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| This Monday, December 14 at 10AM PST West Coast 12 Noon Central and 1PM EST East Coast time.
Thanks! Plain and Simple in West Virginia and Rosie the Riveter Trust in California are thrilled to collaborate on this very special virtual meeting of real Rosies. (See pdf attached for logos and photos
Join us for an hour program where we will hear from four Rosies followed by a short question and answer period this coming Monday, December 14 at 10AM PST West Coast 12 Noon Central and 1PM EST East Coast time.
Please sign on before the hour so we can be ready to start on time!
Zoom link is: Meet the Rosies
Password if needed is rosie
*For more information on how to join if you will be calling in or need the full link is located at the bottom of this message. Any questions/issues? Contact Sarah Pritchard at 503.961.0820 or email sarah@rosietheriveter.org
Here are photos and background on the four Rosies who plan to join us! Ruth Edwards, June Robbins, Buddie Curnutte and Mozelle Brown!
Ruth Edwards
During World War II, Ruth was an “expeditor” responsible for assessing the needs of many work stations at Carnegie-Illinois Steel, a plant that made medal products such as air-to-ground missiles, armor-plating, and medal parts.
After the war, she married her high school sweetheart who had been a Prisoner of War at the Bataan Death March, and Ruth became the primary economic source for the family, since Jimmy never really recovered from dark experiences in the Pacific.
Ruth progressed with both formal and real-life learning, and became Director of Business Education for the State of WV, was on the Board of Directors for Dow Chemical and organizations.
She has worked with “Thanks!” for 10 years. For example, she: a) was interviewed for the documentary film released 2011, called, “We Pull Together: Rosie the Riveters Then and Now”; b) helped plan, design, and open the first park created by Rosies, c) participated when the UK sent an emissary to thank American Rosies at a historically black college, d) participated in the Today Show taping (March. 2012) held at the plant where she had worked, and e) was interviewed in the documentary film of Charles Yeager, a friend throughout her youth, and f) made masks in April of 2020 for the COVID19 crisis, and g) was part of a multi-national Zoom meeting with youth set up by Liberation Route Europe.
Today, Ruth works from North Carolina to educate many groups that the World War II chant, “We pull better when we pull together”, is needed again today.
Her role in the American Rosie Movement is important both as an articulate and aware spokesperson and as a member of the Board of Directors for “Thanks!”. Her business acumen helps “Thanks!” with many tasks, from human resources, to business procedures. to outreach to leaders in many sectors.
Ruth was 98 in October.
June Robbins
June was born in Philadelphia and remembers that the Great Depression was tough on her family. Sometimes they had to move when the rent was due. During high school, she was the first female taking drafting, which she took during lunch and study hall.
She became a drafter at the Philadelphia shipyards, while her mother worked at a riveted airplane nearby. When she first worked, she did drawings day-in and day-out. She also learned to weld.
She wore street clothes, and the few women she worked with included Rosies of Color. The building was metal, so it was hot in summer and cold in winter.
Several members of her family were in the service, and she was determined to do first-quality work because “lives depended on it!”
One of her many memories is that a radio station in Philadelphia played, “The Bluebird of Happiness” every hour – she and her mother dressed to this song daily. Today, the Bluebirds for Rosies Project is popular with children and adults, because Rosies remember that bluebirds represented hope in World War II.
June is a world traveler, a motor cyclist, the mother of seven, the widow of her beloved Marvin whose favorite song was, “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings”. As a senior, June became a professional clown; so, today, she is at ease as she injects humor into her lectures. When asked why she has survived to now, June says, “You have to laugh to survive. Being a clown allows me to show both my heart and my head.”
She has been very active in greater Philadelphia to educate about what life means to be a Rosie, attended the Philadelphia Girls’ Choir performance of the Rosie the Riveter Theme song which was written by “Thanks!”, attended the Netherlands celebrations twice, and met with Royal couple of the Netherlands with “Thanks!” and three other Rosies at Arlington Cemetery.
As a Board Member and a savvy, world-wise citizen, June helps with outreach and planning, especially as the American Rosie Movement reaches out to both urban and rural Americans, different religious and heritage groups, and different nations.
Buddie Curnutte
Buddie grew up poor in Appalachian New York, near Buffalo, during the depression. She and her brother were raised by their father who was often gone. In adolescence, her aunt took her in to clean, then her uncle had her watch an empty building which she still worries may have been, “something illegal.” While working at a “Five and Dime store” friends, Fran and Betty, found an ad for Curtis-Wright, a defense plant for work in Cheektowaga, NY.
Training was four weeks, unpaid, with no guaranteed job for poor performers. Women worked in pairs on the Kitty Hawk airplanes, one a riveter and one a bucker, and Buddie worked on one part of the wing assembly. She says, “It was hard, and you worried - lives were in your hands.”
After two years riveting, she joined the Coast Guard, to see the West Coast and the world. Her unit trained at Sheepshead’s Bay, NY in hard winter, without uniforms or proper shoes. She became a medic, and at a Philadelphia hospital, she met Earl Curnutte who had lost a leg and injured a foot at Okinawa. He was released after the war. They wrote but never heard each other’s voices.
On July 3, 1946, at 11:00 p.m., he climbed three flights of stairs of a Catholic hospital, entered the nurses’ station, and said, “I’ve come to marry Buddie.” They drove nonstop to Charleston, WV, found a minister from the phonebook who, on their arrival, was a mortician who married them at the funeral home.
They adopted two children while Earl worked in rehabilitation. In 2006, he died of cancer that migrated from his amputation, to his lungs, then his brain. She’s another woman who knows more facts (from her husband) of “the war” than history books tell.
Buddie has been invaluable to helping to lay the foundation of the American Rosie Movement. She is in the documentary film and she helped to develop nearly all of the 18 projects that have been created for other locations to model, including a quilt, a park, a driveling display, art, original music, hosting the British when they thanked American Rosies, speaking to schools and civic groups, giving awards to model volunteers, making Public Service Announcements, naming the first government building and an interstate bridge, “The Rosie the Riveter”, and working with veterans.
Mozelle Brown
Mozelle was the youngest of 10 children, grew up in a small town in West Virginia, attended a one-room school, and in 1942 she left her retail job to “do what I could do to bring our boys home.” With $35, she went to Akron, OH and worked for Goodyear Aircraft. “I was a country girl, and I knew how to use a hammer. Lots of us were handy, and we were determined to contribute,” she says.
Goodyear gave her two weeks training, and she says, “I counted the days till I could do real work.” They put her on helping to build the Corsair, a one-man fighter plane used mostly in the Pacific. They gave her a copy of Aircraft Sheetmetal Assembly Manual to learn the basics of riveting. “We did it all, and we made sure the Corsair was made perfectly – it had to be perfect, because lives depended on it.
In April, 2011, “Thanks! Plain and Simple worked with Lt. Col. Cheryl Johns, a British-born son of a London defense factory, to bring the wings of a Corsair from South Carolina, where it had been refurbished, to Charleston, WV where several Rosies were able to see it and the signatures of Rosies who had signed a wing before riveting it together. The plane had been found in a junk yard in New Zealand and shipped to the US for renovation. When Mozelle came that day, she brought the manual she had used to help build the Corsair, with her extensive - and accurate - math calculations in the margins.
“One thing I remember that shows changes since the war is every car on the road was full of people. We’d ask, ‘Are you loaded?’ which meant, ‘Do you have room for me?’ Everybody sacrificed. It changed the world.”
She married in 1949, and she still lives on the same street where they built a home in Summersville, West Virginia, “between a lake and the mountains.” She was 100 years old in October, 2020. Many people drove by to congratulate and thank her, despite the COVID crisis.
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 359 263 3610
Passcode: rosie
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Sarah Pritchard, Executive Director
Rosie the Riveter Trust
Mobile: 503.961.0820
Email: sarah@rosietheriveter.org
Visit: rosietheriveter.org
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