Milka Bamond: The Real-Life “Rosie the Riveter”

This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show and our favorite thing to talk about is American history. And up next, we'll be hearing from an actual World War II Rosie the Riveter, Milka Bayman. She tells her early life story and details her World War II experience as a Riveter in airplane factories. She also chronicles her post-war experiences and describes being part of the Rosie the Riveter coalition.

Here's Milka. Well, my family is really tiny. I was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, a child of an illiterate coal miner who lost his life when I was six months old, so I never got to know my father. After that, my mother was fortunate enough to have someone send her a train fare so she could come to Detroit.

And then her life started all over again. She had a very, very harsh background in a part of Europe that was not developing very well, living almost in a primitive way. So I heard all those stories and I knew that even though it was an effort to come to America, because I don't think that anyone can leave their homeland without a wrenching feeling of you're leaving everything behind, everything who you are, everybody who is responsible for your being on the planet.

But whatever the reason, and however they got here, I'm very grateful. And I think because I knew of their hardships that it gave me a special feeling, especially when the war was going on and so many of our young men were drafted. They were going to Europe to try to salvage whatever they could of Europe. But then when Japan struck, that was a real wake-up call.

And I think that even then, I was not quite 18, I realized that the Japanese had miscalculated. They thought we were very weak, we didn't have much of a war machine, the Depression put a dent in that, and so catching up was very difficult. So I guess they thought if they attacked us on the other side of the planet, we would just be easy pickings.

They had to have Hawaii, they wanted to expand. But they met an enemy that they never expected. And it was a patriotism that kept us going.

I get goose bumpy right now thinking about how important it was, my own background, because my parents said, oh, we thought we were escaping the Balkan Wars, we hope it doesn't happen in America. So there was a sense of fear. Living in Detroit in particular, all the automobile factories had converted to arming America, building planes and other, you know, jeeps.

That was logical for Motortown. But it was a very heartfelt fear. We didn't know whether our factories would be bombed, because that's what we're doing to Germany. And so there were always rumors, we don't know what might hit us. So we were studying from the newspapers the silhouettes of airplanes, enemy aircraft, that in case an airplane flew overhead, we'd know that it was an enemy plane. So all of that added to the kind of insecure feeling that we all had.

We had no idea, because up to then, since the Civil War, we felt like we're doing really okay, but you can't take it for granted. So when the call to arms came, I heard it from a classmate, and she said, I'm going to be working. And I said, where? And she said, the Briggs and Stratton plant. And I said, do they have room for more women?

They said, they're clamoring for more women. So the next day, I was on the trolley and got myself down to the factory, and they signed me up for a three-week course in whatever I needed to know in riveting, and the other side of it, the bucking person who flattens that rivet. And some minor blueprint scanning. It wasn't as thorough as I expected it to be, but it prepared me for what I had to do.

I started in early 1943. But the big surprise, when I finally got to the, the classes were held at Briggs and Stratton and some areas that they had reserved for that, because they were training welders and a lot of other women to do different kinds of jobs. But when I actually saw, they said, now that's a tip of a B-17. And what do you mean the tip? Well, that's the end of the wing. But it was on a platform three feet up off the ground, very heavy-duty superstructure of lumber to hold this massive framework. It was just a skeleton to begin with.

They took us from the very beginning of what it looks like, and then they put on the skin, which is aluminum that's rolled out to a particular thinness and sheets that were already pre-sized to fit the skeleton, the rounded portion. And there was a crane that held women overhead to do their, but we start at the bottom. And there were two tiers of scaffolding. It was so crowded. We were shoulder to shoulder. We could hardly move, but everybody knew their job. And it was for the first time that American Africans were working side by side with white folks.

And there was never anything that would register as disharmony. We had a mission, and it did a lot to bring us together. Also, a lot of young women were coming from the southern states, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia. And they brought a culture with them that we Detroiters were not accustomed to. They were more genteel. They had better manners. They brought wonderful food items with them. They taught us all about pies and fried fish and iced tea, sweet iced tea.

It was a real addition to the culture. So I think Detroit got a real sampling of people from pretty much all over the country, but mostly from the southern area. And that was to Detroit.

I should say mostly from the southern area. But that was a very amazing experience. We were behind in production to begin with.

That was the reason that they had so many people. So they said, you're going to be working seven days a week. We can't guarantee how many hours.

It could be 10 or 12. Are you up to that? Of course, you're up to whatever you have to do. And my goodness, what storytelling by Milka and a collision of cultures and women in the workforce. That's a huge cultural change in the country, one that came fast and hard and would change the country forever. And by the way, Milka's story is brought to us with permission from the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center. The Veterans History Project provides unedited first person interviews for men and women who served our great country. When we come back, more of Milka's story, a Rosie the Riveter story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Milka Bayman, a real life Rosie the Riveter. Let's pick up where we last left off. We were just the other arm of the military. It was like being in the military. You could not quit your job if it was too much for any girl or woman to handle. They just put you in another department, but you're still working in the war, but you're not quitting. And so that's how it went. I also realized early on, much to my chagrin, and at first I thought it was just a nasty rumor, but there was a certain element of men who resented the women for taking over men's jobs, although we were the only resource at that time.

These were harsh men who really not only disrespected, but physically attacked women. One particular evening, I was asked to substitute for a man who said he had to leave what we call the tool shed or tool crib. It was made out of a chain link fencing so you could see right through shelves and drawers full of all kinds of tools. So when you came in to do your job, you picked up the tools, you had a slip for what you needed. And at the end of your shift, you turned it in because people walk off with things. So that just guaranteed it. So he said, I'm going to be away for about an hour.

Would you mind the shed for me? And I thought, oh, that'll be a nice change because there was a lull in my production line. So that was OK. But along comes this man on a bicycle. I'd seen him around the shop and he was the messenger.

And that was the only way to get messages to different department heads with him on his bicycle. And he was dressed like a jockey and the jockey silks, you know, and he had a little Salvador Dali mustache and a silk cap. He looked like a jockey. But when he pulled up, I knew that he had a bad reputation. But I never really questioned it. They said, look out for look out for French.

He called himself French. So when he pulled up the doorway, he said, I've come by to say hello. And I said, what's your real purpose? And that was when he pushed me between two bins. I was so paralyzed with fear, I couldn't even scream.

I couldn't make a sound. But all of a sudden I got this bright idea. I hooked my foot around his leg and he fell and I fell on top of him. And he was like this for a few moments.

And I start punching him in the face. That's when I started to scream and help came. Well, the best thing that came out of that was that incident spread through the shop like wildfire.

For the first time, the women knew they wouldn't have to take it anymore. They were going to organize amongst themselves. And they went to other shops as well. But a lot of the union men were there. You know, they were always, you know, well, you have to join the union. I kept saying, no, I don't have to join the union. No, the Constitution doesn't say so.

I'm not joining the union. It might have benefited us, but they were part of our abusers, the intimidators. So the women really took over because this abuse was not only confined to shipbuilders.

I don't know if you want to hear some ugly stories of what happened to Rosie's on the job. It was not an easy ride by any means. The women who build ships out on the West Coast, we know the armor plate of the hull of a ship is very thick steel. And there was a skeleton there that they had to work at. And they had to put after they assembled the hull, then they had to put a steel floor in there, which had holes pre-drilled where they would run electric wires under that flooring. The men actually urinated into the hull. The women had no recourse but to work under those conditions.

So there were men who were so hostile to us, we began to wonder if they were enemies of the country of some sort. They wanted to discourage us, but nothing did. You just went on.

I mean, you were almost stoic, almost robotic. At the end of the day, if it's a 12-hour day, you're glad to get on a streetcar and go home. But seven days was required. We didn't complain. But the city did so much to keep us going.

The Fox Theater was open 24 hours a day. If you finished your shift at 2 a.m. in the morning, you brought fresh clothes and fresh makeup, and you put on your clothes and you went downtown and you went to the movies, you could go to the night clubs. Everything was there for us so that we didn't feel left out.

Everything was to boost the civilians and whatever we were doing. So this may sound silly, but there was a girl from West Virginia, and she said, Well, I'm from West Virginia and I'm a hillbilly. And I said, Well, I was born in West Virginia, so she wanted to know the story. Well, she said, You were not a patriot.

You didn't stay. I said, Well, my roots are in Europe, not West Virginia. But anyway, she said, It's okay with me if you call me a hillbilly. And I said, Okay. I said, I'm not quite comfortable with it, and she said, Well, try it out. And I said, Well, hi, hillbilly. It sounded okay. I said, What are you going to call me? She said, I'm going to call you a honky. So that's how it went. And Drew Sutter Duncan is her name, and her husband was in the military. And she was really quite, when we would have lunch or time off, because she was a smoker and I'd go outside with her. She kept it going, and she added a lot of humor. We needed it. But because we were so casual while calling each other names, you know, the others kind of fell into that, too.

So that was a happy time. But for me, it was particularly important that America survive. My parents said, Oh, my goodness, can it happen here?

We tried to escape all of that coming from Europe. So anyway, everybody had their own story somewhere there, because one of the coworkers, Peggy, she was 44. I thought she was ancient, 44. I considered her an old person. She was in for the money. She said, I'm a patriot, but I'm here because of the wages.

And they were probably the best that people were making at that point in time. I started out at something like 75 cents an hour. But pretty soon I was promoted to inspector, because I was always curious about everything. So I was making a dollar and a half an hour. So just imagine, overtime and double time. I bought more war bonds.

I could almost paper a small room, wallpaper a small room. And I never cashed in the first one until it was ten years mature. But yeah, everyone really was very patriotic. They were all young, and there were others who were first generation, as I was, and they have the same concerns.

What's going to happen to America? So anyway, at that point in time, we're talking the 1940s. Very little was known about toxic fumes or ventilation or the effects it has on humans. So about my second year, I started losing my hair, and I didn't think much of that, but pretty soon my scalp was showing through. And then to disguise it, I wore my hair up to hide that, and my hair was long anyway, so I was camouflaging that. But when it got to be pretty bad, I was talking to other young women, and they also were losing their hair. Some of them had twitches in their faces.

We were having neurological problems, breathing problems. But my department was maybe like this far up to where the light is back there, and they were making parts for the Votsy Korski Navy fighter plane. No jets in those days, but to lighten the load. The plane had very, very heavy armament on the fuselage to protect the pilot, but they were trying to lighten it a little bit by making the ailerons and the flaps out of fabric over a very light aluminum frame. So that was stretched over and fitted onto the framework, and then they spray painted it and put it in an area where the lights would dry it quickly and then spray paint more. So those spray guns, you know, the hair is settling on your hair, on your arms, on your clothes.

Nobody thought that that was a problem, and yet there was a fan, too, which just blew it around. So anyway, I had taken a day off from work, and you report to the shop nurse if you're going to take any time off and when you're coming back. So when she talked to me, she said, you're a candidate. She said, we've been sending a lot of you young ladies who are reporting illnesses to the YWCA camp on the shore of Lake Erie.

And I said, yeah, I spent some time there as a preteen. She said, the YWCA is rescuing you. The YWCA is making it their job throughout America to rescue young women who need to be rescued by sending them to camps all across America. And you're listening to Milka Bayman, and she's a real-life Rosie the Riveter. For me, it was particularly important that America survive, Milka said.

What's going to happen to America? And so patriotism and a call to duty really drove her and so many women to serve, and the money was pretty good, too. When we come back, more of this real-life Rosie the Riveter story, Milka Bayman's story here on Our American Stories.

And we continue with Our American Stories and Milka Bayman's story, a real-life Rosie the Riveter story. Let's pick up where we last left off. So the YWCA really rescued me, and so I was okay and went back to work. And then it started up again. I became ill again. So she said, maybe you need a little more rest. So it was very nice, a lot of girls who actually depressed, some worried that they never gained their facial expressions back, because they'd be pulled up or the lips would be frozen. Well, we were there recuperating, and I was into my second month.

I was doing quite well. We were in the dining room for dinner, and there was a radio on the ledge. It was just about the size of a Kleenex box.

You would never imagine a radio that was only this big. But that went on, and it got our attention because of the announcer. He said, we have an announcement. He was like stuttering.

He said, the Japanese have just surrendered. When that was heard, we were so stunned. I'm telling you, the whole room full of us fell to our knees. We were just so grateful.

So that was the end of my Rosie career, right then and there. But it was a wrenching experience, and yet a sense of hope. But what happened after the war? The war may have ended in 1945, but the residue of the emotional wreckage was still there, and you had to cope with it, because so many of the young men and women didn't come home. You knew which homes, because when you had a member of your family in the service, you would get a little flag about eight by eight with a silver star on it. If that flag showed up with a gold star on it, you knew that their military man, their soldier, was never coming home.

He was either lost in action or dead. So you were looking at that all the time. You're schoolmates. You could go into any neighborhood, and that would be the topic of conversation. Then they'd be counting homes.

They'd be counting homes, how many on a particular block or section. And so it was a black cloud that hung over us for a long time. It really was. The war didn't just end automatically by any means. And then there was an awful lot of controversy about the two bombs.

How could we do that? We kept saying, sure, they're the enemy. Well, we understood that we were losing thousands of young boys in the Pacific, in the Philippines and all those islands, that we had to do something. It was a massive, massive thing to cope with. After the war, I said to my mother, I have met another girl who is also having a lot of trouble coping. We didn't date.

I was not ever, I come from an ethnic background. Girls were sheltered. You never leave home unless you're going to get married. So can you try to imagine my mother's reaction? I'm leaving home. She was humiliated. She said, how can I face the Serbian sisters in church and tell them that you're a bad girl? And my adoptive stepfather said, my adoptive father said to me privately, your mother will keep you till you're 100 years old. Go wherever your heart desires.

Live your life. So I took out a map of the USMA with a knitting needle in my hand, my eyes closed and I punched a hole and up came Phoenix. That's how I wound up in Phoenix. So Barbara and I got on a greyhound bus and we went to Phoenix.

Oh, I was just bumming around. Should I tell them? I did something that young women did not do at that point in time. I met two girls at the same house where I was renting a room from a wonderful lady and her daughter and they were Mormon and they were so good to us. Mrs. Naylor had three sons and they were in the occupational forces scattered around between Japan and Germany and she was so kind to us. But Eleanor and Marianne, they were models from Chicago. They were taking a break from doing whatever they did in Chicago.

They had fiancés also in the occupational forces. So Eleanor, who was very adventurous, she said, there's nothing to do here. We've done everything that you can do.

Horseback riding is not going to do it. So we were lying down. There was no plastic in those days. We were lying down on an oil cloth, tablecloth that we took off the landlady's lawnmower and we had our bathing suits and swim caps on.

But the sprinkler going, rotating. And Eleanor says, we must be crazy. We're cooking ourselves to death and there's still nothing to do here.

Let's go to California. And I think I sat up and I said, well, I arrived by bus and I don't think you came any differently. She said, we got thumbs, don't we?

And I said, uh-uh, not for me. She said, well then, Marianne and I are going. She said, oh, it'll be perfectly safe. She said, my brother told me that the Monterey Peninsula is exactly where we want to be in California.

Because he had met, he was like 10 or 15 years older than she. And he said, oh, he loved the colony of Swamis that were in Monterey. And he always insisted, if I ever go to California, we have to find out about them.

Well, the Swamis were long gone by the time we got there. But we hiked from Phoenix, Arizona. Hitchhiked to the coast.

We went to Tijuana, Mexico, and nearly got arrested. Because Marianne said, what is that strange sight we're looking at? There was this animal that looked like a donkey, but it had stripes. It looked like a zebra.

So it was a strange looking animal, but it was hooked up to a small cart with flowers on it, and for a dollar you could take a little ride around the area. And so we were joking, oh, we didn't need to do that. So I said, I'll just take pictures. Well, I took pictures, and we were walking away, and all of a sudden we hear this very male voice said, Senoritas?

And he was so good looking, we didn't care what he had to say. A really gorgeous young Mexican man, and he said, you took a picture without permission, you're going to have to pay. And so that sounded okay, and he said, how much, how many photos did you take? I said, well, I think one was okay and the other one may not.

He said, I'll take a dollar. And he said, while you're at it, why don't you take your caps off, ladies, and let your hair down? Because we had our hair up.

We dressed like men, we looked pretty bad. And we had hunting knives in our waistbands. Eleanor was very innovative. She was a brave one.

I was a follower, but pretty soon it seemed like the right thing to do. And so we hiked along the coast with the most amazing kind of experiences. So many people wanted to shelter us and take us in. We took jobs.

One in particular was with a packing plant, orange, Sunkist orange packing plant. Sometimes it was okay to deceive people that we were men. We didn't take our caps off, you know, and we stuck together and stayed away. And in the Monterey Peninsula, it was not developed at that point in time, two years after the war, just small motels, a little business of some kind here and there. But if you've ever been to Monterey, it's a coastline that is so stunning. And those jagged rocks. So we would find little ledges we could sit on and watch the sea lions.

We slept on the beach. And you're listening to Milka Bayman tell her real life story, her Rosie the Riveter story, and what happened after. Because my goodness, after working all that time, making all that money, she didn't want to return to the old life in the old ways.

And as her male relatives said, your mother will keep you till you're 100. And so she picked a place on the map, Phoenix, and then on the word of someone else, just picked Monterey, and up she went. As breezy and easy as the wind, having lived through something really hard, and it weighing on her and weighing on so many Americans, because it's so true, the emotional wreckage was still there, she said. So many of the men and women didn't come home. They were lost in action or dead.

It was a black cloud that hung over us for a long time. And her rebuttal, live life, get going. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Milka Bayman's story, a real life Rosie the Riveter story, here on Our American Stories. MUSIC And we continue with the story of Milka Bayman, a real life Rosie the Riveter story.

In her own words, let's return to Milka. Actually, our first ride from Phoenix was with an old man. We left at seven in the morning, and we arrived at midnight on Long Beach.

And no development at all. A full moon, and if that didn't look spooky, you could see the ocean undulating, it looked silvery, and then there was these big round balls bobbing up and down. But we slept the night on the beach.

There was nobody there. We just lined up our suitcases for a wind barrier. And that's the kind of stuff that happened, you know, all along. And in Monterey, we were looking for a place to sleep, and we also took advantage of the YWCA's as we went along, and Santa Barbara, and different places wherever we could clean up and be human, be women again, you know. So they were a huge help.

They never questioned our awful, you know, I mean, we're grubby from sleeping up. So anyway, they would take us in, and the house mothers were not approving, but, you know, do your parents know you're doing this? No, ma'am. So that's how it went. Oh, my goodness. Takes me back. I was making more money than my papa.

Wow. Wages were very low at that point in time. For me to be making a dollar and a half, and of course everything was rationed. Shoes, you know, if you wanted fine clothing and really something, you could get on the bus and go through the tunnel and go to Windsor, Canada.

They weren't rationing anything. So you could buy all kinds of finery and whatever you wanted in Canada, and it seemed kind of unpatriotic. But shoes were no longer being made out of leather.

Everything was being saved for the military. So if you go to a shoe store to buy shoes, it's made out of a new product. No plastics existed then.

So it would be compressed cardboard of some kind. The uppers might be made out of a fabric that was flimsy, that was not destined to go into the military for uniforms or anything else. No silk was available because that went into the parachutes. Wool was not available in clothing because all of that went to the troops in Europe where it might be cold. But the shoes didn't last very long.

The arch would break down, but that was all part of it. It was just we were living on shoestrings, but everybody swapped. You had to have stamps for certain products. If you wanted coffee or butter or something like that, you could swap with somebody who said, I don't drink coffee, you can have my stamps for that, and give me your butter stamps. And they said, oh, eat margarine. My mother says, I don't buy that junk. She couldn't understand it because it looked like lard. The margarine was in a plastic bag. That was the first plastic that I saw. It was chalk like Crisco with a little capsule in there you'd break, and then you could knead the package until it took on a yellow color. And my mother said, my family's not going to eat that, butter or nothing.

But she was from Europe, she didn't trust that stuff. Every penny that I could really, I had a surplus. Can you imagine 12-hour days, seven days a week, what I was making at overtime and double time?

It was a fortune. So I was buying $100 bonds a month, and you could get a $100 bond for $75, and that would be deducted from my paycheck. A $50 bond was $37.50. I would get those every other week. For $18.75, I could get a $25 bond. I got those every week.

Sometimes I get more. By the time the war was over, I had about $5,800 in mature value, and I wasn't going to spend any of it. And when I got married, my husband didn't know about it because I felt Rosie made that money.

And it didn't hurt because there was a lot that I could use it for. Actually, $850 of it paid for a heating system for the house in Lakewood. My husband said, we can't afford to put a furnace in this house. And the contractor kept saying, you won't be able to heat the house with that little space heater, Bob. He said, this is a big house. And my husband said, no, I've made up my mind.

My mortgage is all set. I'm not going to start with that again. And so the contractor, Peter Contos, I still remember a nice Greek man, he said, can't you persuade Bob to get a heating system? We need to do duct work.

We should do that before we close up the ceilings. And I said, no, he's out of it. I said, I'll tell you what, you price a heating system, and I'll see what I can do. So he priced it down to the penny. And he said, you have a choice of two kinds of systems.

You can burn number one oil, fine oil, or you can burn number two oil, which is just as good, but the only problem with number two oil, if you don't change the filter in your furnace often enough, your ceiling will be black around the ducts. I said, I'll take number two oil. So it cost $832, and I forget how many cents. And I never told my husband. I don't think he even knew it until he moved in the house.

It didn't cool the house, just heat, and it did a great job of heating. But that was my big expenditure of rosy money, the first money I spent. Imagine that. And for other needy things, furniture as we need it. My husband could have lived with orange crates.

Well, he took advantage of the GI Bill and became an attorney, and so it was frugal. So every once in a while I'd say, how about I buy a sofa? He said, okay with me.

How about I buy this? Okay with me. It worked, it worked, got us through it. I think as we get older it becomes more meaningful because we're looking at the youth of America, and we like to preserve it and we like to think that what we did was important. But we're also fearful that unless we keep some remnant of patriotism going, it might not last.

And so the whole patriotic idea. And I wrote a book in which I have high hopes for it, but there's a lot in it about this one character who is really a rosy in disguise. But she's kind of rough around the edges, and she's one of the main characters, and I named her Millie, which I was called on occasion too. So Millie's big reason, what she did during the war, fictionally, was to take care of some of the southern girls who came to Detroit by having a small hotel. But her goal was to go back to Detroit and to see what she could do by inspiring the veterans of our wars and the American Legion. Rosie wants to go back to Detroit to fire them up, to do some of the things that they used to because they started out in the 1800s educating youth, they had scholarships of all kinds, they also had camping, they also were keeping the fires of patriotism going. Little did they know that they were going to be looking at World War II. And so right now the legions are dead or dying. And so last year I thought maybe I could do something about that.

Contact some Rosies. Maybe we could have some kind of programs to inspire the grandchildren of what's left of the veterans to keep us reminded that it isn't free. Freedom is not free.

You pay for it. Everybody that knew anybody lost a child. A lot of nurses died on the front lines.

It still hangs over my head really because I'm afraid of what's going on in the world. I'm not afraid that America can't mobilize. We didn't know anything about mobilizing then.

We were practically without any armament that our spear would hold us together. But the enemy is much bigger at this point in time. And we could be hit pretty hard. But I think Americans can survive. I shouldn't say I think.

I know. I know Americans can survive. We have the spear. Because we're so diversified is what makes us strong. We're not just an isolated country with one language, one religion, one government. We've got it all.

We're like a little package of M&Ms. And you're listening to Milka Bayman and a real-life Rosie the Riveter and a special thanks to the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center. They do great work.

And you can go to AtlantaHistory.com and click Veterans History Project under the Research tab. And great job, as always, to Greg Hengler. And my goodness, some of the things that Milka said. I was making more money than my pops. I had $5800 saved.

I didn't spend any of it. That was Rosie money. And the Rosie money she deployed whenever she felt like it. Again, that independence that she got, that so many women in this country got, becoming Rosie the Riveters. By the way, she was also fearful. Unless we keep some remnant of patriotism, it might get lost, she said. Everyone who knew anyone lost someone, she said. And that it hangs over all of our heads still to this day. Milka Bateman's story, a real-life Rosie the Riveter story, here on Our American Stories.