TORPY: One of the last Rosie the Riveters tells her place in history

Lucretia Jane Tucker, who’s pushing 98 years old, paused before our interview to apply bright red lipstick. It’s a point of pride with the Rosies to look feminine and reflect the gutsy, yet womanly, visage of Rosie the Riveter of World War II fame.

Let’s start with an obscure point of history here. The iconic Rosie the Riveter image — the comely, bicep-pumping woman with a red checkered scarf and blue work suit on the “We Can Do It!” poster — wasn’t all that popular during the war.

A “Rosie” painted by the famed Norman Rockwell, which appeared on the cover of the May 29, 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, was far more well-known by Americans at the time. That Rosie, pausing to eat a sandwich with a rivet gun in her lap, was hated by the women who worked in factories, says Jane. She was too brawny, not ladylike enough.

At the time Rockwell’s drawing graced the magazine, Jane, her sister, Betty, and their mother, Iris, were on a train headed from the tiny burg of Lineville, Alabama, to Savannah, Georgia.

Opportunity was calling for the single mother and her two teenage daughters. Jane remembers the 16-hour train ride as “a wall of khaki,” as it was packed with young soldiers heading off to war. The women had to sit on their suitcases until some kindly men offered up their seats.

The Tuckers were leaving behind the poverty of Alabama to earn $1.20 an hour working in the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corp. shipyard. Jane recalls thinking that was a princely sum, as she was making $1 a day at the Five and Dime. Her mother, who made $25 a week as a switchboard operator, was escaping the embarrassment of being a divorced woman in a small town. And 16-year-old Jane was leaving behind boredom.

Credit: Lucretia Jane Tucker

Credit: Lucretia Jane Tucker

“Nothing happened in Lineville after the football season was over,” she recalled.

Upon arrival in Savannah, the Tuckers went straight to training. They learned to be welders, doing their part to build “Liberty Ships,” the 441-foot-long workhorses that transported supplies across the ocean. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a ship aficionado, called the craft “a real ugly duckling.”

The Savannah shipyard went on to build 88 ducklings and the U.S., after perfecting prefabrication, constructed 2,700 Liberties overall.

The job was six days a week, 10 hours a day. It was hard and could be dangerous. Jane worked with teams of eight to 12 women on slabs welding vertical steel walls, which were then hoisted into place by a crane. They wore heavy boots mid-calf, long-sleeve shirts, thick pants and suede gloves. If you were welding above your head, you had to wear a heavy leather jacket for protection.

And, remember, this was Savannah, where it is often sweltering.

The sudden introduction to a “manly” job gave the teen a feeling of capability, as did the 50 bucks a week.

“It was a feeling of independence, I could buy a pretty dress,” Jane told me from the living room of her apartment in Loganville, 45 minutes east of Atlanta. “It was the freedom to do what I wanted without asking. It was very empowering.”

It also helped dispel stereotypes.

Credit: National Archives

Credit: Saturday Evening Post

“We were supposed to be too emotional, not strong enough, that we would cry,” she said. “Well, we showed ’em.”

It was empowering but also sometimes embarrassing. She went to a church event in Savannah to help improve her social life but was met with indifference by the local girls after mentioning where she worked.

Oh, well. There was another outlet — USO dances in a city teeming with young soldiers and airmen.

“We felt it to be our patriotic duty to entertain those troops,” Jane said with a smile, quickly adding that they acted like “gentlemen.”

As the war ended, so did most of the factory jobs for the 6 million women who stepped up. The soldiers were returning home and would need work.

“When the war was over, the women got pushed aside; that’s how it was,” Jane told me. “Women had to give up our jobs and go home to small jobs. But we never forgot the sense of being able to be free and do what we wanted.”

After the war, she returned to Alabama to finish high school. But her two-year adventure to Savannah expanded her view of the world, her experience with different people and what might be available. She moved to Chicago to study dental hygiene and worked for more than 50 years as a dental assistant, much of that time in Rome, Georgia.

She never married and moved to Loganville four years ago to be near her niece.

In the 1990s, with the 50th anniversary of World War II, military veterans, who were then largely retired, started to gather and reflect on that long-ago era. So did the women of that time, including Jane.

“You were busy living your life, you didn’t talk about these things,” she said.

She met other Rosies, who compared notes about their days way back when, and their lives since. In 2010, the Rome newspaper profiled her and she ended up getting in touch with 15 other women. “All are gone now, except me,” she said.

Less than 60,000 of the 16 million men who served during World War II are still alive, according to one estimate. The Rosies have seen a similar dwindling.

Jane has dived into Rosiedom and often talks to schools. She will speak Tuesday at the Covington airport to the Women in Aviation group.

Next weekend, she heads to New Orleans for a Rosie the Riveter event put on by the Gary Sinise Foundation and The National WWII Museum. It commemorates the 80th anniversary of the war’s end.

“We just don’t want people to forget what we did,” she said.

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