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- [00:00]
A
Hello, my friends. This is Professor Jackson. A new HTDS episode is coming this Friday, May 22nd. A little early for your Memorial Day weekend, and it's a doozy. We're covering propaganda from Bob Hope to Bugs Bunny. We'll even throw in a couple broadcasts so you can hear firsthand what Americans were influenced by. In the meantime, here's a little something from our network partner odyssey. Remember how we covered Rosie the riveter in episode 205? The defining symbol of American resolve during World War II and a lasting representation of the women who powered the arsenal of democracy? I mentioned that her origins are debated, but there's a whole lot more to say. This preview of the new podcast, Family Lore, takes a closer look at a family story to try and separate the icon from the historical reality. Was Rosie an actual person? A piece of wartime propaganda or something that evolved into the legend we recognize today? Family Lore is a new series that digs into the stories we inherit to uncover what's true, what's myth, and why it matters. Enjoy.
- [01:07]
B
I want you to close your eyes or do whatever you do when you're trying to think of something visual. And I want you to come up with what you think is the most famous image from World War II. Like a photograph or a work of art. What comes to mind? I'll give you a second. Okay, maybe some of you are thinking of the photograph of the Marines hoisting up the American flag at Iwo Jima. Or maybe you're conjuring the photo of the sailor dipping the nurse in Times Square and planting a kiss on her. But there's another image that at least some of you probably thought of. Unlike the others, it's not a photo. It's a poster. It's a poster of a beautiful young woman, her hair pinned up in a red bandana with white polka dots. She's rolling up her sleeve and flexing her bicep. And above the image is a caption we can do. Might be the most famous image from World War II. Some of you might even know the name of the woman on the poster. Rosie the Riveter. Right? The poster inspired millions of women to go work in the factories and help America win the war by keeping things running on the home front. This one posterior changed the course of history. It's inspiring stuff. Except everything we think we know about that poster is wrong. I'm Lloyd Lockridge, and this is Family Lore. Normally in this podcast, we start with a family story, which takes us into some unexpected chapter of history. But in this Episode we're going to work backwards. We're going to start with the history, because first and foremost, we have some national lore to deal with, and the national lore will lead us to the family lore. That's the plan. And it wasn't really my idea. I got it from one of our guests in today's episode.
- [02:58]
C
So my name is Jim Kimball. I am professor of communication, media and the Arts at Seton hall University.
- [03:05]
B
So Dr. Kimble is an interesting guy. He's the kind of professor you'd want to have. He's endlessly curious, eloquent, engaging and just friendly. He teaches a broad range of subjects, but one of his specific areas of focus is war messaging and war propaganda, which is how he arrived at the topic of this episode, the We Can do it poster. A few years back, Jim was in the process of turning his dissertation into a book. The topic of the dissertation was war bond drives in the World War II era. Basically the government's initiative to get people to buy treasury bonds to finance the war. But as he was fact checking his work, he encountered an error.
- [03:44]
C
I was going through the proofs and I realized that there was a mistake in my draft material because I referred to the We Can do it poster as Rosie the Riveter.
- [03:57]
B
Now, most of us would not have clocked that as a mistake. The We Can do it poster, Rosie the Riveter, same thing, right? But it turns out that they're not exactly the same. Let's start out with the Rosie the Riveter part. What exactly did it mean to be a riveter?
- [04:12]
C
So During World War II, ships and planes and I think tanks were riveted together. So the person who would do that action from the outside of the structure was called the riveter.
- [04:25]
B
And normally that job was done by a man. But in World War II, the men go to war, the women go to the factory in droves and fill in as riveters. But why Rosie?
- [04:35]
C
Well, the name Rosie the Riveter was quite well known during the war, and after a while, it became synonymous with the idea of women supporting the war effort.
- [04:46]
B
Jim says the name became popular after the release of a song in 1943 called Rosie the Riveter. All the day long where the rain or shine She's a part of the assembly line she's making, making history Working for victory Rosie the Riveter keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage Sitting up there on the fuselage that little frail can do more than a male can do Rosie the Riveter Rosie, in case you didn't Catch that last lyric. It goes, that little frail can do more than a male can do. Kind of a backhanded compliment, but it was the 1940s, so we'll take it. So the song is released, it becomes a hit, and the term was just catchy.
- [05:26]
C
And I suppose because of the alliteration in the name, or maybe that song was just so popular, it became a phrase that people spoke quite a bit, a buzzword on the home front.
- [05:37]
B
And then about a year later, the iconic painter Norman Rockwell created his own rendition of Rosie the Riveter. It was an image of a woman holding a rivet gun that wound up on the COVID of the Saturday Evening Post, a very influential magazine at the time. From that point on, Rosie was a household name. And so she's almost like an Uncle Sam type character, a fictional person meant to deliver a patriotic message. Now, Professor Jim Kimball is writing his book when he realizes that he's referred to the We Can do it woman as a Rosie the Riveter. Again, you're probably thinking, what's wrong with that? Isn't she the quintessential Rosie? Well, that's precisely where this story becomes somewhat baffling.
- [06:17]
C
The We Can do it poster would have been virtually unknown during World War II. This is pretty startling for people today, because, of course, we know it. It's just about everywhere. So, you know, logically, it makes sense that it would have been everywhere during World War II, but that's not the case.
- [06:35]
B
I'm just going to let that sink in for a second. Now, obviously, the term Rosie the Riveter was known during the war, but the We Can do it poster, the thing that everybody associates with Rosie the Riveter, it would have been virtually unknown during World War II. How is that possible? It just doesn't make any sense to me. It's like someone telling you that the Gettysburg Address was actually delivered during Vietnam or that John Hancock refused to sign the Declaration of Independence. If this poster wasn't widely known during World War II, if it wasn't seen all around the country to celebrate and motivate women in factories, if it wasn't the thing that helped make Rosie the Riveter famous, then what was Was a
- [07:14]
C
Westinghouse Corporation poster, not a government poster. It was aimed at Westinghouse employees, and Westinghouse had a finite number of locations.
- [07:24]
B
In case you don't know, Westinghouse is an electrical manufacturing company that still exists today.
- [07:29]
C
So when you go back and look at the Westinghouse records, you can see that they printed generally less than 1,000 copies of their posters. They were meant for internal motiv, posted on bulletin boards within their factory sites and then replaced after two weeks. And after that, it would have been recycled, thrown away.
- [07:51]
B
So the Rosie the Riveter poster we all know was just a Westinghouse company motivational tool that got tossed after two weeks. It's unbelievable. It's funny. These. I would have bet somebody thousands of dollars that that poster was disseminated from coast to coast in World War II and was critical in galvanizing women across America to join the war effort, and that it was a huge inspiration and one of the reasons we won World War II.
- [08:24]
C
Right? Yeah. It's a common thought. Almost everything we know about that poster is wrong. From its fame during World War II to its role as a feminist icon for the World War II viewer to its property as a government poster. All wrong.
- [08:43]
B
And when Dr. Kimball says that everything we know is wrong, he doesn't just mean the general public. Even at the highest echelons of academia, everyone is wrong. Like, for example, in this article in the Harvard Business Review, the author writes, rosie the Riveter is both a romantic and heroic figure from the World War II era. Posters emblazoned with her picture became a symbol of wartime courage and patriotism. Her motto, We can do it, stirred countless women. But now we know that's not true. The poster stirred nobody, except for maybe some of the people who worked at Westinghouse. And these posters weren't even a big deal at the Westinghouse Corporation. They threw them up on the wall for two weeks and then threw them away. Well, most of them were thrown away. A few prints made it all the way from the Westinghouse Corporation to the National Archives, not because the image was iconic or important, but because the artist who created them, a guy named J. Howard Miller, sold a few prints to the archives. He made $75 on the sale. So this begs the question. If the We Can do it poster wasn't famous during World War II, then when and how did it become famous?
- [09:54]
C
The We Can do it poster resurges into fame in the 1980s because that was the era of the Reagan budget cuts. And the budget cuts forced elements of the government to figure out ways to raise extra money or to cut corners. The National Archives had one of only two remaining copies of that poster. And at some point, somebody in the National Archives said, okay, let's go back into the vault. Let's see what we have. What can we monetize? What can we put on T shirts? What can we put on coffee cups? And it's about 1983 or 1984 that you start to see the National Archives producing that as a souvenir, and then it starts to take off from that point.
- [10:40]
B
So it was basically a merchandising?
- [10:41]
C
Absolutely. The we can do it image probably surges into fame for merchandising. It's a capitalist enterprise
- [10:51]
B
and that's why the poster is famous. It was a merchandising effort to make up for lost revenue as Ronald Reagan made budget cuts in the 1980s. So how does this happen? How does everybody misunderstand the history of something so high profile? Well, Professor Kimball has a theory behind this global misconception, and it comes from an unlikely text, Winnie the Pooh.
- [11:16]
C
A.A. milne, in one of his many Pooh stories, has an interesting one that features Pooh and Piglet walking through the woods and they're just innocently traipsing along, leaving tracks in the snow. And at a certain point they encounter another pair of tracks and they think this is suspicious and they walk a little bit further and they see even more tracks and. And they start to become alarmed. And for some reason they start talking about this idea of woozles, that there might be a pack of woozles out there and they might be dangerous. So they start to get nervous and yet more and more tracks appear the further they walk. And eventually Christopher Robin shows up and explains to them they've been walking in a circle, the tracks are their own and they've taken them as evidence of woozles, when in fact it was just their own footsteps.
- [12:15]
B
This woozle parable isn't just a story that's been told in the Hundred Acre Wood. It's actually been used by scholars to explain deeply rooted misconceptions in academic research and popular history. The way it works is somebody says something authoritatively, but what they're saying is based on a flawed argument. Someone repeats that assertion, but they soften the flaw and a third person repeats the assertion again, leaving out the flaw entirely. Now, it's a seemingly factual statement with no trace of the inaccurate underlying claim.
- [12:46]
C
But if you followed those claims back in time, just as you might follow your footsteps in the forest back in time, as Pooh and Piglet could have done, you'll eventually see they are really your own footsteps. They're just people repeating the same thing over and over again, right?
- [13:03]
B
You trace it back to the original error, to the.
- [13:05]
C
Yes, to the, er, source.
- [13:07]
B
You might say, remember in the beginning when I said we'd be working Backwards. Well, this is why the idea that the We Can do it poster was a popular image during World War II is a woozle. The notion exists only in our imagination, but that's not where the story ends. Now we have to retrace the steps of the woozle. And when you do that, you find there's much more to the story. Because contained within the frame of the We Can do it poster is an even more interesting and elusive woozle. I hope people aren't too disappointed that the We Can do it poster had no role in World War II and is only famous because the National Archives was strapped for cash. But here's the thing. Even though the poster wasn't famous during the war, it still represents the tremendous impact that women had on the home front. While the poster wasn't really seen by anybody, its imagery, its message is accurate. And today, the We Can do it poster really is an important symbol for women empowerment. And while it didn't inspire millions during the war, it has certainly inspired millions since.
- [14:27]
C
The We Can do it poster is absolutely one of the most famous images of all time. I would put it right up there in terms of just plain recognition value with the Mona Lisa. I've given presentations about the We Can do it poster in places across the world, and people recognize it instantly.
- [14:46]
B
And as the We Can do it poster became what you might call a household image, a backstory began to take shape. It turns out the woman in the poster was based on a real person, a woman who was photographed while working at a lathe, which is a tool used for shaping metal and wood and other things. The photo is known as the Woman at the Lathe. It shows a young, beautiful woman with delicate features. Red lipstick, dark defined eyebrows leaning gracefully over a lathe. She's wearing a denim jumpsuit and her hair is wrapped up in a polka dot bandana. She's not flexing or anything like that. It's just an evocative photograph of what was seen as a remarkable juxtaposition. A beautiful young lady working in a factory. And it is believed that the photo was used by J. Howard Miller to create the We Can do it poster. And for about 40 years, nobody knew the identity of the woman at the lathe. Well, one day in the 1980s, as the poster was becoming world famous, a woman in Michigan named Geraldine Hoff Doyle was at home thumbing through an old magazine.
- [15:46]
C
She is looking at a copy of Modern Maturity magazine, and she's looking through a photo montage of women from World War II. So it's celebration of women workers during the war. And she sees one of these pictures that absolutely stuns her because she thinks it's her. And she digs out some old photos of herself from the war years, and. And she compares them, and it really does look a lot like her.
- [16:15]
B
Geraldine Hoff Doyle happened to have some friends in the local media, and they wrote about this fascinating discovery that Geraldine was the woman at the lathe, which inspired the We Can do it poster. Geraldine was the model for an iconic image.
- [16:34]
C
And in this era of the Internet, it got repeated over and over again. And eventually she became so well known that she would appear at parades holding up an image of the poster. She received fan mail from kids. They admired her for what she had done during the war. She was recognized by the Michigan Senate. She became a member of the Michigan Women's hall of Fame. And by all accounts, she enjoyed being semi famous for this role.
- [17:02]
B
And when Jim encountered this backstory, it was not considered a theory, it was a matter of fact. But at this point in his research, Jim took nothing for granted.
- [17:12]
C
I started to encounter more and more stories about Doyle and her claim to be the woman in the poster. And it occurred to me, if almost everything we think we know about the We Can do it poster is based on some kind of myth, how do we know that Doyle was the woman in that poster? And you know what? If it's Geraldine Doyle, great, Then her story's right. But if it's someone else, then I've really got something that people need to know about.
- [17:41]
B
So Jim set out to verify that Doyle was, in fact, the woman in the We Can do it poster. And his first step was laying out Doyle's own logic behind the claim.
- [17:50]
C
And so, in Doyle's reasoning that she was the woman in the poster, you had three different images. You had her photographs of herself from the 1940s. You had the mysterious photograph of the woman at the lathe in Modern Maturity magazine. And she reasoned that if she was, in fact the person in the woman at the lathe photograph, and that photograph thereafter inspired the artist to create the We Can do it poster, Then, by a sort of transitive property, she was the woman in the poster.
- [18:23]
B
So his job was simple. All he had to do was prove or disprove that Geraldine Hoff Doyle was the woman at the lathe. But simple is not the same thing as easy. At that point, all he had to go on was that people thought the photo was a UPI photo. UPI is a newswire service that provides news materials, including photos to Thousands of news outlets around the world. In other words, this was a really shitty clue.
- [18:49]
C
And what I ultimately resorted to doing was looking for an original version of the photograph. That is one that was printed in the 1940s in a magazine or a newspaper. I thought, if I can find an outlet that published it, maybe it'll have a caption and tell me who it was. That was simply me going page by page through old issues of Life magazine and Colliers and Time and Fortune and you name it, any publication from the war years that carried photographs. I was looking through it, and it was a lengthy process, as you can imagine.
- [19:28]
B
Yeah, very tedious.
- [19:32]
C
Tedious.
- [19:33]
B
And I'm. I mean, you got a nice panoramic education of wartime photographs, I guess, along the way.
- [19:41]
C
Absolutely. And I will tell you that the worst moments in a search this long, you. You have moments of despair. Will I ever find what I'm looking for? But even worse were moments when, if you're in a university library and you're looking at a bound copy of Life magazine, you know that students have looked at that hundreds of times over the years and put it back on the shelf. Some of them have ripped out pages. And so if you're going, okay, page 100, page 102, page 106, you start to think maybe it was that page,
- [20:19]
B
and you have to go on knowing that it might all be for naught.
- [20:22]
C
Yeah, there were points when I thought I would never find my way out.
- [20:25]
B
I have to say, I feel for Professor Kimball. I do a lot of research for work, and I've been on my fair share of wild goose chases, and it's hard to know when to give up. All I know for sure is that I would have stopped a lot earlier than Professor Kimball. This guy looked through old magazines and newspapers for two and a half years before he had his first breakthrough. He was leafing through old issues of New York Times Magazine while checking his
- [20:49]
C
voicemail, when mid message, the woman in the lathe photograph appeared Right. In the New York Times Magazine. And it was interesting because they had reversed her. She was no longer facing to the left. She was facing to the right, but it was definitely her. But to my immense frustration, there was no caption telling me who she was. It was simply. It was an array of photographs dedicated to the different kinds of hats or headgear that women were wearing in the factories.
- [21:22]
B
But even though there wasn't a caption, there was another clue that might lead Jim to the owner of the photo. Remember Jim's entire strategy at this point Was based on the photo being a UPI photo.
- [21:34]
C
Everyone says today that it was upi, but. But the New York Times magazine said ap, and I read ap, and I went, that's not the same as upi. Something is off here. But then I went to the Associated Press archives. They didn't have anything. So I thought that was a dead end as well.
- [21:52]
B
So after two and a half years of work, Jim learned that the UPI photo was actually an AP photo. But when he called ap, they didn't know what he was talking about. That's what we're calling a breakthrough. But he was really between a rock and a hard place. He's investigating the we can do it woman. What's he supposed to do? Give up? If I were Professor Kimball, I would have felt very trapped. But that's not how he felt. The professor has a gift for identifying clues. When he found the captionless photo in the old issue of the New York Times magazine, it was connected to a piece that focused on what women were wearing in the factories.
- [22:26]
C
That New York Times magazine array of photographs had made me think of fashion. Maybe there was a story on fashion that might have featured this photograph. And that led me to an article in Time magazine in early 1942 that featured a photograph that instantly arrested my attention. There was something about it. And as I looked at it and I looked at it, I realized this might be the same way. Woman. The woman at the lathe, but in a different pose and at a different machine.
- [23:04]
B
Kimball rushed out of his office and immediately showed the photo to his colleagues. After four years of solitary research, it's a good idea to get a fresh perspective.
- [23:12]
C
Is this the same woman? Do you think this is the same woman? Over and over again. And everyone agreed this was the same woman. Same clothes, same shoes, same headgear.
- [23:21]
B
So Jim scanned the new photograph onto his computer. The one of the woman at the lathe. Except it was a different photo. She is no longer at the lathe. And he did a simple reverse image search on Google, and sure enough, there was a company selling original prints. So Jim called him up. He requested the photo of the woman not at the lathe and asked them if they had one of the same woman at the lathe.
- [23:42]
C
It looks like it may be the same woman. That's the one I really want. And they found it, and they sold me both of them.
- [23:53]
B
A few weeks later, Jim received the photos. After five years, he was holding the original print of the woman at the lathe. And on the back of one photo was a Note card. First of all, the note card indicated that the photo was distributed by Acme Press, a newswire service that covered World War II and went defunct in 1951. That's where the AP came from. Not the ubiquitous Associated Press, but the obscure and extinct Acme Press. Under that, more information was scribbled on the card. The photo was taken in Alameda, California. That's an awfully long way from Michigan, where Geraldinehoff Doyle was from. And the picture was taken in 1942, which is before Doyle ever worked in a factory. And then there was a name.
- [24:41]
C
Naomi Parker. No one had ever heard of that name in association with Rosie the Riveter. So I knew I had something.
- [24:48]
B
Naomi Parker. So the next thing Jim did was contact a genealogy service to help him figure out who Naomi Parker was, where she lived, what she did, and when she died. The genealogy service helped him with some initial details. But then suddenly, they stopped.
- [25:03]
C
They said, we have to apologize because we have to stop doing research on Naomi Parker. And the reason is that we have a rule in genealogical societies that we can't perform research on people who are still alive.
- [25:19]
B
She was still alive, 94 years old and living with her sister, Win, on 10 acres of land near Redding, California. So Professor Kimball tracked down their phone number and gave Naomi a call. And so you get a hold of the person that you've been looking for all these years, you didn't know who you were looking for for most of it, but now you do, and you've got her name, and. And you get her on the phone. Where do you begin? With Ms. Parker?
- [25:49]
C
We had two conversations. The first was a disaster. By this point in her life, Naomi was extremely hard of hearing. We weren't able to have a conversation. And she hung up on me. That was a problem. And it took me about a week or two to gather up my courage to try again. And this time, I got her sister on the phone, and her sister was. Was fine on the phone. And the first thing that I said was, my name is Jim. I'm a historian. I want to talk about Alameda Naval Air Station. And that was the key.
- [26:30]
B
A few weeks later, Dr. Kimball was in California on his way to Naomi and Wynn's home. He stopped by a grocery store and picked up some flowers.
- [26:38]
C
I knocked on their door, and there they were. This was the woman at the lathe and her sister who ushered me into their home. And we had, I would say, not a very lengthy conversation. You know, they were in their 90s, but I was there a good 20 or 25 minutes.
- [26:55]
B
And in those 25 minutes, Jim laid out his research. His surprising fact checking error with the We can do it poster had led him to the woman at the lathe, which everyone believed to be Geraldine Hoff Doyle in Michigan. Jim seemed to be the only person skeptical of that claim. And after five years, he had finally proven that it was in fact Naomi.
- [27:14]
C
And it turns out that she knew this already. She and her sister had been to a reunion of Rosie's in the Bay Area a couple of years previously, and they had seen an installation that featured the woman at the lathe photograph. And the caption indicated that the woman's name was Geraldine Hoff Doyle of Michigan. But Naomi knew it was her. She even had a clipping of it from an original publication in the Oakland newspaper back in 1942. And she tried to get the record corrected. But by that point, the Woozle, you might say, was so powerful that. That she was simply seen as a crank. This woman thinks it's her, when obviously it's Geraldinehoff Doyle. Everyone says so, and all the Internet says so, too. So she was asking for advice on what she should do.
- [28:09]
B
So Jim asked for permission to contact a journalist friend of his, someone at the Omaha World Herald who had written some articles about World War II imagery. Naomi agreed. An article which included an interview with Naomi was published, and Jim's research was on full display. It was now a verifiable fact that Naomi Parker was the real woman at the lathe.
- [28:30]
C
And he asked Naomi, how does it feel to finally get your identity back? And she said over and over again, victory, victory, victory.
- [28:46]
B
In 2018, not long after she was recognized as the Weekend do it woman, Naomi Parker Fraley passed away. Before her passing, she had been featured in numerous articles celebrating her role as a Rosie the Riveter. But the We Can do it poster and the photograph that inspired it was literally a snapshot of Naomi. And I wanted to know more about her. And with Professor Kimball's help, we were able to get in touch with some folks who could tell us a lot more about Naomi Parker. Could you please tell me your names?
- [29:16]
D
My name is Joel Blankenship. I'm the son of Naomi Parker.
- [29:21]
E
And I'm Marnie Blankenship, her daughter in law.
- [29:44]
B
So somehow our story has led us to Naomi Parker. The poster wasn't what we thought it was. The woman in the poster wasn't who we thought she was. But now we've retraced the Woozle's footprints and arrived at the truth. There is no Woozle. Only Naomi Parker. And that revelation has led us to the family lore part of the story. Although it's not really lore, it's simply the truth. Naomi Parker was the woman at the lathe, but who was she? The image of the we can do it woman is iconic, larger than life. She's a superhero. When you look at the poster, you don't think, I wonder who that is. Because you probably thought it was just a generic rendering of a woman. But it's not. She's a real person, and I wanted to know more about her. Who was the woman who came to personify the phrase we can do it? For that, we sat down with Joe and Marnie Blankenship, Naomi's son and daughter in law. And the first question I had was, how did she end up in this factory in the first place?
- [30:42]
D
Mom. When the war broke out, my grandpa said, you got to do something for the war effort. So my mom and Naomi and her sister Win went to work in Alameda Naval Station. And the way that this whole thing came about with her picture was that Alameda, the. The newspaper in this city there went to the naval station and they took a picture of a woman working on a machine, which happened to be my mom.
- [31:13]
B
And the newspaper was there for a specific reason. They were writing a piece on how women had to adopt different kinds of attire in order to work in these factories.
- [31:22]
D
And the whole point of the Navy department was trying to deglamorize women. They didn't want all these, you know, skirts and dresses and stuff and loose, flowing things.
- [31:33]
E
It wasn't all the men that were gone. There were plenty of men still working in those naval stations, but they didn't want the women to become a distraction. So you had to wear low shoes, flat shoes, not heels. Wear pants, not skirts. Don't bring jewelry, no bling. When you're working among the men at these naval places.
- [31:56]
B
So being dressed all tough in the denim jumpsuit with the bandana on her head wasn't just to protect all the Rosies working in factories from a riveting gun or a saw. It was also to protect them from the wandering eyes of the men they were working with. Jo and Marnie also told me that the women were forbidden from wearing heels and jewelry or bling, as she puts it, but they were allowed to keep one feminine touch. Lipstick. What was her shade of lipstick?
- [32:21]
E
It was usually a dark pink or red. Yeah, yeah, she liked that red lipstick. Red lipstick was important during the war. That was because Hitler hated it. And American women picked it up as oh, we're gonna wear it then.
- [32:36]
B
I did not know this.
- [32:37]
E
Yeah. A lot of women wore red lipstick during the war because Hitler hated it.
- [32:42]
B
Really?
- [32:43]
E
Oh, yeah.
- [32:44]
B
That's awesome. This is true, by the way. Red lipstick was among the many things that Hitler hated, and women wore it despite him. In England, when taxes made lipstick prohibitively expensive, women smeared beet juice on their lips. But back to the final and probably the most iconic piece of the ensemble, the red polka dot bandana.
- [33:05]
D
And her little bandana she wore. The spotted red bandana became famous was she got that at Woolworths when. Which was in those days called a five and dime.
- [33:15]
B
The bandana seen around the world, purchased at Woolworths for upwards of 10 cents. And that's the breakdown of the iconic we can do it ensemble. So Naomi Parker was a typical Rosie the Riveter type figure. She joined the war effort out of a sense of civic duty. She worked in the factory repairing airplanes and doing whatever else needed to be done. She served her country. And then after the war was won, she went about her life. But for Naomi Parker, the spirit of we can do it doesn't end with the war. It continues because her first marriage to Joe's father was challenging.
- [33:51]
D
My dad was an alcoholic, and dad would not come home on a Friday night. And when he did, he'd be drunk and no money for the week. And she couldn't rely on this guy.
- [34:02]
B
One night, Naomi made fried chicken for dinner. She and Joe ate, but Joe's dad still hadn't come home from work.
- [34:08]
D
And she leaves the fried chicken on the stove in the frying pan with the oil. The old man comes home, he takes a pan, puts it on the kitchen table, sits down, passes out, falls face first down in this pan of chicken and oil. And she walks in the kitchen and picks up his head and looks at him, and he just says, oh, my God, and just dropped his head back into splash. And he's going gurgle, gurgle. So mom and him were always splitting up. I mean, my favorite thing from mom would say, jody, pack your bags. We're leaving. So mom would wait till dad would go to work sometimes, and off we'd go. And in those days, generally the women didn't have a car, so we were taking the bus or the train or what have you. And so it was just a lot of moving.
- [34:57]
B
It's important to remember that Naomi is going off on her own to raise her son. In the 1950s, by 1950, women had had the right to vote for just 30 years. Banks could stop you from opening an account or securing a loan explicitly because you were a woman. Naomi would have faced enormous pressure socially and economically to stay with her husband. But she'd had enough. And off they went.
- [35:21]
D
And we were so broke. She said, jodi, she used to call me that. We have enough money for dinner or enough money for me to get a clock so that I can get to work on time. So she said, what's it going to be? I said, oh, I guess a clock, Mom.
- [35:37]
B
And now that Naomi and Joe were on their own, Naomi had to find a reliable line of work.
- [35:41]
E
Well, what. What she ended up doing was becoming a. A server.
- [35:48]
D
Yeah.
- [35:49]
E
In, like, nightclubs and restaurants and things like that. And so that's a job that you could get no matter where you went. And tips was why Joe and her had meals that night. A lot of times she was just
- [36:03]
D
a go getter, and. And she was very. Had a very fiery temper. One time in Las Vegas, she's working, I think at the Sands, and some guy pinched her on the bottom, and she. She was delivering soup. So she put it over his head. Yeah, she was. Yeah. She didn't like. She didn't like.
- [36:22]
B
She dumped the soup on his head.
- [36:24]
D
Right on his head. Yeah. So she was. She was very fiery. She didn't take any guff from any man.
- [36:31]
B
It was a tough life. But Naomi didn't make excuses or cut corners. She raised Joe down to the smallest details.
- [36:38]
D
I mean, she was. She was an amazing lady. This woman taught me to shake hands. Listen to that. Not the dad. My mom. She's. Whatever you do, do not do what she called a limp fish handshake. You shake a hand, and you shake it firmly like you mean it. Yes, Mom. Okay, that was Mom.
- [37:03]
B
At this point in the story, I wasn't really expecting any more surprises, but this aspect caught me off guard. Naomi was the inspiration for one of the most famous women's empowerment icons in history. And the icon references the work women did during the war. But it's the work that women did after the war. In this case, the hard, thankless job of being a working single mother, that strikes me as even more powerful. For me, this casts Rosie in a slightly different light. She's not just driving rivets into the side of an airplane. She's dumping bowls of soup on the heads of handsy men and teaching her son the art of a firm grip. The woman on the poster could not have asked for a better model. All that being said, Naomi always took great pride in what she and her other female factory workers accomplished during the war. And in 2011, she and her sister Win attended a conference celebrating women who served on the home front during World War II.
- [37:56]
D
So mom and Aunt Win went to a Rosie the Riveter.
- [38:00]
E
A reunion.
- [38:01]
D
A reunion? Yeah, in California. So they see this great big picture on the wall of the newspaper article that mom was in. And there was another lady's picture name on the picture. Mom goes, well, that's me.
- [38:15]
B
What.
- [38:15]
D
What are you doing with it? What's going on here? They said, well, you're going to have to prove it. So she was just so confused by that. And. And that was it. They sent the newspaper article, and the lady said, well, it's not enough. We don't believe it. So, Mom.
- [38:28]
E
So they just put it down and forgot it. Didn't think about it.
- [38:31]
D
Yeah. Oh, well, she's so.
- [38:32]
B
Well, what she didn't know is that right after she had this dispute with the Rosie the Riveter people, a professor back in New Jersey named Jim Kimball was about to dedicate five years to proving Naomi right. And in 2016, he arrived with the proof. Naomi and her sister Win were delighted to have the name corrected, but they weren't too taken by the fame associated with the We Can do it poster. And neither was Joe.
- [38:55]
D
Yeah, to me, she's famous because she's my mom.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah.
- [38:59]
D
You know, I don't care. I don't care what she did, but what she did for me, what she did for the family and how she was, that's what makes my mom famous.
- [39:12]
B
When People magazine came to her home to do an exclusive interview, Naomi hoped to use it as an opportunity to deliver a positive message. But when the interview was published, Naomi felt she had more to say. So she decided to gather her thoughts and write them down in what she called a letter to young people. In it, she says things like, you have a long life ahead, and it's your right to choose the road that you wish to walk on. And you are uniquely created. There's no other one created exactly like you. You're an individual mold, and you have your very own talents and gifts. And this is what I love about this story. For most of her very long life, Naomi had no idea that she was the woman at the lathe. And she was completely unaware of her role in the We Can do it poster. But coincidentally, perhaps, she lived a life that exemplified the spirit of We can do it, a life in which challenges were conquered through toughness, grace, and perseverance. It's almost like Naomi and Rosie the Riveter were twins, separated at birth. Later in life they meet, and despite being raised apart, they discover that they're incredibly similar. And I think Naomi captures the essential message of both her and her twin Rosie, in the final line of her letter to young people. Set a goal for yourself, large or small, and pursue it. It will give you security and it will also cause you to be fulfilled. You are a treasure and the world awaits you with love, respect and admiration. Naomi, Thank you for listening to Family Lore.