Keith Long
Fort Collins, CO
Category: Working Women

My grandmother, Vernel Bossman (Bethel), worked in the Navy Shipyards in the San Francisco Bay area during World War Two. Born in 1925 on an Indian Reservation in the Muskogee, Oklahoma area, she was one of thirteen children. It was mainly swampy, poor land. After large oil and gas deposits were discovered there, the tribe was moved to a new Reservation in the Selma, California area. This completed their last move on the Trail of Tears, which had started long ago in Florida. California presented new challenges. Some of her siblings died due to disease or accidents in the workplace, and did not make it to adulthood. Not wanting to be next one to reach a similar fate, she left the Reservation at 15 years old, and made it to San Francisco. There was demand for laborers in the shipyards there. She lied about her age, and began work there as a welder. They would repair vessels that had come in off the Pacific Ocean. I came to learn of this when I asked what these several large, oval-sized white scars were on her thighs. She said that they were burns from dripping, hot slag from overhead welding, and recounted the tale. She met my grandfather there, an Army man. They married, and shared over 50 years of wedded life together. She still lives, and splits her time between West Battle Lake, Minnesota in the summer, and Mesa, Arizona in the winter.

Carolyn Conarroe
Longmont, CO
Category: Working Women

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is near the small town of New Carlisle, Ohio, where I lived. In the summer of 1944, when I was between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked in Materiel Headquarters on Patterson Field. I was a typist and there were letters and reports to be sent to Supply Depots around the country. These documents had multiple carbon copies and the fewer the errors the fewer carbons to correct. I learned quickly.

Supply Depots, which reported to Headquarters, kept inventories of equipment and supplies vital to the Air Force, from plane repair parts, items of clothing for the airmen, and equipment for fighting the war, down to nuts and bolts. Patterson Field had a record of every item in the inventory and our office managed records and correspondence about those records. It was a routine job but necessary for the war effort and I was pleased to be able to have the job.

Two airmen who had returned from their deployment were assigned to our office while waiting for discharge papers from the service. Eventually one of them asked me for a date. Of course I said I would have to ask my mother. Somehow that date was never worked out. Before long they were out of the service and headed for home and I was back in high school.

Linda
Fort Collins, CO
Category: Working Women

I phone my eighty-eight-year-old mother most weekends and journal her memories for my family and my writing.

Recently she said, "I saw a news program about some women taken up in airplanes they'd worked on during World War II. I didn't know those women were called 'Rosie the Riveter.'"

Her memories began to surface and she told me the "rest of the story."

My father enlisted in the army when I was about four. He left us in Chicago and trained at Fort Knox. Even though my twenty-three-year-old mother had little education and no work experience she decided to help in the war effort. She left me with my grandfather and rode a bus to Douglas Aircraft every day for about eight months.

In one job she washed motor parts before they were assembled. Eventually, she trained to be a riveter.

Training taught her to handle metal, riveters, drills and welders. To demonstrate her abilities, she was required to choose and complete a project. She fashioned a ring for my father out of propeller metal.

Once trained, she and a partner helped assemble war planes—B29 and B24 bombers. First, she worked as the riveter from the outside while the other woman worked on the inside capping the rivet end. Occasionally, she traded places. She and her partner tapped a code on the plane's metal side to communicate what needed to be done.

At the end of her story, she exclaimed, "I guess I was a 'Rosie the Riveter.'"