On June 8, 1943, at the north Tarrytown plant of Eastern Aircraft, Jennie Fiorito and Rose Bonavita set a record by riveting an entire trailing edge wing assembly for an Avenger torpedo bomber in less than six hours.  

They started at midnight and finished just as the sun was rising.  

Jennie and Rose had been working together as a riveting team for about six months when they decided to try and set a record.  (Bonevita’s 1996 obituary in The Journal News asserted that the idea came about to help “raise flagging morale at the factory.”)

They asked for approval from their supervisor and were given the go-ahead.  As word spread throughout the factory, the girls were a bit nervous, knowing that everyone was watching them closely. But as Jennie said, “The record doesn’t really mean anything, the main thing, as we see it, is to get out as many wings as we possibly can.  We like to work and we feel that we, personally, are responsible to those boys for producing as much as we can as quickly as we can.”  

For their effort, they received a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Born in 1916, Jennie was the youngest of six children whose parents emigrated from Faenza, Italy in 1909.  The Chicarellis lived on a farm next to the Scarborough Country Club, and Jennie and her siblings attended a one-room schoolhouse in the area. Jennie would leave school at the age of 16 to work as a trimmer at the Fisher/General Motors Body Plant in North Tarrytown. With the advent of WWII, that factory was converted to an Eastern Aircraft plant in mid-1942, and primarily built Avenger torpedo bombers

By April 1944, nearly half of the workers at the north Tarrytown plant were women, a significant increase from pre-war conditions.  However, many would lose those jobs after the war ended and the men began returning home from the front.

After the war, Jennie would go on to work at Bell Telephone in Ossining, then transfer to NY Telephone in White Plains, where she would retire as a Supervisor after 30 years. 

FUN FACT:
“Rosie the Riveter”

Though we’re referring to Jennie and her partner Rosa as “Rosie the Riveters”, it’s a title that does not refer to one single person – there are many who are considered to be “Rosie.”

According to the Library of Congress, the first use of the term “Rosie the Riveter” came from a song of that title, written in 1942 by Redd Evans and Jacob Loeb and recorded by the Four Vagabonds. [Here’s a version recorded by Allen Miller and his Orchestra in 1943.]

The story goes that the songwriters were inspired by a 1942 newspaper article in which they read about Rosalind Palmer, a Connecticut society girl who took a job as a riveter at a Stratford, Connecticut factory that built Corsair fighter planes.

Then there’s that iconic “We Can Do It!” poster (above) – it is now believed that the model for the image was Naomi Parker, who worked in Alameda, California at the Naval Air Station and had been photographed at work on the assembly line.  However, for decades the model was believed to be Geraldine Hoff Doyle.   

Normal Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover published on Memorial Day, May 29, 1943 was modeled on Mary Doyle Keefe, a 19-year-old phone operator from Arlington, Virginia.  This poster toured the country and encouraged people to buy war bonds.

But alliteration works, and Rose Bonavita is as good a Rosie the Riveter as any.  And so is her riveting partner Jennie Chicarelli Fiorito Windas.