A Few Words About Mom
My mom was Rosie the Riveter in World War II. It's a fact! She worked with Dad at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach. Mom installed electrical components in the cockpits of either B-17 or B-29 bombers that kept the flight crews warm when flying at high altitude. She called them "suit heats." As the war ended the bombers no longer flew, and Mom, like other Rosies, was laid off.
Mom was a meek and retiring woman, more comfortable in the shadows providing support than on stage in a lead role. At our local Presbyterian church Mom was never a Deacon. Never aspired to be. Never "rose to power" as the garbage on the internet says. Mom was one member on the Deacon's Committee, a group of women who each performed tasks that needed to be done for the church. For example, one of Mom's jobs was to clean and set up the serving pieces for Easter Communion. She asked me to help her and I readily agreed. We went to some backrooms of the church on the Saturday before Easter. Got the silver service pieces out of storage and cleaned and dusted them - a tall stack of round silver trays, each with numerous round holes filled with small communion glasses. In the movie "Places in the Heart," both the beginning of the film and the ending occur in a small wooden church. At the end they are having communion and using the exact same silver service Mom and I prepared: the round trays, the numerous little glasses we filled with grape juice. But back then we didn't have wafers for bread. Instead, Mom cut bread into little cubes and toasted them. Worked fine.
It's true that Mom worked as a seamstress to make ends meet after the war. And we always had a sewing machine in the house. Mom also worked in a local tile factory running a kiln on the overnight shift. But Mom settled into school cafeteria work in the Westminster School District. She took schooling and trained to become cafeteria manager, a job she kept until retirement.