Michigan Rosies remembered in Yankee Air Museum exhibit

Yankee Air Museum is honoring the real Michigan women behind World War II icon Rosie the Riveter with a new exhibit “Women Answer the Call.”

The exhibit, which opened on Veterans Day, depicts the working life of women at Willow Run, a Ypsilanti-adjacent manufacturing plant that operated during World War II.

The plant produced B-24 bomber planes as part of a $200 million government contract with Ford Motor Co. in 1941. A thriving boost to Michigan’s economy, the plant was known as the world’s largest factory at the time.           

The voices of the original women workers, known as Rosies, surround museum-goers as they make their way through the exhibit. In one video panel, a former worker describes her career as a riveter and crane operator at the plant.

“We did what we had to do,” Margaret Cramer, a Detroit native born in 1921, said in the video. “I mean, come on. Sit by and wait for people to help? You get up and help. Do what you can do.”

The plant’s workforce included Black and white women of all ages.

At peak production, women at the plant completely built one B-24 every 55 minutes, according to exhibit signage alongside lifelike displays of women working inside a plane frame.

Other interactive displays show how women would work in pairs to rivet metal plates together by shooting rivets with a gun and smoothing out the rivets.

By 1945, the Willow Run Bomber Plant produced 70 percent of U.S. B-24 planes as crew members slept and waited for the finished planes on nearby cots, according to the exhibit.

Though adopted by later feminist movements, the famous Rosie the Riveter poster originally represented factory women such as Cramer, who later died in 2012, the exhibition explains.

More than eighty years later, “Women Answer the Call” is bringing the history of Michigan and local Rosies to life again, said Alan Darbe, a Yankee Air Museum docent.

“I didn’t know anything about them until I started becoming a docent,” Darbe said. “It’s been amazing, what they did. They did every job that was needed to be done.”

Many people attended the exhibit’s Nov. 11 grand opening, where several original and representative Rosies were present to speak on their experiences, he said.

With this exhibit, museum visitors can witness a snapshot of life in Michigan during a booming industrial period, Darbe said.

“Like England’s battles were won on the playing field of Eton, America’s were won on the assembly lines of Detroit,” one display quote from UAW Leader Walter Reuther reads.

The exhibit is open from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays and is open on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.