The Real Rosie

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And if it's not too late, it's not even in the beginning. Yet, start an Alfanta.com. 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 for World War II, like a photograph for 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 Iwojima, 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 her 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 it. It 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 poster 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. So my name is Jim Kimbell, I am professor of communication, media, and the arts at Seaton Hall University.

So Dr. Kimbell is an interesting guy. 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 that 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. I was going through the proofs, and I realized that there was a mistake in my draft material, because I had referred to the Weekenduit poster as Rosie the Riveter. Now most of us would not have clocked that as a mistake.

The Weekenduit poster, Rosie the Riveter, same thing. 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?

“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. 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 and draws and fill in as riveters. But why Rosie?

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. Jim says the name became popular after the release of a song, in 1943 called Rosie the Riveter. So the song is released, it becomes a hit, and the term was just catchy. And I suppose because of the illiteration 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. 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 cover of the Saturday evening post, a very influential magazine at the time.

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. 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.

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

dress 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 and factories, if it wasn't the thing that

“helped make Rosie the Riveter famous, then what was it?”

It was a Westinghouse corporation poster, not a government poster, it was aimed at Westinghouse employees and Westinghouse had a finite number of locations. In case you don't know, Westinghouse is an electrical manufacturing company that still exists today. 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 from internal motivation, posted on bulletin boards within their factory sites, and then replaced after two weeks, and after that it would have been recycled thrown away. So the Rosie the Riveter poster, we all know, was just a Westinghouse company motivational

tool that got tossed after two weeks. It's funny, 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. Yeah, it's a common thought, almost everything we know about that poster is wrong. From it's famed 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. And when Dr. Campbell 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." Postures in blazing 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's 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 'em up on the wall for two weeks and then threw 'em 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 Jay 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, well, did it become famous? 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?"

So it was basically a merchandising initiative.

Absolutely. Well, that we can do it image probably surges into fame for merchandising. It's a capitalist enterprise. 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.

A.A. Nillm in one of his many poo stories has an interesting one that features poo 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 for some reason, they start talking about this idea of usuls, that there might be a pack of usuls out there, and they might be dangerous, so they start to get nervous. And yet more and more tracks appear than 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 usuls, but in fact it was just their own footsteps. This usul 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 this. 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. But if you followed those claims back in time, just as you might follow your footsteps in the forest, back in time, as Poo and Piglet could have done, you'll eventually see they are really your own footsteps there, just people repeating the same thing over and over again. Right, you trace it back to the original error, to the yes, to the erre source, you might

say. Remember in the beginning when I said we'd be working backwards, well, this is why. The idea that we can do it poster was a popular image during World War II is a usul. The notion exists only in our imagination, but that's not where the story ends. Now we have to retrace the steps of the usul.

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 usul.

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It is not hard to destroy a college. Last season, the podcast campus files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts, campus colts, and more, and now campus files is back for another season. There's a guy screaming into his phone, he's like, "Just saw Charlie Kirk is assassinated right in front of me."

Every week is a new episode and a new story. Yeah, it's okay, I like it's almost a university on a siege. Listen to and follow campus files, available now wherever you get your podcasts. I hope people aren't too disappointed that 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 while it didn't inspire millions during the war, it has certainly inspired millions since. That 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 mean, I've given presentations about the we can do it poster in places across the world, and people recognize it instantly. 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 in 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 Jay Howard Miller to create the we can do it poster.

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.”

She is looking at a copy of modern maturity magazine, and she's looking through a photo montage of women from World War II, with 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 warriors, and she compares them, and it really does look a lot like her.

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 that we can do it poster. Geraldine was the model for an iconic image. And 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, 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. Jim was intrigued by this backstory, but at this point in his research, he took nothing for granted. 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 at 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 is right. But if it's someone else, then I've really got something that people need to know about. 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.

And so in Doyle's reasoning that she was the woman in the poster, you had three different images. You had 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, they're after 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.”

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.

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.

Yeah, very tedious. And I mean, you've got a nice panoramic education of wartime photographs, I guess, long the way. Absolutely. And I will tell you that the worst moments, I mean, it'll assert this long you, you have moments of despair. I have to say, I feel for Professor Campbell. 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 Campbell. This guy looked through old magazines and newspapers for two and

a half years before he had his first breakthrough. He was leaving through old issues of New York

Times magazine while checking his voice mail. 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 not 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 an array of photographs dedicated to the different kinds of hats or a headgear that women were

might lead Jim to the owner of the photo. 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 woman, the woman at the lathe, but in a different pose and at a different machine. Campbell rushed out of his office and immediately showed the photo

“to his colleagues. 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. So Jim scanned the new photograph onto his computer. The one of the woman at the lathe, except it was a different photo she used 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 caught him up. He requested the photo of the woman not at the lathe and asked them if they

had it one of the same woman at the lathe. 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. A few weeks later, Jim received the photos. After five years, he was holding the original prints of the woman at the lathe. And on the back of one of those photos was a note card with some very interesting information.

“First of all, the photo was taken in Alameda, California. That's an awfully long way for”

Michigan, where Geraldine Hoff 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. Naomi Parker, no one had ever heard of that name in the association with Rosie the Riveter. So I knew I had something. 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. 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. She was still alive, 94 years old, and living with her sister, when on 10 acres of land near Redding, California.

So, Professor Kimmel 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 for all these years. And we didn't know who you were looking for for most of it, but now you do, and you got our name,

“and you get around the phone. What do you begin with, Miss Parker?”

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 her 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 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.

A few weeks later, Dr. Kimmel was in California, on his way to Naomi and wind's home. He stopped by a grocery store and picked up some flowers. And 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.

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 and 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.

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

seen as a crank. So this woman thinks it's her when obviously it's Geraldine Hoff Doyle,

“everyone says so and all the internet says so too. So she was asking for advice on what she should do.”

So Jim asks for permission to contact a journalist friend of his, someone at the Omaha World Harold, 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.

And he asked Naomi, how does it feel to finally get your identity back? And she said over and over again,

victory, victory, victory. In 2018, not long after she was recognized as the we can do it woman. Naomi Parker 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 Kimbles' 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?”

My name is Joel Blanketchip, I'm a son of Naomi. And I'm marney Blanketchip, her daughter-in-law.

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 weasel's footprints and arrived at the truth. There is no weasel, only Naomi Parker. And that revelation has led us to the family lore part of this 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 super hero.

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 Marney Blanketchip. Naomi's son and daughter-in-law. Joe and Marney knew the whole story, starting with the genesis of the photo that led to the poster. The way that this whole thing came about with her picture was that 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. And the newspaper was there for a specific reason.

They were writing a piece on how women had to adopt different kinds of a tire in order to work in these factories. And the whole point or the Navy department was trying to de-glamourize women. They didn't want all these, you know, skirts and dresses and stuff and loose-flowing things. Yeah, 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. So being dressed all tough in the denim jumpsuit with the bandana on her head wasn't just to protect all the Rosie's 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? It was usually a dark pink

“or red. 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, "Whoa, we're gonna wear it then." I did not know that. Yeah, a lot of women wore red lipstick during the war because Hitler hated it. Really? Oh yeah. That's awesome. This is true, by the way. Red lipstick was among the many things that Hitler hated. And women wore it to spite him. In England, when taxes made lipstick prohibitively expensive, women smeared beat juice on their lips. But back to the final and probably the most

iconic piece of the ensemble, the red polka dot bandana. And her little bandana, she wore the spotted red bandana became famous. She got that at Woolworths, which was in those days called a five in dime. The bandana scene around the world purchased at Woolworths for upwards of 10 cents. And that's the breakdown of the iconic we can do it ensemble.

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 Nami 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 also a battle. "My dad was, it was an alcoholic and dad would not come home on a Friday night and when he did to be drunk and no money for the week and she couldn't rely on this guy." One night, Nami made fried chicken for dinner. She and Joe ate, but Joe's dad still hadn't

come home for work. And she leaves a 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 false face first down in this pan. "Look, chicken, can't 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 drops his head back into

the splash and he's going to girdle, girdle. So mom and him are always splitting up. I mean, my favorite

thing from mom would say, "Journey, pack your bags, we're leaving." So mom would wait till dad would go to work sometimes and off we go. And in those days, generally the women didn't have a car, so we were taking a bus to the train or what have you. So it was just a lot of movie.

“It's important to remember that Nami 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. Nami would have faced enormous pressure socially and economically to stay with her husband. But she'd had enough. And off they went. And we were so broke. She said, "Journey, she's to call me that. We have enough money for dinner, enough money for we get a clock so I can get to work on time." So she said, "What's it going to be?"

I said, "Oh, I guess a clock, mom." And now that Nami and Joe were on their own, Nami had to find a reliable line of work. What she ended up doing was becoming a server 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 a goal-gitter. And at a very fiery temper, one time in Las Vegas, she's working,

think it the sands and some guy pinched her on a bottom. And she was delivering. She put it over his hand. She was... She dumped the soup on his head. Right on his head. Yeah, so she was very fiery. She didn't take any gut from any man. It was a tough life. But Nami didn't make excuses or

cut corners. She raised Joe down to the smallest details. I mean, 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 and shake. Did you shake hands and you shake it firmly?”

Like you mean it. Yes, Mom, okay. That was mom. 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 Naomi did after the war. In this case, the hard thankless job of being a working single mother. This strikes me as even more powerful.

For me, this adds a dimension to the rosy figure. She's not just driving rivets into the side of an airplane. She's dumping a bowl of soup on some guy's head 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. In in 2011, she and her sister, when attended a conference, celebrating women who served on the home front during World War II. Mom and that went to a rosy riveter reunion in California. So they see this great picture on the wall of the newspaper article that Mom was in. And there's another lady's name on the picture. Mom goes, "Well, that's me. What are you doing? What's going on here?" They said, "Well, you're going to prove it." So it's you was just so confused by that. 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 said, "Well, they just put it down and forgot it. You don't think about it." What she didn't know is that right after she had this dispute with the rosy the riveter people, a professor back in New Jersey named Jim Kimball was about to dedicate five years to proving

name corrected. But they weren't too taken by the fame associated with the we can do it poster.

And neither was Joe. To me, she's famous because she's my mom. Yeah. I don't go what she did. What she did for me and what she did for the family. And how she was,

“that's what makes my mom famous. 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." 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 alive 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, larger 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.

If you have stories you'd like to share about your family, please email me at [email protected]. That's family lore, [email protected].

“Family lore is an Odyssey original podcast. It is written and narrated by me, Lloyd Lockridge.”

Our executive producers are Leah Reece Dennis and I. Our lead producer and sound editor is Zach Clark. Our story editors are Maddie Sprung Kaiser and Katie Mingle. Additional sound editing mixing and mastering by Chris Basel and production support by Sean Cherry. Special thanks to more occurin, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hillary Schuff, and Laura Barman. Thanks again for listening to Family Lore.

And if you have time, we'd love for you to rate and review the show. For years, Gone South has been a podcast about crime in the American South. But for our new season, we're widening the lens. Through deeply reported narrative-driven stories, we're digging into the myths, scandals, and power structures that still shape the South. And in a lot of ways, the country itself.

Follow and listen to Gone South Season 5, an Odyssey podcast, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.