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Acegirl
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AMERICA REMEMBERS -- , Rosalind P. Walter, the First ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ Dies at 95.
Rosalind Palmer Walter — friends called her Roz, not Rosie — was born on June 24, 1924, in Brooklyn, one of four children of Carleton and Winthrop (Bushnell) Palmer. Her mother was a professor of literature at Long Island University.
Rosalind P. Walter grew up in a wealthy and genteel Long Island home. Yet when the United States entered World War II, she chose to join millions of other women in the home-front crusade to arm the troops with munitions, warships and aircraft.
She worked the night shift driving rivets into the metal bodies of Corsair fighter planes at a plant in Connecticut — a job that had almost always been reserved for men. A newspaper column about her inspired a morale-boosting 1942 song that turned her into the legendary Rosie the Riveter, the archetype of the hard-working women in overalls and bandanna-wrapped hair who kept the military factories humming.
The family settled in Centre Island, a village in the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. Its 400 or so well-heeled residents have since included the singer Billy Joel, the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Her parents sent Rosalind to the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., one of the first college preparatory boarding schools for upper-class women.
By the time she graduated, Europe was at war, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 spurred the United States to declare war on Japan, Germany and Italy, she was recruited, at 19, as an assembly line worker at the Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford, Conn.
Her story caught the attention of the syndicated newspaper columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote about her in his “Cholly Knickerbocker” column. And that, in turn, inspired the songwriters.
Ms. Walter was not the only Rosie the Riveter. There were at least four other women who became models for the character as the War Production Board sought to recruit more women for the military factories.
Norman Rockwell drew his version of Rosie for the cover of the May 29, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post — a grimy-faced, muscular woman in denim overalls, work goggles perched on her forehead and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf trampled underfoot. His model was a Vermont woman, Mary Doyle Keefe, who died in 2015.
And J. Howard Miller drew a Rosie poster for Westinghouse war factories. He portrayed her in a red and white polka dot bandanna as she flexed a bicep under the words “We Can Do It!” The image became a feminist symbol starting in the 1980s, reprinted on T-shirts and coffee mugs. The model for that Rosie was most likely Naomi Parker Fraley, a California waitress who died in 2018.
So Rosalind Walter cannot alone claim the crown of being the real Rosie the Riveter. But she was there first.
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From: The Ninety-Nines, Inc, International Organization of Women Pilots
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The following user(s) said Thank You: Alex Galt, Pegoud, Smoke Screen
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