Meet Rosie the Riveter, Rockwell’s Model, That Is

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.