I thought of today and what it means and came across this article.

Here's a bit from the Seattle Times of May 30, 2005, from Nancy Bartley,
staff reporter:

Florence Abrahamson was only 15 when she went to war for the first time.

She was a married mother of three, with a son in the Navy, when duty called
again more than 20 years later.

Now 102, Abrahamson is being honored by legislators, officials in her
hometown of Aberdeen, and by Seattle's Museum of Flight as one of a number
of "Rosie the Riveters" who worked on Boeing and de Havilland airplane
assembly lines during wartime.

Abrahamson, however, is among the rarest of them all: She is the Northwest's
last surviving "Rosie" from two world wars - and perhaps the only one
anywhere, Museum of Flight officials believe.

An upcoming trip to Seattle for the recognition ceremony and a tour of
Boeing, all part of the museum's week of Memorial Day events, have
significance for Abrahamson: For the first time, she will actually see a
finished version of the B-17 bomber she worked on during World War II.

For the Aberdeen woman, whose blue eyes loom large behind her spectacles,
it's all much ado about what, to her, was "just duty" and "what anyone would
have done."

"Here is a gal who worked in two world wars," said Polson Museum Director
John Larson. The rarity of that "just blew us away."

The museum selected Abrahamson as this year's "Pioneer of the Year" for her
contributions to the community and for her long history in the Grays Harbor
area. Abrahamson's work life began shortly after her father died, which left
her mother a widow with five children to support. Abrahamson and her brother
were the two eldest.

In 1917, at the beginning of America's entrance into "The Great War," the
Grays Harbor Commercial Co. in Cosmopolis, one of the first sawmills in the
harbor and located where the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill is now, needed help
manufacturing de Havilland warplanes. While Abrahamson's brother was readily
accepted, the company was torn over whether to hire women.

When Abrahamson was hired in 1918, she dressed in overalls - daring attire
at a time when proper ladies wore long skirts - and walked to work at the
factory every morning from the family home less than a mile away.

She spent her days making spruce lath for the de Havilland DH-4 biplane, the
only U.S.-built warplane to see World War I combat. Her life was regulated
by the steam plant's whistle, which signaled the start of work, lunch and
end of the day.

World War I was different from the war that followed, she said.

Although Grays Harbor citizens - including her husband-to-be, Hugo
Abrahamson - served in the military, the fighting in Europe seemed more
remote than that of World War II.

After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Aberdeen citizens shaded their
windows at night. The Boeing Aberdeen factory was camouflaged with trees on
the roof. Japanese submarines lurked off the coast. And American warplanes
patrolled the harbor.

By then, Florence and Hugo were married and living in house they built in
1925. He was working at a mill, and she was employed at a small grocery when
the new war effort called.

She tied a red bandana over her hair, donned a pair of slacks and became a
riveter, fastening the aluminum skin onto B-17s. But as she placed rivet
after rivet, she always wondered what the final plane looked like, with all
those carefully laid rivets stitching the aluminum together as precisely as
if she had been cross-stitching a sampler.

She was so fast that co-workers asked her if she was "trying to win the war
all by yourself." And she proved herself so capable - despite being
left-handed in an occupation set up to accommodate only the right-handed -
that she became an inspector, checking the work of others. Later, she would
help make components for more than 5,000 B-29s.

Now, Abrahamson's day of discovery is closing in.

"The important title being bestowed on you must fill your heart with fond
memories and a warm sense of pride for your enormous wartime contributions,"
state Rep. Gigi Talcott, R-Tacoma, wrote to her. Her efforts are
"appreciated by every American who has experienced liberty and freedom."

Thursday, Abrahamson will join a number of other Rosie the Riveters as
guests of the Museum of Flight. Sporting her Boeing security badge from
World War II, she will be accompanied by four of her six grandchildren for a
tour of Boeing and the museum's B-17G "Fuddy Duddy."

Abrahamson's husband died in 1974 and the last of her three children in
2004, but she is adored by her surviving grandchildren and six
great-grandchildren. All have heard her colorful stories: Her assembly-line
days; the ordeal of taking a driver's test for the first time at 57, after
her son taught her to drive in a Pontiac so large she nicknamed it "the
beast." After failing once, she passed the test on her second try but
slammed the cranky license examiner against the dash when she braked too
hard.

"I wake up at night thinking about it even after all these years," she said.

And no one will forget her arrest - sometime past the age of 60 - for a
fishing violation.

"I was caught fishing in a fish hatchery," she admitted sheepishly.
Fishermen friends kept advising her to go farther up the Satsop River. "How
was I to know it was part of the hatchery?"

Afterward, when she showed up at church, the congregation "sang the
prisoner's song" when she walked in, she recalled. And there was a fund
drive at some stores to help her pay her fine. The judge ultimately
dismissed the charge as long as she promised to "fish somewhere else."

She figured that was good advice and went to Westport, Grays Harbor County,
where she then won a 1964 fishing derby with a 48-pound salmon.

She smiles in satisfaction at the thought. Just like she does when she
thinks of those days during the war when she could fasten a rivet quick as
anything.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or [email address had been here]

in a letter to Florence Abrahamson

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company


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