Vanita Ely used to have a rather famous nickname.

“We used to call ourselves Rosie the Riveter,” she said from her home in Kansas City North, where she has lived since 1956.

On Friday, Aug. 22, as part of the annual Kansas City Aviation Expo and Airshow at the Charles B. Wheeler Airport, Ely had the opportunity to fly in a B-25 Mitchell aircraft, the very model she used to build as a riveter during World War II. The plane she boarded was even traced back to the same plant where she worked in Fairfax, Kan.

Rosie the Riveter, of course, was the symbol of U.S. propaganda that helped recruit women into a largely male manufacturing workforce during World War II. Men were being called overseas to the war’s frontlines and their industry jobs they left behind needed to be filled.

Ely took on the Rosie moniker after moving to Kansas City from Blackburn fresh out of high school in 1943. She learned the North American Aviation assembly plant in Fairfax was hiring. After a quick six-week metal schooling, Ely was sent to the assembly line to build B-25s for the U.S. Army as a riveter.

“So many men from around the area got called overseas and they started replacing them with women,” Ely recalled. “It was supposed to be a man’s job but they taught us to do it.”

As a riveter, Ely worked in the final assembly area and riveted parts of the back of the aircraft — generally from the wings back toward the tail, she said. The Fairfax plant was open from December 1941 to August 1945 and produced 6,608 B-25s in that span.

Ely said she is still proud of those two years and two months she spent on the assembly line before the war ended. Her wardrobe still includes shirts — three, in fact — with Rosie’s famous bicep-flexing pose on the front.

“We’re very proud of it,” she said of being part of the Rosie movement. “We were always in a good mood and you had to be because that line kept moving while we were working.

“It was fun for me because it was my first job,” she said.

This wasn’t Ely’s first trip to the skies in a B-25. Two times prior — in 2000 and 2006 — she had similar opportunities, but Ely said this trip was probably the most comfortable.

“The weather was nice, and the plane was not nearly as noisy,” she said after the flight.

Ely said every opportunity to fly in the plane model she helped build brings memories flying back.

“The idea that something happened so long ago and just realizing that they are still flying for one thing,” she said of the flights. “It’s just great, it’s wonderful.”

Staff writer Jeffrey M. Salem can be reached at 389-6653 or jeffsalem@npgco.com.

 

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