'I can tell you history': A real-life Rosie the Riveter tells her World War II story at 95

Show Caption

PHOENIX – Caroline Kilgore was a senior in high school when she went to work assembling the wings of C-47 aircraft at a factory outside Rockford, Illinois, in the final year of World War II. 

She made 75 cents an hour.

She wrote letters to her boyfriend stationed overseas. He served on D-Day, she said, and by the end of the war, he was a lieutenant.

When he returned to the U.S., he had developed a stutter. Kilgore said she asked him what was wrong: “He says, ‘If you look out and you see your man being killed, you would stutter, too.’”

At 95 “and a half," Kilgore continues to share the stories of her life with younger generations “because history needs to be remembered.”

Now living in Sun City, Arizona, she continues to stay on top of current events, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She said it scares her because she knows the costs that come with war and the sacrifices it requires. Many of the boys she went to school with who served in the war didn’t come back. “They died for you and for me to have freedom,” she said. 

'The Six Triple Eight': A Black female unit served in Europe during WWII. Now, they're getting a congressional honor.

Kilgore also is aware of the deep divisions in the U.S. 

Still, she thinks Americans could again rise to the challenge her generation did.  “We can probably do it, but, boy, is it going to be work,” she said.

A real Rosie the Riveter

Kilgore didn’t know the term for it while working in the factory, but she was a Rosie —one of the millions of women who entered the U.S. workforce during WWII as men went off to fight. The name drew from the iconic Rosie the Riveter “We can do it!” poster featuring a drawing of a woman in a blue jumpsuit and red bandana flexing her right arm. 

The poster, created by J. Howard Miller, arrived in 1942 as part of the country's effort to get women to enter the workforce as men went off to war. A song titled "Rosie the Riveter" came out in 1943. 

Growing up, Kilgore had wanted to become a teacher and saved up money to go to college. But the money was needed elsewhere while living with an aunt and uncle. Kilgore's mother had died when she was three. After living in an orphanage and with her father and stepmother, she went to live with an aunt and uncle in Rockford at age 14.

Once she was old enough, Kilgore went to work making airplane wings at the factory that had been retrofitted from making farm equipment.

She was small so she worked from inside of the wing as a bucker, where she held a bar to the aluminum sheet of the wing as another person set a rivet to it to fasten and flatten the sheets together. To communicate with the person outside of the wing, Kilgore would tap the aluminum with her hands to let them know they needed to keep riveting to get the sheets flat.

'I’ll be seeing you soon': Widow receives WWII letter 76 years after it was sent

The finished wing would be sent to Oklahoma City, where it would be assembled into a full C-47 aircraft that served as a military transport and cargo plane. In Oklahoma, 5,354 C-47s were produced from March 1943 to August 1945, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.

For Kilgore, there were no balloons or confetti to celebrate when the war ended in 1945. Instead, she and a friend cut open pillows filled with chicken feathers and let the feathers fall to the floor, and “it was a happy day for everybody.”

Life after the war

Kilgore would continue to work at the factory that reverted back to making farming equipment when the war ended. She handled payroll for the employees. 

She married the neighbor boy, the boyfriend who had gone off to war, in 1947. She quit her job to stay at home when she had their first child. The couple went on to have four children, but Kilgore didn't stay home forever.

At age 35, she went to school to become a nurse to help put her two boys into college. She would keep nursing on and off for about 30 years. 

She moved to Arizona in the 1990s and eventually remarried. She continued to work as a nurse and even worked as a clown for 20 years.

“I wanted to be a clown all my life because I like to make people smile,” Kilgore said.

So when she saw a clown school was starting up in Arizona, she jumped on the opportunity.

But it was her work nearly 80 years ago that played such a critical role in American history. "I'll be a Rosie forever. I'm Rosie now. I'll be Rosie until I die," she said.

'I can tell you history'

Kilgore is eager to tell her story. She wants people to know where the country comes from and what it was once like. 

The COVID-19 pandemic stopped her from going out to speak. But at the end of March, she did her first talk since the pandemic began at the East Valley Institute of Technology campus in Mesa, Arizona.

Carrying out the mission: America's oldest active park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, retires at 100 years old

Standing in front of about 30 high school students in EVIT’s new aviation building, she told the story of her life during World War II. 

“I get up there, and I'm scared because I might make a fool of myself,” she said in an interview after speaking to the students.

Despite the fear, she knows telling those stories is important. The work she and her fellow Rosies did during the war paved the way for women to enter the workforce. “That was the beginning of everything,” she said, for women being able to pursue a career in different fields.

Kilgore was anxious to begin, she said, but by the time it was over, the students and she posed for pictures and asked her more questions about her life.

“Believe it or not, children are interested in history,” she said. “And I can tell you history.”

Follow Wyatt Myskow on Twitter: @WMyskow.