January 27, 2025 3:03 am
Milka Bayman shares her experiences as a real-life Rosie the Riveter, working in airplane factories during World War II, and her journey to the West Coast after the war. She recounts her struggles, friendships, and the emotional aftermath of the war, highlighting the importance of patriotism and the resilience of American women.
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The new Roku pro series a smart TV built by the streaming pros. 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 Fairmount, 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 train fare so she could come to Detroit and then her life started all over again.
She had a very very harsh background and a part of Europe that was not developing very well living very 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 that who 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 and especially when the war was going on and so many of our young men were drafted they were going to Europe to try to re-salvage whatever they could have 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 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 motor town 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 and from the newspapers of silhouettes of airplanes enemy aircraft that in case some 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 we were 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 I said I'm going to be working trolley and got myself down to the factory and they signed me up for a three-week course and whatever I needed to know in 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 oh they said now that's a tip of a b17 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 that 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 and it was 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 and fried fish and iced tea sweet iced tea it was 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 well I should say mostly from the southern area but that 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 and 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 too 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 what are you looking for in a new smart tv 4k picture quality high quality and immersive sound a sleek design all of those are givens but only the new Roku pro series has all of those and the Roku streaming experience an award-winning os get fast easy access to all your apps like iHeart where you can stream all your favorite music radio and podcasts all day and regular all-inclusive trips to Roku city the new Roku pro series a smart tv built by the streaming pros with the best all-inclusive vacation deals to Mexico and the Caribbean booking your getaway with cheap Caribbean vacations means you have more freedom to do your deal whether you want to enjoy snorkeling endless margaritas and more or simply soak up the sun and sand in a tropical paradise cheap Caribbean vacations has your deal for that plan and book the exact getaway you want at exactly the right price for you by using our exclusive budget beach finder or find a featured adults only all-inclusive package to seekers resorts and spas and do your deal at cheap caribbean.com hello it is ryan and i was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacassino.com i looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing they're also playing chumbacassino everybody's loving having fun with it chumbacassino is home to hundreds of casino style games you can play for free anytime anywhere so sign up now at chumbacassino.com and grab your free welcome bonus sponsored by chumbacassino no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 18 plus terms and conditions apply did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach meet greenlight the debit card and money app for families with greenlight you can send money to kids quickly set up chores automate allowance and keep an eye on what your kids are spending with real-time notifications kids learn to earn save and spend wisely and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place try greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com slash i heart and we continue with our american stories in the story of milka baymond a real-life rosie the riveter let's pick up where we last left off we 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 for it 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 okay 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 uh salvador dolly 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 frenchy calling himself frenchy 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 it was like this for a few moments and i started 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 it went to other shops as well but a lot of the union men were there you know they're 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 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 you went to the movies you could go to the nightclubs 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 uh 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 certain 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 hillbilly and i said okay i said i'm not quite comfortable with it but she's and she's about try it out and i said hi hillbilly it sounded okay i said what are you gonna call me she's i'm gonna call you a honky but so that's how it went and drusetta duncan is her name and her husband was in the military and she was really quite when we would have lunch or time off like 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 and the others kind of fell into that too so that was a happy time yeah but for me it was particularly important that america survived my parents said oh my goodness can it happen here we tried to escape all of that coming from europe so that so anyway everybody had their own story somewhere there because uh one of the co-workers 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 small room and i never cashed in the first one until it was 10 years mature but yeah everyone really was very patriotic they're all young and there are others who are first generation as i was and they have the same concerns what's going to happen to america so anyway um 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 i 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 you know 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 to where the light is back there and they were making parts for the avot cichorsky navy fighter plane no jets in those days but they 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 on onto the framework and then they spray paint it and put it in an area where the lights would dry it quickly and then spray paint more so we're those spray guns you know the hairs 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 be take any time off and when you're coming back so when she talked to me she said you're a candidate candidate she said we've been sending a lot of your young ladies who are reporting illnesses to the ywca camp it's on the shore of lake erie and i said yeah i spent some time there as a pre-teen 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 hello i heart listener we have a confession to make both i heart in this commercial you're listening to right now would probably sound a heck of a lot better on the new roku pro series tv it's got side firing speakers that fill your room with sound dobi atmos audio that puts you right in the middle of the entertainment and the ability to pair seamlessly with your home theater sound 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everybody's loving having fun with it chumbacasino is home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free anytime anywhere so sign up now at chumbacasino.com that's chumbacasino.com and live the chumba life sponsored by chumbacasino no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 18 plus terms and this message comes from green light ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy meet green light the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn save spend wisely and invest with your guardrails in place with green light you can send money to kids quickly set up chores automate allowance and keep an eye on what your kids are spending with real-time notifications join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on green light get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash i heart and we continue with our american stories and milka bayman's story a real-life rosie the riveter's story let's pick up where we last left off so the ywc it 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 you know 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 ledgers just just about the size of a kleenex box that's too you would never imagine a radio is only this big but that went on and it was got our attention because of the announcer was said we have an announcement an announcement he could 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 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 record she was still there and you had to cope with it because somebody of the young men and women didn't come home and you know which homes because when you're 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 the gold star on it you know that their their military man their soldier was never coming home he was either lost in auction or dead so you were looking at that all the time your schoolmates you could go into any neighborhood and that would be the topic of conversation you know and they'd be counting homes you'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 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 in the pacific in the philippines and all those islands that we had to do something it was a a massive massive thing to cope with after the war i said to my mother uh i have met another girl who is also having a lot of trouble coping uh we didn't date uh i was not ever i come from a best ethnic background girls are 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 and tell them that you're a bad girl and my adopted stepfather said my adopted 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 us of a with a knitting needle in my hand my eyes closed and i punched a hole up came phoenix that's how i wound up in phoenix so barbara and i got on a bus 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 uh and her daughter and they were mormon and they were so good to us and they had mrs nailer 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 was and marianne they were models from chicago they were taking a break from doing whatever they did in chicago they had fiancees and the uh also in the occupational forces so eleanor who was the uh 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 and so we were lying down there was no plastic in those days we were lying down on an oil cloth tablecloth and 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 ah 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 monterrey 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 monterrey 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 it 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 no 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 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 oh so many people wanted to shelter us and take us and we took jobs one in particular was with a a packing plant orange sunkiss orange packing plant sometimes we we let we let we it was okay to deceive people if we that we were men we didn't take our caps off you know and we stuck together and we stuck together and stayed away but and in the monterey peninsula the 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 it's a coastline that is so stunning and those jagged rocks so we would find little ledges we could sit on our rocks the sea lions ours we slept on the beach and you're listening to milka bayman tell her real life story her rosie the riveter's story and what happened after is 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 a hundred and so she picked a place on the map phoenix and then on the word of a 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's story here on our american stories roku has what you need to make your college home away from home feel more like your own make your dorm the place to be with roku tv or bring a roku 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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 looks slurry and then there was these big round balls bobbing up and down but that 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 and we also took advantage of the ywca's as we went along and santa barber on different places wherever we could clean up and be human be women again you know so that they were a huge help uh they never questioned our awful you know i mean we're we're grubby from sleeping 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 yeah 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 want to find clothing and really something you could get on the bus and go through the tunnel and go to winsor canada they weren't rationing anything so you could buy all kinds of finery and whatever you wanted in canada and it in canada and it seemed kind of um 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 has existed then so be compressed cardboard of some kind they would wear 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 so but the shoes didn't last very long the arch would break down but that was all part of it you know 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 we eat margarine my mother says i don't buy that junk she couldn't understand it because it looked like lard you know the margarine was in a plastic bag that was the first plastic that i saw it was it was chocolate like crisco with a little capsule in there you'd break and then you could knead the package till 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 syrup 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 hundred dollar bonds a month and that you could get a hundred dollar bond for 75 dollars and that would be deducted from my paycheck a fifty dollar bond was 37.50 i would get those every other week for 18.75 i could get a 25 dollar i got those every week sometimes i get more by the time the war was over i had about 5800 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 for a heating system for the house in lakewood my husband said we can't afford to put a a furnace in this house and the 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 nope i've made up my mind my mortgage is all set i'm not going to start with that again and so the contractor built 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 adamant 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're going to 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 a filter in your furnace often enough your ceiling will be black around the ducts i said i'll take number two oil so it costs eight hundred and thirty two dollars and i forget how many cents and i never told my husband yeah i don't think he even knew it until he moved in the house it wasn't 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'd 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 with this one character who is really a rosy in disguise but she's kind of rough around the edges 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 foreign 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 two i mean you know 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 uh some kind of programs to inspire the grandchildren of what's left of the veterans to keep us reminded that it reminded that it isn't free freedom is not free you pay for it everybody that knew anybody lost the child or a lot of nurses died on the front lines and and yeah it still hangs over my head really because i'm afraid with what's going on in the world i'm not afraid that america can't mobilize we would we didn't know anything about mobilizing then we're 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 spirit 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 a little package of m&ms and you're listening to milka baman 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 hangler 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 baman's story a real-life rosie the riveter story here on our american stories to all your apps like iheart where you can stream all your favorite music radio and podcasts all day and regular all-inclusive trips to roku city the new roku pro series a smart tv built by the streaming pros with the best all-inclusive vacation deals to mexico and the caribbean booking your getaway with 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