The fastest gun in the west - Elinor Otto died aged 104
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The fastest gun in the west - Elinor Otto died aged 104
from an Obit. in this week's Economist:-
The longest-working “Rosie the Riveter” died on November 12th, aged 104
[img]file:///C:/Users/ROBW~1.CHI/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image002.jpg[/img]image: Getty Images
Nov 22nd 2023
Busy, busy, busy. So Elinor Otto liked to be: always doing, accomplishing something. Starting every working day at 4am with a shower and a drive. Parking the car a long way from the plant to get a brisk morning walk. Then, at 6am, getting down to work on Boeing’s assembly line in Long Beach. She liked neatness, too. So every Thursday, when she felt her hair was mussed or her nails getting dull, she went to the beauty parlour. And her working days were spent firing neat rows of rivets, brrr, brr, brrr, into the wing sections of C-17 cargo planes.
That was in her 90s. By then she had spent almost 70 years as a riveter and would have gone on, if Boeing hadn’t closed the plant. She made a fine show on the factory floor: red hair, bright pink or purple nail polish. What’s that old bag doing here? she imagined some colleagues saying. Well, if they thought she couldn’t handle the two-foot rivet gun, or being on her feet all day, they were wrong. She might be slight, but she was strong. And she’d been using that gun since before most of them were born.
It was in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, that she became a riveter - she and one of her two sisters both became riveters at Rohr Aircraft in San Diego, where they lived, while her other sister was a battleship welder in the Bay Area. The money was great: 65 cents an hour, about twice what she could get as a sad, immobile typist. It was a no-brainer to change. Besides, she was newly divorced with a baby and her mother to look after. The one drawback was the hours, which were crushing. But she and her friends would find an incentive to jump up and get dressed by playing on the wind-up phonograph the new 78rpm record by the Four Vagabonds, a merry number with a plunky ukulele called “Rosie the Riveter”:
But not all the men were away. Those who remained were wary of the women at first. They didn’t believe women could do their jobs, either. Elinor, like the others, had no doubt she could meet the challenge. There was no time for formal training, so she had to listen to and carefully copy the men for a while. But even on her first day she astonished them by fiercely wielding a big mallet to drive a crooked piece of metal precisely into a casting. No one else could work it out. After that, she soon went faster than they did. And since she was pretty, with blue eyes and masses of dark hair, the men started to hang around her.
Everything about the job appealed: the camaraderie, the routine. Other “female jobs” were boring or even stupid. But once the war was over and the men returned, women were expected to go back to such work, or stay at home. But riveting was proper work, and by 1951 she was back doing it at Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego. “I don’t act in movies,” she liked to say. “I build planes.” She was deeply proud of that. In wartime, working mostly on the noses and fuselages of B-24 bombers, she felt completely absorbed in this huge thing, “working for victory”. Every rivet she fired into place made each plane stronger. But afterwards, too, when she moved on to McDonnell Douglas and then to Boeing, every C-17 cargo plane she riveted (that is, every one of the 279 produced in the 49 years she was there) thrilled her with the thought that it was taking food somewhere, or going to help some other country. They could fly safely, thanks to her.
Two years before, in 2017, she had taken her first flight in one of the C-17s she had helped to build. C-17s remained her favourite to work on, alongside the B-17 bomber and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. They took off towards the heavens. She didn’t especially want aircraft and rivet guns to be waiting for her up there. But she hoped God meant to keep her busy. ■
The longest-working “Rosie the Riveter” died on November 12th, aged 104
[img]file:///C:/Users/ROBW~1.CHI/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image002.jpg[/img]image: Getty Images
Nov 22nd 2023
Busy, busy, busy. So Elinor Otto liked to be: always doing, accomplishing something. Starting every working day at 4am with a shower and a drive. Parking the car a long way from the plant to get a brisk morning walk. Then, at 6am, getting down to work on Boeing’s assembly line in Long Beach. She liked neatness, too. So every Thursday, when she felt her hair was mussed or her nails getting dull, she went to the beauty parlour. And her working days were spent firing neat rows of rivets, brrr, brr, brrr, into the wing sections of C-17 cargo planes.
That was in her 90s. By then she had spent almost 70 years as a riveter and would have gone on, if Boeing hadn’t closed the plant. She made a fine show on the factory floor: red hair, bright pink or purple nail polish. What’s that old bag doing here? she imagined some colleagues saying. Well, if they thought she couldn’t handle the two-foot rivet gun, or being on her feet all day, they were wrong. She might be slight, but she was strong. And she’d been using that gun since before most of them were born.
It was in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, that she became a riveter - she and one of her two sisters both became riveters at Rohr Aircraft in San Diego, where they lived, while her other sister was a battleship welder in the Bay Area. The money was great: 65 cents an hour, about twice what she could get as a sad, immobile typist. It was a no-brainer to change. Besides, she was newly divorced with a baby and her mother to look after. The one drawback was the hours, which were crushing. But she and her friends would find an incentive to jump up and get dressed by playing on the wind-up phonograph the new 78rpm record by the Four Vagabonds, a merry number with a plunky ukulele called “Rosie the Riveter”:
But not all the men were away. Those who remained were wary of the women at first. They didn’t believe women could do their jobs, either. Elinor, like the others, had no doubt she could meet the challenge. There was no time for formal training, so she had to listen to and carefully copy the men for a while. But even on her first day she astonished them by fiercely wielding a big mallet to drive a crooked piece of metal precisely into a casting. No one else could work it out. After that, she soon went faster than they did. And since she was pretty, with blue eyes and masses of dark hair, the men started to hang around her.
Everything about the job appealed: the camaraderie, the routine. Other “female jobs” were boring or even stupid. But once the war was over and the men returned, women were expected to go back to such work, or stay at home. But riveting was proper work, and by 1951 she was back doing it at Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego. “I don’t act in movies,” she liked to say. “I build planes.” She was deeply proud of that. In wartime, working mostly on the noses and fuselages of B-24 bombers, she felt completely absorbed in this huge thing, “working for victory”. Every rivet she fired into place made each plane stronger. But afterwards, too, when she moved on to McDonnell Douglas and then to Boeing, every C-17 cargo plane she riveted (that is, every one of the 279 produced in the 49 years she was there) thrilled her with the thought that it was taking food somewhere, or going to help some other country. They could fly safely, thanks to her.
Two years before, in 2017, she had taken her first flight in one of the C-17s she had helped to build. C-17s remained her favourite to work on, alongside the B-17 bomber and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. They took off towards the heavens. She didn’t especially want aircraft and rivet guns to be waiting for her up there. But she hoped God meant to keep her busy. ■
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