon was crystallized in popular culture as Rosie the Riveter. “I loved that time,” Krier says. “I was one of the youngest Rosies. They were taking us right out of school. “I think I was a tomboy to start with. I just dug in. I don’t ever remember not wanting to go to work. I loved to work, and I was good at it.” In recent years, foundations and memorial groups have begun promoting Rosie the Riveter as a feminist role model and pop-culture icon. Young women wear Rosie the Riveter costumes on Halloween. As Krier points out, the real thing is still around, even if her numbers are falling, as they are for her male military counterparts. “Our husbands are dead, 1,000 a day,” she says. “Well, we’re dying off, too. “If I could just meet some other Rosies, and just talk to them.” That gets more difficult by the day. Women war workers make the news now mostly in the obituaries. Barbara Freer of Bristol, who compiled an oral history that included a small group of local Rosie the Riveters, says most of the women she spoke to about three years ago have since died. At 88, Krier is one of the younger home-front veterans. While she did not grow up in Bucks County, having settled here with her late husband, Norm, who was from Morrisville, local women riveted planes and did other war work for an aircraft company in Bristol. Virginia Di Maggio, 90, went from her dad’s tailor shop on Lincoln Avenue to Fleetwings on Radcliffe Street, where she said few women worked during her time there. Experience with precise cutting at the tailor shop was her entree to aircraft assembly. “You had to know how to use a ruler to like, 1/32nd of an inch,” she says. DiMaggio and another woman worked on the factory floor, staffed mostly by wolf-whistling males during that period. “My ears were red all the time, I guess,” she says. After a while, she was drafted for office work due to a shortage of secretaries. And she made an unusual career move after the war. With many men in the armed services or other wartime jobs, industry knew it needed women. Krier recalled propaganda films using Rosie the Riveter to counter Hitler’s claim that American women were interested only in frivolous things. Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Rosie the Riveter for a 1943 cover of The Saturday Evening Post went further, showing an extremely muscular female factory worker pointedly resting her foot on a copy of “Mein Kampf.” It was considered patriotic for a woman to take on factory work. “Most of them did not want to work, but we had this war, and that’s what they did,” says Freer. “They all said, ‘We did what we had to do.’ They didn’t want to work after that, they wanted to be housewives.” When men came home from battle, it was considered patriotic for women to give up their jobs. Laying off women so men could be hired was common, and accepted by many. DiMaggio saw it from a different angle: Female breadwinners were losing their livelihoods. “There were other ladies that were mothers and needed the job, so I just quit,” she says. That didn’t sit well with a union official, but DiMaggio was adamant. “They needed money ‘cause they had children.” She went to work for her brother, who had a shoe shop in New Jersey. Krier had already quit her job at the Boeing factory, having met and married Norm, who was discharged from the Navy as soon as the war ended. “Most of the women, they (Boeing) laid off,” she says. It was not the end of her wartime adventures. While the couple was living in the state of Washington, she got a job at an Army base packing supplies for the rebuilding of Europe. Helping out was a crew of Italian prisoners of war, who did the heavy lifting and had to become accustomed to a confident victory generation of females. “They thought the American women were so fresh,” she recalls. Krier briefly returned to riveting at the Bristol factory during the Korean War. She and Norm, who died several months ago, traveled extensively during 69 years of marriage. The couple has two great-great grandchildren. She still corresponds with a friend from her days at the Boeing plant and another Rosie from Vermont, with whom she became acquainted in recent years. Krier hopes to attend a gathering of former war workers next year at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. She also would like to organize a group of ex-Rosies for similar outings. Though she would welcome more official recognition of home-front workers, “I’m not here for fame and fortune,” she said. “I loved my past. I loved my role in World War II.” http://www.theintell.com/life-style/local-feature/riveting-tales-of-world-war-ii/article_854dc9a1-c380-50da-bacd-603154e1776b.html
