House Springs woman’s grandmother inspired Rosie the Riveter poster

With Women’s History Month celebrated this month, Leah Winchester of House Springs expects to see a lot of images of her grandmother in the news and on social media.

Winchester’s grandmother, the late Naomi Parker Fraley, was the inspiration behind the famous “We Can Do It” poster featuring a woman known as “Rosie the Riveter” rolling up her sleeves and wearing her hair tied up in a red polka-dotted bandana, according to numerous news sources and historians.

“That image gets used a lot during Women’s History Month,” said Winchester, 46.

“To me, it’s not just Rosie the Riveter; it’s my grandma,” she said. “If you think about it she is probably the most recognizable female of the 20th century.”

Winchester said over the years she stopped telling people about her grandmother being the inspiration for the poster.

“(People) either don’t believe me, they think I’m crazy or they’re completely obsessed,” she said.

Parker Fraley died at age 96 on Jan. 20, 2018, about three years after she was identified as the true Rosie the Riveter.

For years people believed Geraldine Hoff Doyle of Michigan inspired the famous poster, but in 2015, James J. Kimble, historian and professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, discovered Parker Fraley to be the true Rosie.

“She was excited because she wanted her name restored,” Winchester said. “She wanted her identity back.”

On March 21, Rosie the Riveter Day will be celebrated. The day was designated a national holiday by Congress in 2017 to celebrate women who worked during World War II.

The true Rosie

According to family accounts, when Parker Fraley was 19, her father told her and her sister, Ada, who was 17 at the time, to get a job, and they were two of the first three women hired by Alameda Naval Base in California, where Parker Fraley spent her days making rivets.

Ada Parker Wynn is now 98 and lives in Washington state.

One day in 1942 a photographer stopped by the base to photograph women working.

Winchester said the famous photo, “Lady at the Lathe,” that inspired the poster, was taken of Parker Fraley, wearing heels and a red polka-dotted bandana, at a machine she never used.

Kimble said he began working to debunk myths about the poster and learned that the photo of Parker Fraley appeared in a Pittsburgh newspaper during the summer of 1942. He also said the poster artist, J. Howard Miller, normally worked from photographs, which helped Kimble determine Parker Fraley was the real inspiration for Rosie.

“We see (the poster) everywhere we look, and that makes us think that it was seen everywhere back then. It was actually a corporate poster produced by the Westinghouse Corporation,” he said.

Winchester said her grandmother did a couple of interviews, including ones with People and Time magazines, after being discovered as the true Rosie, but not too many.

“She said, ‘I just want the world to know the truth and now I’m going to be left alone. I’m an old lady,’” Winchester said.

She said her family had to get security for her grandmother’s funeral.

“We had to hire bodyguards because people wanted to pay their respects,” Winchester said.

She also said she stays on the lookout for people selling items they claim are connected to Parker Fraley.

“People on eBay tried to sell memorabilia after she died with fake signatures,” Winchester said.

She said she doesn’t sell any of her grandmother’s memorabilia.

“She (Parker Fraley) felt like the image belonged to every single Rosie and that everybody deserves to be able to use that image and she did not want the rights to it,” Winchester said.

Before Kimble reached out to Parker Fraley, she had talked about being the true Rosie, Winchester said.

Fraley’s daughter and Winchester’s mother, Marnie Blankenship, 71, of Kelso, Wash., told the family that in 2011 Parker Fraley and her sister went to a Rosie the Riveter reunion in California for women who worked during World War II.

“There was a big picture of her 1942 photograph, a big rendering of it on the wall,” Blankenship said. “Right next to the ‘We Can Do It” poster it said it was the inspiration for this poster, but the name at the bottom of the photograph was someone else’s name.”

Winchester said her grandmother came back from the reunion saying the photo actually was of her.

“We were kind of like, ‘OK, whatever, Grandma,’” Winchester said.

When Kimball confirmed Parker Fraley was the true inspiration for the poster, Winchester said her grandmother just said, “I told you so.”

After her Rosie years

After the war, Parker Fraley traveled and worked as a waitress and shared some of her stories from that time, too.

“She was waitressing in Vegas, and a guy pinched her on the bottom as she was serving hot soup, and she dumped it right on his head,” Winchester said. “She did not stand for being disrespected.”

Winchester said she remembers her grandma as sweet, but feisty.

“She was amazing, and of course that’s easy for me to say because it’s my grandma, but she really truly was, and she was a single mom off and on for a long time,” Winchester said.

She said her grandmother was born in Oklahoma, one of eight children, and was raised in California. At 20, she married Joseph Blankenship, and they were married 13 to 14 years before divorcing. They had one child, Joseph Blankenship Jr., who is Winchester’s dad.

Winchester said Parker Fraley was married to her second husband, John, for just a few years before he died.

Her third husband was Chuck Fraley and they were married for 20 years before he died from cancer.

“Third time’s a charm,” Winchester said. “Incidentally, my mom is my dad’s third wife and I am on my third husband. For some reason, that’s a family trait. It takes three times to figure it out.”

Books

Blankenship has self-published two books detailing all of her mother’s letters.

“My mom retyped hundreds of letters and then researched what would have been happening in the world during that time and made some notes about it,” Winchester said.

Blankenship said there were so many letters it took two volumes to get them all in.

“She left us over 200 family letters,” Blankenship said. “It just sort of created this story about an American family. It’s a history book more than anything.”

The first volume starts in 1937 and goes up to 1949 and the second volume ends in 2018.

The books are titled, “A Peek at History Thru Naomi Parker’s Family Letters: Vol.1 - 1937 to 1949 (Our Rosie the Riveter)” and “A Peek At History Thru Naomi Parker’s Family Letters: Vol. 2 - 1950 to 2018 (Our Rosie The Riveter).”

The books are available for purchase through Amazon.

Local ties

Winchester isn’t Parker Fraley’s only connection to Jefferson County. Parker Fraley’s mother, Esther Parker, was born in De Soto.

Winchester said Women’s History Month isn’t the only time she encounters her grandmother’s images.

Her photo hangs in Red Robin restaurants and it is tattooed on people. Also, many people dress up as Rosie for Halloween.

Winchester said she tries to keep people informed about her grandmother’s place in history.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Winchester said she visited different military bases to share her grandmother’s story. She said the last speech she gave was in November 2019, when she spoke about her grandmother and shared a letter her grandmother had written to young people, which encouraged them to be true to themselves, to set goals and strive to accomplish them and to follow “the road of light.”

She also advised youth to honor “the Lord, parents and country, military and community, friends and all. You will feel good about yourself, and it will show in your actions and on your face, and happiness will follow.”

Winchester and her husband, David, have been married for eight years. She has two children, Jeremiah Dellay, 15, and Myer Winchester, 13.