Rosie the Riveters!

They Did it!
“All the day long, whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line.
She’s making history, working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.”
“Rosie The Riveter”

Words and Music by Redd Evans & John Jacob Loeb Published 1942

Agnes Moore – 98 – Journeyman Welder 1942-1945
Determined to do something for the war effort and support her young child, Agnes
became a certified welder, hiring on at the Kaiser Shipyard #3 in Richmond, CA.
Before her Graveyard shift, Agnes would drop her daughter off at a 24-hour
childcare center. There, the child would sleep all night, wake up in the morning to
be fed and dressed before being sent off to preschool.

Phyllis Gould – 96 – Journeyman Welder 1942-1945
Phyllis was living in Richmond, CA on Dec., 7, 1941, when she & her husband heard
the radio broadcast announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor. When her husband
said he wanted to learn welding, Phyllis said “me too.” Formerly rejected by the
Union because she was a woman, she was one of the first women to be hired at
Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards, building deck houses in Pre-Fab. Her husband’s
mindset that ‘only men bring home the bacon’ couldn’t hold this Rosie down.

Kay Morrison – 95 – Journeyman Welder 1943-1945
Kay married her high school sweetheart when she was a junior in high school. After
graduation, she and her husband left Chico, CA., to find wartime work in the Bay
Area. They found housing in San Francisco, which meant a 45 minute ferry-boat
ride to their Graveyard shift in Richmond, where they worked together at Kaiser
Shipyard #2. He was a shipwright and she was a Journeyman Welder.

Marian Sousa – 92 – Draftsman 1943-1944
Marian came from Oregon to Richmond, CA for a summer job to care for her sister
Phyllis’ son. She decided to stay & enrolled in the local high school, graduating in
June 1943. Following a 6-week engineering drawing class at U.C. Berkeley, Marian
was hired at Kaiser Shipyard #3 to make adjustments on ship blueprints. Kaiser
Shipyards became a family business as her 2 sisters and mother also worked there.

Mae Krier -- 92 – Riveter 1943-1945
At the age of 17, Mae left her home in North Dakota to find work in Seattle, taking
two weeks of training to become a Riveter at the Boeing Company. Mae helped
build the Five Grand, Boeing's 5,000th B-17 plane since the war began! All the
workers got to paint their names on the plane and help push it out on the tarmac.
“In 1944, I met a sailor on the dance floor and we danced our way through life”, she
says of her late husband Norman.

Marian Wynn – 91 – Pipe Welder 1944-1945
After graduating from high school in Minnesota, she traveled to Richmond, CA to
join her father, an electrician leadman in the Kaiser Shipyards. Marian got a job as a
pipe welder in Shipyard #3, working in the West Storage area, where pipes were
brought for her to weld. She and her father lived in a trailer park where she met
her future husband, the son of the trailer park’s managers and were married for 60
years before his passing.