Barbara Erickson: From "Rosie the Riveter" to B-17 Pilot (Barbara Jane Erickson) (Interview‪)‬

The cavernous interior of the aircraft factory dwarfed the metal skeleton destined to be a B-17's left wing. On an adjacent platform, a team of coverall-clad men and women lifted a section of thin aluminum from a conveyor belt and positioned the shiny square of skin over the wing's exposed ribs. They moved back as a woman wearing safety glasses and a bandanna tied over her hair moved forward and began to buck rows of rivets into place. Twenty-one-year-old Barbara Jane Erickson, part of the swing-shift wing assembly team, watched the woman work with a deftness that belied her status as one of a new breed--Rosie-the-Riveter, women working in American defense plants. Now Barbara, too, was one of them. She had been up since six that morning, had attended classes at the University of Washington where she was a senior, and then reported at 5 p.m. for work on the Boeing Aircraft Company assembly line in her hometown of Seattle.