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The ADVANCE, January 13, 2021/Page 5A
OPINIONS
“I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak.”
—James Russell Lowell
editorials
A Rosie The Riveter
She talked to
me so matter-of-
factly, as if it was no
big deal.
“Yes, I worked
in the defense in
dustry from 1943
until World War II
ended,” Jane Tucker
said to me last week.
That’s when
I realized I was talking to one of the few
living “Rosie the Riveters.” You probably
remember the image on the poster of a
woman with her hair pulled
back in a red polka dot ban
dana flexing her bicep with
the words, “We can do it,”
printed across the top. The
poster helped recruit female
workers for defense indus
try jobs during World War
II, when American women
were called upon to enter
the workforce to fill gaps left
by men fighting in the war.
“Rosie the Riveter” became a
symbol of female patriotism.
Her name is Jane Tucker,
and she lives about twenty minutes from
my home. She’ll be 94 years old in a few
weeks and is as sharp as a tack.
“I grew up in Lineville, Alabama, and
the Great Depression hit my family hard,”
she told me. “It was just my mother, my old
er sister, and me, and all three of us worked
hard just to survive. I worked at a five and
dime store and made a dollar a day or 60
cents for a half day’s work on school days.”
In 1943, just after Jane turned 16, she,
her mother, and sister decided to move to
Savannah and work at the shipyard, both
because they needed money and it seemed
like “the right thing to do.”
“The three of us took the train. It was
wall-to-wall GIs in their khaki uniforms,
and we sat on our suitcases because there
were no seats available,” she said. “I had
never seen anything like it,” she said refer
ring to the shipyard. “There were 6,000
people working on every shift. Three-sto
ry cranes and supports framed the ships.
I started at $1.20 per hour for the first six
weeks as a trainee, and that’s when I learned
to weld. The wall panels of the ships were
positioned with the cranes, and we welded
the panels together.”
Southeastern Shipbuilding Corpora
tion in Savannah churned out 88 Liberty
Ships for the war effort between 1942 and
1945.
“It was hard work — and sometimes
dangerous,” Tucker remembered. “You had
to climb up high and weld, and you had
to be so careful not to get burned or have
a hand or finger pinched between metal
plates. My sister actually saw workers lose
their footing and fall three stories to their
death. I never saw anyone die there.”
The summer months were unbearably
hot and humid, especially for the welders in
full coveralls working in the Savannah sun.
“We wore pants during a time when
women didn’t dress like that,” she told me.
“We were often shunned by the people of
Savannah. They didn’t think
we were good women. They
thought we were trying to be
like men.”
“It was the first time in
my life that I met Yankees,”
she said. “Growing up in Ala
bama, we just didn’t meet a
lot of folks from the northern
states, and I had been told
that Yankees were bad peo
ple. In Savannah, at night, me
and the other women would
go to the USO dance hall and
dance with each other and the
GIs on shore leave. I met some really won
derful Yankees there, and I realized that I
had been wrong to judge them that way.”
Jane and the other women who worked
at the shipyard knew how important the
mission was.
“We lived together, we took care of
one another, we took care of each other’s
children, we worried about the men who
were serving in the war ...” she said. “We all
made sacrifices.”
Tucker welded ships until the end of
the war. Up until the pandemic struck, she
visited schools and events and shared her
memories with others. She was happy to
talk with me last week and answer all my
questions.
Last month, President Trump signed
a bill collectively awarding a Congressio
nal Gold Medal of Honor to the 16 mil
lion women who worked to build vehicles,
weaponry and ammunition during the war
— a much-deserved honor for our nation’s
“Rosies.”
Today, most “Rosies” are well in their
nineties. They are as rare as our elderly
WWII veterans, and like their male coun
terparts, they wave off special accolades
and the word, “hero.” But make no mistake
about it — these women are beloved mem
bers of our nation’s Greatest Generation.
They are heroes, too.
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle
A Soup Kind of Day
By Joe Phillips
Dear Me
Oh yum.
Last night we had
a supper of home
made potato soup.
Potato soup is a
recently acquired fa
vorite in that it wasn't
something my mom
fixed. Ever.
The KWs father
was a pure meat and potatoes guy, and the
potato soup had some meat in it.
The soup only includes butter, corn
starch, some nutmeg, milk and of course the
cooked potatoes.
Yesterday I cheated by using dehydrated
hash browns. I thought it would give a more
mouth-full feel, and it seemed to work since
we ate all of it.
We use a lot of dehydrated potatoes here,
mostly for mashed potatoes. I can't tell the
difference between a bowl of mashed pota
toes from scratch or from dehydrated flakes.
There is a secret, and that is to forget the
label instructions and just don't use water at
all. We make it with milk and add sour cream.
Works good all the time.
At lunch of a recent funeral, the church
ladies took note of the weather and piled on
three kinds of soup. One was chili, and it was
good, but the beef and veggie soup was
worth taking home.
It was mostly made of veggies out of a
can with a few chunks of fresh carrots, pota
toes, chili beans and chunks of beef. The
chunks gave you something to chew on since
the cooked veggies tend to get mushy. I can't
identify what the chili beans added, but you
knew they were there.
There isn't anything from a can that ex
ceeds the taste and cost of soup from your
own kitchen.
We keep jars of leftovers in the freezer,
and when we're ready for a soup night we
clean out the freezer.
When I was testing the waters of Mid
western life, I learned they have different
names for things that are common down
here.
“Chili” is called “chili soup.” They don't
seem to make thick chib out there.
When I cook pinto beans, she calls it
bean soup, same with black-eyed peas, “pea
soup.”
I know what she's talking about, so I
stopped trying to reeducate her on the sub
ject of beans.
I think I touched on this, maybe not, but
when I can get away with it I whip up a jug of
nonfat dry milk.
For drinking it has to be cold, and I in
clude a tablespoon of whipping cream to re
place the fat removed from the milk in pro
cessing. With the cream it is just right for
drinking and to sop up cereal, or what they in
the Midwest call “breakfast food.”
As I write you this, we have a soft rain
falling and you know what that means.
Yep, more soup and combread.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
Requiem For The Woman
Who Shares My Name
She wasn’t
thrilled when I
told her I had
been invited to
write an
occasional
column for a
local
publication.
After more than
three decades in
the Bell System
and three arduous years as part of the
staging of the 1996 Centennial
Olympic Games, she thought it time to
enjoy a long-awaited retirement. But if
I did choose to embark on this new
venture, there was one non-negotiable
condition. I was never to use her name
in print. She wanted anonymity.
The occasional column in one
paper soon became weekly. The one
paper turned into some four dozen
newspapers across Georgia and at last
count some 1,500-plus columns. True
to my word, I never revealed her name.
Instead, she became The Woman Who
Shares My Name. Her efforts to feed
me broccoli and my creative ways of
avoiding it became the stuff of legends.
So much for anonymity.
Today, I break that long-ago
pledge. Jane Yarbrough was her name,
and as I write these words, she is with
the angels, having succumbed to a
relatively brief illness and a merciful
passing the week before Christmas.
Ours was a romance that began in
high school. It started innocently
enough. We were good friends who
shared a few classes together. I needed
a date for our school’s Valentine Ball
and she agreed to go with me. That was
it. Or so I thought. Who would have
guessed this would be the start of a
partnership that would span six
decades.
To say it was all hearts and flowers
would be incorrect. I can’t imagine two
more different personalities being
joined together in holy matrimony. I
was aggressive. She was passive. I was
ambitious. She was practical. I was a
risk-taker. She avoided risks. I was all
about career. She was all about home
and hearth. Then God did one of His
miracles. She managed to eventually
tame my wild side. I brought her out of
her shell and watched her blossom into
a graceful, confident woman.
I’ve told the story often but it
bears repeating. In high school, she
was a member of the National Honor
Society and definite college material,
but because of the times in which we
lived, most young women didn’t go to
college then. They were expected to
become secretaries and/or housewives.
She did both and did them well, but
there was something missing in her
life.
Years later, with two children in
college, the family decided it was time
for Mom to scratch the itch she had
always had for all things medical. We
sent her off to Kennesaw State
University to obtain her nursing
degree.
It was a struggle for her hitting the
books some 25 years after high school.
That meant my taking over the
household chores which was an
By Dick Yarbrough
education in itself. (Do you know how
many settings there are on a washing
machine? And that if you put red
clothes in the wash with white clothes
you end up with pink clothes?)
But she persevered. The stay-at-
home mom became Jane Yarbrough,
registered nurse, with a proud and
rewarding career as an occupational
nurse at Delta Air Lines until hanging
it up to join me on my Olympic travels.
While at Kennesaw State, she also
introduced her young lab partner to
our son. That resulted in a marriage
that now numbers some 35 years, two
grandsons and four great
grandchildren.
Somehow, I had always assumed
she would outlive me and my pedal-to-
the-metal lifestyle. God had other
plans.
Her sharp-as-a-tack mind began to
fade. Always a detail person, she
became noticeably forgetful. That,
coupled with chronic health issues,
began a downward spiral that
culminated in hospital stays, skilled
nursing facilities and hospice. And
then peace.
I have heard from so many people
who talk about the impact she had on
their lives. They talk about her
kindness and generosity. They talk
about her genuineness. She had the
opportunity to meet U.S. presidents
and first ladies, politicians of all stripes,
CEOs and celebrities. She dealt with
them as she did with the person
checking her out at the grocery store.
Kindly and with no pretensions. What
you saw with her is what you got.
These have been difficult days, but
I am comforted in the fact that Jane
Yarbrough has left this a much better
world than she found it. She was the
Woman Who Shared My Name. She
was and always will be the wind
beneath my wings. I thank God we
shared this journey.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at
dick@dickyarbrough.com; at P.O. Box
725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139 or on
Facebook at www.facebook.com/
dickyarb.
^Ainiante
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