The original Rosie the Riveter put her money into helping public broadcasting
Rosalind Walter, who has died aged 95, was a prominent American philanthropist who also had a convincing claim to be the first ‘‘Rosie the Riveter’’, the symbol of women’s contribution to the war effort and latter-day feminist icon.
Many women laid claim to be the original Rosie. When Norman Rockwell drew his version of the character – a grimy-faced, muscular woman in denim overalls – for a magazine cover in 1943, his model was Mary Doyle Keefe, who died in 2015. When Howard Miller drew his famous ‘‘We Can Do It!’’ Rosie poster for Westinghouse – featuring a factory worker, her right arm flexed, her blue work shirt’s sleeves rolled up, her black hair pulled back under a headscarf – the model was probably Naomi Parker Fraley, who died in 2018.
But Rosie the Riveter began life in 1942 as a song by John Jacob Loeb and Redd Evans which was recorded by the Four Vagabonds, an African-American vocal quartet, in early 1943.
The song, which celebrates a woman who works driving rivets on a bomber factory’s assembly line and who ‘‘keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage/Sitting up there on the fuselage’’, became a hit. By the summer of 1943, Rosie the Riveter was the United States’ most popular nickname for the roughly 6 million American women who joined the factory workforce as men went overseas to fight.
The songwriters had apparently been inspired by a newspaper column about Rosalind Walter, then Rosalind Palmer, a 19-year-old society girl working the night shift driving rivets into the metal bodies of Corsair fighter planes on the assembly line at the Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford, Connecticut – a job that had previously been reserved for men.
In the words of the song: ‘‘That little girl can do, more than a male can do/Rosie, brrrrr, the Riveter’’.
One of four children, Rosalind Palmer was born on June 24 1924, in Brooklyn, where her father, Carleton Humphreys Palmer, was president and then chairman of E R Squibb, a drug company that helped mass-produce early doses of penicillin distributed to the troops during World War II.
Her mother, Winthrop (nee Bushnell), was a professor of literature at Long Island University. Brought up in a comfortable home on Long Island and educated at the private Ethel Walker School, Connecticut, Rosalind Palmer joined the wartime labour force after leaving school.
After the war she worked as a nurse’s aide at a Manhattan hospital and married Henry Thompson, a lieutenant with the Naval Reserve.
The marriage was dissolved in the 1950s and in 1956 she married Henry Walter, a lawyer who later became president and then chairman and chief executive of International Flavors and Fragrances, a company which manufactured the scents and tastes for tens of thousands of consumer products.
Both together and independently – Rosalind’s wealth partly derived from her father – the Walters became important philanthropists and benefactors.
Rosalind became particularly known for her support for educational public television programming in the US. She was one of the principal benefactors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and was the largest individual supporter of WNET, the US’s flagship PBS station, in New York. WNET today brings arts, education and public affairs programming to more than 5 million viewers each week.
She had been drawn to public television because its documentaries and other programmes had helped her to fill the gaps in her education after her wartime service denied her the opportunity to go to college.
She is survived by a son from her first marriage. – Telegraph Group