Quad-Cities ‘Rosie the Riveter’ will welcome counterparts

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Quad-Cities ‘Rosie the Riveter’ will welcome counterparts

By ALMA GAUL Quad City Times

May 10, 2019 08:13 AM

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In this April 30, 2019 photo, Martha Wahe poses for a photo in her home in Moline, Ill. Wahe worked as a “Rosie the Riveter” at the Rock Island Arsenal during the winter of 1942 as the nation entered its second year of World War II. “Rosie” is a moniker given to the unprecedented number of women who went to work in factories as part of the war effort, replacing men who were drafted to fight. Wahe worked 23 years for the Arsenal, both during and after the war, but this summer she’s going to relive the early days as she welcomes to the island any and all Rosies coming to the Quad-Cities for a national “Rosie the Riveter” convention.


Quad City Times via AP

Andy Abeyta


MOLINE, Ill.

The unheated building was freezing cold, fumes from the vehicles gave her bronchitis, and she earned 50 cents an hour.

Those are three memories Martha Wahe, 97, of Moline, has of working as a “Rosie the Riveter” at the Rock Island Arsenal during the winter of 1942 as the nation entered its second year of World War II.

“Rosie” is a moniker given to the unprecedented number of women who went to work in factories as part of the war effort, replacing men who were drafted to fight. While some Rosies did install rivets, jobs ran the gamut.

Wahe worked 23 years for the Arsenal, both during and after the war, but this summer she’s going to relive the early days as she welcomes to the island any and all Rosies coming to the Quad-Cities for a national “Rosie the Riveter” convention. The event is scheduled for June 7-9 at the Isle of Capri, Bettendorf.

Wahe is the Arsenal’s last known “Riveter,” or as they were called at the Arsenal, WOWs, for Women Ordnance Workers.

Two misconceptions about Rosies is that they were the first generation of women to work in munitions and that working outside the home was unusual. Neither is true. Women worked in factories during World War I, and Wahe had several jobs after graduating from Rock Island High School, including at Woolworth’s, a hamburger restaurant and a Singer sewing machine store.

But after marrying her husband Vern, who already had a job at the Arsenal, she hired on, too, in the summer of 1942, in the transportation department to drive shop “mules” on second shift.

“They were hiring that summer cause of course the Arsenal was growing and growing and growing,” she said in a 2012 interview conducted as an oral history project about the WWII homefront by Augustana College. “I mean they were working 24/7/365.”

A “mule” was a Jeep-like vehicle, and Wahe drove it to pick up and drop off trailers used to move supplies and parts throughout the sprawling complex.

In time, Wahe graduated to driving a forklift inside Building 299, a huge warehouse with “two railroad tracks down the middle of the building.” She helped unload the railroad cars that were stacked full of wooden boxes of supplies, such as ammunition.

In 1943, her husband joined the Navy and was sent to a PT base in Rhode Island; PT is short for patrol torpedo boat, a torpedo-armed fast attack vessel.

Wahe followed her husband in 1944, but she couldn’t just quit her job and leave.

“If you were working for anything that had to do with the war effort you couldn’t just quit the job when you wanted to and go somewhere else,” she explained in the Augustana interview. “You had to get permission. It had to be a good reason or you couldn’t get another job anywhere except in a store or something because you wouldn’t get rehired in anything to do with the war effort.”

She received permission, and her eyes still light up with pride on how she handled her journey East.

“I was a young bride … we’d only been married a year or so, and I’d never gone anywhere to speak of, and I had to take the train out there all by myself, and I had to go to Providence,” she said in the 2012 interview.

Not only did she make the 1,000-mile-plus trip, but when she arrived, she got a job at a torpedo station and found a room for her and her husband to rent.

“I did all that before I even saw my husband,” she said in 2012. “So for somebody who was really, really nervous going so far from home, I thought I did very well to get all that accomplished by myself.”

Her first job was to help pack the torpedoes, an explosive device that is launched just above or in the water. She helped load the igniter, which she describes as a filling about the thickness of the lead in a pencil. Sometimes there were accidents with small explosions, but she was never injured.

Her final job during the war was to do filing in the purchasing department.

Following the war, she and her husband returned to the Quad-Cities, and she worked at the Arsenal again in two stints, with time out to raise their two children, a boy and a girl.

Wahe is a faithful member of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Moline, and still staffs the bake sale table, known as Martha’s Kitchen, at the church fundraiser. Her specialty is sugar cookies with an Andes mint inside.

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Convention looks for more Rosies

The convention of the American Rosie the Riveter Association will be June 7-9, based at the Isle of Capri, Bettendorf, with a meeting, time to share stories, a cruise on the Celebration Belle and a tour of the Rock Island Arsenal.

Organizer Patricia Woepking wants to find and invite as many “Rosies” as she can. If you or anyone you know qualifies, please contact her at 319-212-0187 or [email protected].

Rosies didn’t work only at the Arsenal. Factories across the country were converted to the war effort, so a woman who worked at any of the Quad-City factories, from Voss Washing Machine to John Deere, qualifies.

So do other lines of work, as the association honors any woman who did what was traditionally men’s work. In addition to jobs in a factory, shipyard, and aircraft assembly, parachute or munitions plants, this would include work on a farm or railroad, in a lumber mill, or as a driver, nurse, pilot, plane spotter or canteen volunteer.

“Our goal is to honor the Rosies,” Woepking said. “This year we really want to push.” By now, the youngest Rosies are in their mid-90s, so time is of the essence.

The Arsenal does not have personnel lists from the World War II era (or any era) on file, George Eaton, chief of communications and engagement and Arsenal historian, said.

“However! When we knew they (the Rosies) were having the annual meeting here, we scrubbed the arsenal newspaper for names of our own female workers,” Eaton wrote in an email. “We officially called them Women Ordnance Workers, or WOWs. We found only one living woman, Martha Wahe.”

The national Rosie organization was founded on Dec. 7, 1998, by Frances Carter, of Birmingham, Alabama, to honor working women of World War II and to recognize and preserve their history and legacy.

Carter herself was a Rosie, working on airplanes.

Daughters of Rosies are called Rosebuds and sons are called Rivets.

More information about Rosies and the convention, go to rosietheriveter.net, or call 888-557-6743, or email [email protected]

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Who was Rosie the Riveter?

Mention “Rosie the Riveter,” and a likely image that pops to mind is the poster of a woman wearing a red polka-dot bandana with her bent arm flexed, rolling up her shirt sleeve. At the bottom are the words, “We Can Do It!”

But according to various sources, including Encyclopedia Brittanica, there was no single woman who was THE Rosie.

The “We Can Do It” poster was created in 1942 by artist J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Electric Corp.’s wartime production campaign to recruit female workers and had no association with anyone named Rosie. In fact, the poster was displayed only to Westinghouse employees, then disappeared for nearly four decades.

It was only later, in the early 1980s, that the Miller poster was rediscovered and became famous. By then the term “Rosie the Riveter” was in the popular lexicon, introduced in 1943 with the release of the song “Rosie the Riveter,” by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. Because of that, the general public assigned the name “Rosie” to the woman in the Miller poster.

Several women named Rosie have been associated with the song.

On May 29, 1943, another “Rosie” image emerged, a depiction by noted American artist Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s Rosie is muscular, wearing a blue jumpsuit and red bandana and the name “Rosie” on her lunch box. The woman was a paid model, not a riveter.

After the war, Rockwell’s image faded from public sight because of a general policy of vigorous copyright protection by his estate.

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Source: Quad City Times, https://bit.ly/2Yld3OX

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Information from: Quad-City Times, http://www.qctimes.com

This is an Illinois Exchange story shared by the Quad City Times.

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