With her rolled-up, ready-to-go sleeves, Esther Horne recalls the famous Rosie herself. Horne helped keep the U.S. working during the war at Gossack’s Machine Shop in Queens.
Esther Horne clearly remembers the smell.
“We worked in a constant spray of turpentine and we stank,” she says of her time in a Queens machine shop while her husband was fighting in World War II.
“You wore your work clothes, which were kept in a locker, [but] when I got home, my sister always said, ‘Go to the shower!’ ”
Seventy years after the famous “We Can Do It!” poster was created, Horne is one of dozens of real-life Rosie the Riveters sharing their stories in an online video gallery.
“I didn’t have any background in any kind of machine shop work at all,” Horne tells The Daily News.
Now 89 and living in Chelsea, Horne was interviewed for “The Real Rosie the Riveter Project,” an oral history collection that documents their stories in a series of videos on a New York University Web site.
The famous “We Can Do It” poster, which popularized the idea of women replacing men at factories during the war, features a woman in a blue-collar shirt and red bandana flexing her bicep.
A photograph of Harlem-born Horne from around that time could easily have filled in for the feminist icon.
She’s standing outside Gossack’s Machine Shop in Long Island City, wearing khakis, a button-down shirt and cap, and has her hands on her hips.
“I was between ages 19 and 21,” Horne says of the photo. “When we entered the war, I was able to get into this machine shop. It was easy to get a job in those days because there was a labor shortage.”
Horne was living in Washington Heights at the time and took two trains to get to work. She remembers Long Island City being extremely poor, its streets lined with factories.
Horne says she had always planned to go to college and find a job, she just hadn’t expected to be working in a shop.
“In the machine shop, you were assigned whatever came in,” Horne recalls. “I worked drill press and milling machine and a screw machine. We had small parts that we worked on. We never knew what we were working on because they were parts of things.
“And we weren’t supposed to know, I don’t think,” she adds.
“The Real Rosie the Riveter Project” was born out of NYU alum Elizabeth Hemmerdinger’s research for a play she wrote as a student. It won a playwriting award and had a small theatrical production. Later, Hemmerdinger asked filmmaker friend Anne de Mare to collaborate on a musical version.
“We realized as we began to do deeper research that there were between 8 and 16 million women who had worked in what had been traditionally men’s jobs when they went off to war,” Hemmerdinger says. “And they had never been counted.”
