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Park Honors WWII's Rosies

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By MICHELLE LOCKE, The Associated Press

Published: December 30, 2007

RICHMOND, Calif. - Fog drifts over the old shipyard, casting a veil over the shoulders of empty factories where thousands of women once thronged, welding and hammering and typing and filing as they put a lipsticked smile on the face of the war at home.

This is Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historic Park, a sprawling tribute to the sacrifices of a generation located in what was once a wartime boomtown on the shores of San Francisco Bay.

As recounted in Ken Burns' recent documentary "The War," which details the impact of the war boom on cities including nearby Sacramento, Northern California was as swept up in the home front mobilization as any region of the country.

"There is no more charged period in history - hate, love, fear, despair, everything that goes along with a human emotion is just heightened during a period of war. No one was left untouched by this experience," says Lucy Lawliss, a National Park Service landscape architect who is among the people working to establish the park.

The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter is of a cheerful, blonde housewife. But many Rosies didn't fit that image.

For Betty Reid Soskin, a black woman living in the San Francisco Bay area when World War II broke out, life on the home front meant confusion and change.

Workers, male and female, were recruited from across the country to work in the shipyards, including people from states where blacks and whites would not be sharing drinking fountains for another 20 years.

Soskin went to work, too, keeping clerical records for the segregated union set up for black shipyard workers.

These days, Soskin tells stories, her own and others', as a community outreach worker for the Rosie the Riveter park.

The Richmond shipyards produced 747 ships, an enormous effort that required round-the-clock shifts.

Mary Head worked with the welders, knocking off the rough surfaces and priming paint for the next step of construction.

She remembers the work as "greasy and dirty and cold. Honey, it was cooold," she says, drawing out the vowels.

The Rosie the Riveter park is a work in progress. A memorial walkway, flanked by metal structures meant to evoke the hull of a ship, was dedicated in 2000. Park officials also were allotted space in a refurbished Ford assembly plant. They hope to open an exhibit there soon.

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