Naomi Parker Fraley, the real Rosie the Riveter, dies at 96

Unsung for seven decades, the real Rosie the Riveter was a California waitress named Naomi Parker Fraley.

Over the years, a welter of American women have been identified as the model for Rosie, the war worker of 1940s popular culture who became a feminist touchstone in the late 20th century.

Fraley, who died Saturday at 96 in Longview, Washington, staked the most legitimate claim of all. But because her claim was eclipsed by another woman's, she went unrecognized for more than 70 years.

“I didn't want fame or fortune,” Fraley told People magazine in 2016, when her connection to Rosie first became public. “But I did want my own identity.”

The search for the real Rosie is the story of one scholar's six-year intellectual treasure hunt. It is also the story of the construction - and deconstruction - of an American legend.

“It turns out that almost everything we think about Rosie the Riveter is wrong,” that scholar, James Kimble, told the Omaha World-Herald in 2016.

For Kimble, the quest for Rosie, which began in earnest in 2010, “became an obsession,” as he explained in an interview for this obituary in 2016.

His research ultimately homed in on Fraley, who had worked in a Navy machine shop during World War II. It also ruled out the best-known incumbent, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a Michigan woman whose innocent assertion that she was Rosie was long accepted.

On Doyle's death in 2010, her claim was promulgated further through obituaries, including one in the New York Times.

Kimble, an associate professor of communication and the arts at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, reported his findings in “Rosie's Secret Identity,” a 2016 article in the journal Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

The article brought journalists to Fraley's door at long last.

“The women of this country these days need some icons,” Fraley said in a People magazine interview. “If they think I'm one, I'm happy.”

The confusion over Rosie's identity stems partly from the fact that the name Rosie the Riveter has been applied to more than one cultural artifact.

The first was a wartime song of that name, by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. It told of a munitions worker who “keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage / Sitting up there on the fuselage.” Recorded by bandleader Kay Kyser and others, it became a hit.

The “Rosie” behind that song is well-known: Rosalind P. Walter, a Long Island woman who was a riveter on Corsair fighter planes and is now a philanthropist, most notably a benefactor of public television.

Another Rosie sprang from Norman Rockwell, whose Saturday Evening Post cover of May 29, 1943, depicts a muscular woman in overalls (the name Rosie can be seen on her lunchbox), with a rivet gun on her lap and “Mein Kampf” crushed gleefully underfoot.

Rockwell's model is known to have been a Vermont woman, Mary Doyle Keefe, who died in 2015.

But in between those two Rosies lay the object of contention: a wartime industrial poster displayed briefly in Westinghouse Electric Corp. plants in 1943.

Rendered in bold graphics and bright primary colors by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller, it depicts a young woman, clad in a work shirt and polka-dot bandanna. Flexing her arm, she declares, “We Can Do It!”

Miller's poster was never meant for public display. It was intended only to deter absenteeism and strikes among Westinghouse employees in wartime.

For decades, his poster remained all but forgotten. Then, in the early 1980s, a copy came to light - most likely from the National Archives in Washington. It quickly became a feminist symbol, and the name Rosie the Riveter was applied retrospectively to the woman it portrayed.

This newly anointed Rosie soon came to be considered the platonic form. It became ubiquitous on T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters and other memorabilia.

The image piqued the attention of women who had done wartime work. Several identified themselves as having been its inspiration.

The most plausible claim seemed to be that of Geraldine Doyle, who in 1942 worked briefly as a metal presser in a Michigan plant.

Her claim centered in particular on a 1942 newspaper photograph. Distributed by the Acme photo agency, the photograph showed a young woman, her hair in a polka-dot bandanna, at an industrial lathe. It was published widely in the spring and summer of 1942, though rarely with a caption identifying the woman or the factory.

In 1984, Doyle saw a reprint of that photo in Modern Maturity magazine. She thought it resembled her younger self.

Ten years later, she came across the Miller poster, featured on the March 1994 cover of Smithsonian magazine. That image, she thought, resembled the woman at the lathe - and therefore resembled her.

By the end of the 1990s, the news media was identifying Doyle as the inspiration for Miller's Rosie. There the matter would very likely have rested, had it not been for Kimble's curiosity.

The third of eight children of Joseph Parker, a mining engineer, and the former Esther Leis, a homemaker, Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Aug. 26, 1921. The family moved wherever Joseph Parker's work took him, living in New York, Missouri, Texas, Washington, Utah and California, where they settled in Alameda.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 20-year-old Naomi and her 18-year-old sister, Ada, went to work at the Naval Air Station in Alameda. They were assigned to the machine shop, where their duties included drilling, patching airplane wings and, fittingly, riveting.

It was there that the Acme photographer captured Naomi Parker, her hair tied in a bandanna for safety, at her lathe. She clipped the photo from the newspaper and kept it for decades.

As he searched for the woman at the lathe, Kimble scoured the internet, books, old newspapers and photo archives for a captioned copy of the image.

At last he found a copy from a vintage photo dealer. It carried the photographer's original caption, with the date - March 24, 1942 - and the location, Alameda.

Best of all was this line:

“Pretty Naomi Parker looks like she might catch her nose in the turret lathe she is operating.”

Kimble located Fraley and her sister, Ada Wyn Parker Loy, then living together in Cottonwood. He visited them in 2015, whereupon Fraley produced the cherished newspaper photo she had saved all those years.

“There is no question that she is the ‘lathe woman' in the photograph,” Kimble said.

An essential question remained: Did that photograph influence Miller's poster?

As Kimble also learned, the lathe photo was published in The Pittsburgh Press, in Miller's hometown, on July 5, 1942. “So Miller very easily could have seen it,” he said.

Then there is the telltale polka-dot headscarf, and Fraley's resemblance to the Rosie of the poster. “We can rule her in as a good candidate for having inspired the poster,” Kimble said.