Alyce the Riveter!
100 years young in December 2024
During my 18th summer I traveled from our farm in Iowa to see my fiancé, Dave on his first leave in Minneapolis from the Navy May 18-26, in 1943, and decided to stay. My sister, Leota and her husband, Del, lived there and were happy to have me stay at their home at 3216 Hennepin Avenue.
That first summer I took a job handling claims for an insurance agency but at the end of the summer Del told me that there were good paying jobs at the Defense Plant and that I should ask them for some exorbitant hourly wage. That was so typically Del’s style, and I took his advice. The interview went well enough, and I secured the job, but they laughed at me when I told them what I wanted to be paid.
I went to work for the Defense Plant assembling gas masks on the night
shift. The plant was on 4th Ave. South and Virginia Fitzgerald, my friend from home, also came to stay at Del and Leota’s and worked at the plant with me. We were assembling the masks, and it was very hard on our hands. We worked there quite a while, until sometime after I was married, but before Dave was discharged from the Navy. As the war was ending, they began closing things down there as well. The plant eventually closed, and I lost the job there.
Much later, when I was a young mother of two and Dave and I were living in Kenmare, North Dakota, I had joined a group of people who were quite concerned because we were only 30 miles from the Canadian border and there were several missile sites near there. The group decided to keep watch for Russian planes from the top of the school house. The school had a ladder on the side of the building that led to the roof and a little shelter up there. I was terrified that even if I did see a plane, I would not recognize the markings and would not know if it were Russian or not. Fortunately, we never did see a plane and I think half of the town thought we were crazy, but I took my turn.