She was a pretty 19-year-old girl with a shock of red hair living in Arlington, VT, a small New England town. Her mother ran the first telephone switchboard, there. Nearby was an artist’s studio. “That’s how I met Norman Rockwell,” Mary Doyle Keefe, told me, relating how she was chosen as his model for women working in factories all over the country fabricating weapons for the military. Japanese planes had savaged Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941. America was at war. Men and women, in a display of unity, rushed to enlist in our various armed forces. America was both an industrial giant, and a rural country of small towns and family farms. Most of the farmers’ daughters — and their sons — had never been more than 40 miles from home. Mary Doyle was no exception. “I often stopped in to see my mother and would run into Mr. Rockwell. One day he asked me to pose for him.” He told Keefe he was painting a picture of a woman in a war plant holding a riveter. With so many men in the armed forces fighting on two fronts, we were running out of workers to make guns, tanks, and hundreds of other items needed by the military. So Roosevelt and his advisors decided to recruit women, despite naysayers who said you couldn’t train a woman to use a pair of pliers. They were wrong. Millions of women joined the work force and America produced weapons and tools and trucks. But I’m came getting ahead of myself. To attract women to the burgeoning work force, the administration needed to sell the idea. A painting by Norman Rockwell was just the ticket. His illustrations were featured regularly on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, widely distributed throughout the country.Keefe told me that Rockwell typically paid a model he painted $5. “But he paid me $10,” she said triumphantly. Why? “Because the first time I showed up with saddle shoes and a white blouse. He sent me back to get my penny loafers and a blue work shirt!” The painting appeared on the May 29,1943, cover of the magazine and stirred thousands of women to action. It was used by the Treasury Department to sell war bonds.And the woman in the painting was immediately immediately dubbed “Rosie the Riveter.” “Did you ever use a riveter?” I asked the onetime war bond saleswoman.She held up one of the early copies of the painting. “As you can see,” she said, “the woman in the painting is holding an extra large riveter in her lap, eating a ham sandwich in the other, and has the muscles of a wrestler. My right foot is stamping on a copy of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’ ” What happened? “Rockwell fiddled and fiddled with my picture until he turned me into a girl that fit his description of a strong factory worker.” She paused for a moment before I could ask the inevitable question. “And I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t complain. Some years later he sent me a nice letter apologizing for changing my appearance so drastically but said it was necessary.” A short while later Rockwell painted four men, each symbolizing one of the four freedoms. The President praised the paintings, and they and “Rosie the Riveter” were posted all across the country helping to sell war bonds. And perhaps more important, they helped induce 18-million women to leave farms and homes and work in war industries. So what did our “Riveter” do next? “I married an Army captain, worked as a dental hygienist and raised a large family,” On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, she and her husband were invited to appear on the Jay Leno show. At the same time a “Rosie the Riveter /World War II Home Front National Park” was dedicated in Richmond, CA. It’s no surprise that the early posters become icons. “Did you receive any money from the sale of the posters?” I asked. “Not at all. I was happy the Rosie image helped the war effort.” Once, when Keefe was at the Big E honoring the Rosie image, “a woman took one look at the riveter in the poster and told me I was real strong to hold and use one of those machines. Fact is I never saw a riveter like that.” A few weeks back, a very large party was held in the banquet room of the McLean Retirement village in Simsbury, where Keefe now lives in an airy apartment. She moved to Connecticut eight years ago from her New Hampshire home to be close to a daughter, Mary Ellen Keefe, living in Granby. The party celebrated her 90th birthday. Four children, plus grandchildren and great grandchildren were there to wish her well. As an epilogue: Yes, the original poster painted by Norman Rockwell sold at a Sotheby’s auction for nearly $6 million. “I was invited to be at the auction house, and I was shocked someone would pay so much. But then I guess I really was glad.” Since then it has been sold again for even more. Freelance writer Barnett Laschever, longtime resident of Goshen, now lives with his wife, Dolores, in the McLean Retirement village and is a neighbor of Rosie the Riveter.
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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