My name is Ruth Casella. In the spring of 1942 I was Ruth Zamarripa, twenty-one years old, two years out of high school and working the notions counter at a department store downtown for fourteen dollars a week. In May of that year I walked out of the store on my lunch hour, took the bus to the Hallett employment office, and was hired before I got back. I spent the next three and a half years riveting airplane parts at Hallett Aircraft's Plant Two, on the East Side of Bridgeport, and I was laid off with nearly every other woman in the place in the fall of 1945.

The women of Plant Two have had lunch together every August since 1975. This page belongs to all of us. My granddaughter Victoria, who does something with computers for an insurance company in Hartford, set it up over the Fourth of July weekend and showed me how to change it. She says I should welcome you. Welcome. She also says I should keep it short. We'll see.

If you worked at Hallett, or your mother or grandmother did, I want to hear from you. Our roster has holes in it, and I am too old to be polite about asking.

This was our twenty-fifth luncheon. Seventeen of us came, which is two fewer than last year and nine fewer than five years ago. I don't say that to be gloomy. I say it because I'm the one who counts the chairs.

We pick the Saturday closest to the fourteenth on purpose. Fifty-four years ago that evening, at seven o'clock, President Truman came on the radio and said Japan had surrendered, and the whole East Side went out into the street. I was on the swing shift. The foreman didn't say we could leave. Nobody asked him. We walked off the line with our bandanas still on and didn't stop walking until somewhere around Washington Park, where a sailor I had never seen before or since kissed Phyllis Gaynor on the mouth and she hit him with her lunch pail.

The oldest at the table this year was Gert Lowrie (she was Gert Stebbins at Hallett), who is 91 and drove herself, which ought to worry the entire state of Connecticut. The youngest were Teresa Green and Wanda Laing, at 73. Wanda was sixteen when she got hired, which is another story and she tells it on the Memories page.

We had the chicken or the sole, salad, rolls, and the spumoni Gennaro's has been putting in front of us since 1983. The cost was $14.50 apiece with the tip, and we passed the hat for the flowers on the tables, which went home with the two women who had driven the farthest: Christina Barton, from outside Providence, and Leona Corum, from Waterbury.

Nine daughters, two sons-in-law and one granddaughter came as drivers. They sat at their own table by the window and behaved themselves. Several of them have sent things in for the Memories page, and I thank them.

The business:

• I read the Last Roll. We lost two this year: Mattie (Nickell) Daugherty in February and Katherine (Yates) Wiltshire in May. We stood for a minute. Then Clara Murphy, who has said the grace at this luncheon since 1976, said it again.
• Barbara Connolly will organize next year's luncheon with me, because she volunteered, and because I told her she had volunteered.
• We voted, sixteen to one, to keep meeting as long as there are two of us to split a check. The one was Daisy Smallwood, who says she is holding out for three.
• Victoria showed this page on a portable computer she brought in a bag. Half the table didn't believe it would be on the Internet. The other half didn't know what that meant and said so. Gert asked if the Japanese could read it.

The twenty-sixth luncheon will be on the Saturday closest to August 14 next year, at Gennaro's. If you are one of us and you are not on the roster, you are invited. You don't need to tell me if you're coming. I will know.

Plant Two was a brick building that had made sewing machine parts before the war. Hallett took it over in the winter of 1941 and filled it with jigs and air hoses, and by the time I got there it ran three shifts, six days a week. We didn't build whole airplanes. We built pieces of them: wing panels, flaps, access doors, the little parts nobody thinks about, for Navy fighters and some bombers. The parts went out the back on flatcars. I never saw one of our airplanes fly. I didn't expect to.

Riveting. You worked in pairs. One girl had the rivet gun, which was an air hammer about the size of a hair dryer and twice as heavy. The other girl, on the far side of the panel, held the bucking bar, a heavy little block of steel, flat against the tail of the rivet. The gun drove the rivet and the bar flattened the end into a button. If the bar wasn't square and tight, the rivet went in crooked and the inspector drilled it out and you did it over, and he remembered your face. Phyllis Gaynor bucked for me for two years. We could do a panel without saying one word, and we usually didn't, because you couldn't hear yourself think in that room.

Some of the rivets were kept in an icebox. That is the truth. They were a kind of aluminum that hardened as it sat, so they kept them cold to keep them soft until you drove them, and you had a certain number of minutes after you took them out. People don't believe me about the icebox rivets. Ask anybody who was there.

Before you riveted, somebody drilled the holes, and somebody cleaned the burrs off the holes, and the panel was held together with little spring clips called clecos until the rivets went in. Everything was checked. Johnny Vieira, the inspector on our line, had a stamp, and until he put it on your work you didn't go to lunch.

The shifts. Day shift was seven to three-thirty. Swing shift was three-thirty to midnight. Graveyard you can work out. I was on swing almost the whole time, because it paid a little more, and because my mother worked days at a laundry and somebody had to get my brothers off to school in the morning. The bus home at a quarter past midnight was full of girls in slacks asleep against each other's shoulders, and one driver who sang.

Slacks and bandanas. Hallett required slacks on the floor. My mother had never owned a pair of pants in her life and said I looked like a longshoreman. Hair had to be tied up in a bandana or a snood. They weren't fussy about it until a girl on days caught her hair in a drill and lost a patch of it. She was all right. After that they were fussy. No rings, no bracelets, no loose sleeves. You could wear lipstick. Everybody did.

War bonds. Ten percent of your pay went to bonds, through the payroll. Nobody made you. Everybody did it, the way everybody wore lipstick. An $18.75 bond was worth $25 in ten years, and I cashed mine in 1952 for the down payment on our house, and I will not apologize to the Treasury.

The E flag. In 1943 Plant Two won the Army-Navy "E" award for production. There was a ceremony in the parking lot with a Navy officer and a band from the high school, and they ran the flag up the pole over the front gate, with the big E on it in a wreath. Every one of us got a little E pin for our lapel. We got a star on the flag in 1944 for keeping it up. I still have the pin. It's in the same box as Ira's ribbons.

I started at sixty cents an hour. The boy who was hired the same week for the same job on the next line, who was seventeen and couldn't buck a rivet straight to save his life, started at eighty. When I asked Mr. Farmer, our foreman, about it, he told me the boy might have a family to support someday. I said I had one to support now. He said, "Now, sister." He called all of us sister. He was not a bad man. That was just how it was.

We heard there was a ruling down in Washington that a company could pay a woman the man's rate for the same work. Could. That was the important word. By 1945 I was up to eighty-five cents. I believe the men on my line were over a dollar by then, but nobody showed their pay envelope to anybody, so I can't swear to it, and I don't swear to what I can't prove.

It was still more money than I had ever seen. I gave my mother half. I bought a winter coat with a fur collar in 1943 that I wore until 1958.

Within two weeks of V-J Day the contracts started getting cancelled. The notices came in our pay envelopes, a half sheet of paper thanking us for our patriotic service and telling us our position had been eliminated. Mine came on a Friday in September of 1945. Most of the girls on our line got theirs the same day. By Thanksgiving, I'm told, there were hardly any women left in Plant Two who weren't in the office or the cafeteria.

Did we mind? Some did and some didn't. A lot of us had men coming home and wanted to get married and have babies, and did. A lot of us had men who weren't coming home, and needed the work, and didn't get to keep it. Nobody asked us which kind we were.

Ira Casella came home from the Pacific in December of 1945, after two years on a Navy destroyer, and we were married in June of 1946. We had three children, Lou, Patricia and Rocky (he was christened Robert, and nobody has called him that since the first week). When Rocky was in the second grade I went back to work, and I managed the cafeteria at an elementary school for twenty-two years, until 1984. I ran that kitchen the way Mr. Farmer should have run Plant Two. Ira died in 1994. He would have thought this page was a lot of foolishness, and then he would have read every word of it twice.

Every year somebody's grandchild asks if we were Rosie the Riveters. Here is the answer. Nobody called us Rosie. Not once, not at Hallett. We called ourselves "the girls," and the men called us "the girls" or "sister" or worse.

There was a song, yes. It was written in 1942 and by the next year it was on every radio in America, and if you were a riveter and your name happened to be Rose, you heard about it every day of your life. We had a Rose on days. She asked for a transfer to the paint shop.

Norman Rockwell did a Rosie for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, a big girl eating a sandwich with her rivet gun in her lap. That one we saw. Gert said she had never sat like that in her life, and Gert was the only one of us who did.

And that poster you see now on the coffee mugs, the girl in the polka-dot bandana making a muscle? I never saw it once during the war. Not once. Victoria looked into it and says hardly anybody did, and that it got famous forty years later. I believe her. If they had hung that in Plant Two somebody would have drawn a mustache on it by the second shift.

I don't mind the name. I mind people thinking it was fun. It was hard, loud, dirty work, and we were good at it, and when it was over they sent us home. That's the whole story. The rest of it is on the other pages.

The Roster, by Maiden and Married Name, and the Last Roll
Memories: Sent In by the Girls and Their Daughters

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since July 5, 1999

Write to Ruth Casella: [email protected]
I answer every letter. I do not answer chain letters, and I do not forward jokes.

Last updated September 19, 1999

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