Five years ago, we told you the story of how Geraldine Doyle was identified as the inspiration for the Rosie the Riveter
poster. Doyle died in 2010 at age 86. Now evidence has come to light
that she wasn’t the model for Rosie at all! Dr. James Kimble of Seton
Hall University followed the story of how Doyle was identified as Rosie
and was bothered by how little fact-checking went into it. So he decided
to investigate himself. He began working on tracing the provenance of
the photograph that Westinghouse used when their graphics department
designed the poster. None of the available copies of the photo had any
information on them, and the identification was made by Doyle herself.
So
he called all the various wire services and stock photo collections
that might now own the photo. He called naval bases and photo experts.
He did endless Google searches. He leafed through endless issues of
WWII-era magazines, looking for the photo in question in the hope it
might be captioned with a date or a place. This took months, and got him
pretty much nowhere — though a particular naval base in California kept
popping up, a location that piqued Kimble’s interest because Doyle had
worked at a factory in Michigan.
And then, in a feat of both
persistence and luck, yet another Google search led Kimble to a Memphis
company that sells old newspaper photos. The company just happened to be
selling the photo he was looking for, the photo of the woman leaning
over the lathe. He bought it, and when it arrived in the mail he
realized it had the caption information he had been searching for on the
back.
The photo was taken March 24, 1942, in Alameda,
California. That pretty much eliminated Doyle as the photo’s subject,
because she worked in a plant in Michigan and hadn’t even started there
by that date.
Besides, the woman in the photo had a name.
Not only that, but Noami Parker Fraley is still around at age 94 and living in California. Read the story of
how Kimble found the real Rosie at the Omaha World-Herald.
Five years ago, we told you the story of how Geraldine Doyle was identified as the inspiration for the Rosie the Riveter
poster. Doyle died in 2010 at age 86. Now evidence has come to light
that she wasn’t the model for Rosie at all! Dr. James Kimble of Seton
Hall University followed the story of how Doyle was identified as Rosie
and was bothered by how little fact-checking went into it. So he decided
to investigate himself. He began working on tracing the provenance of
the photograph that Westinghouse used when their graphics department
designed the poster. None of the available copies of the photo had any
information on them, and the identification was made by Doyle herself.
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