Naomi Parker Fraley, the Real Rosie the Riveter, Dies at 96
In reply, she received a letter asking for her help in determining “the true identity of the woman in the photograph.”
“As one might imagine,” Dr. Kimble wrote in 2016, Mrs. Fraley “was none too pleased to find that her identity was under dispute.”
As he searched for the woman at the lathe, Dr. Kimble scoured the internet, books, old newspapers
and photo archives for a captioned copy of the image.
“I didn’t want fame or fortune,” Mrs. Fraley told People magazine in 2016, when her connection to Rosie first became public.
Best of all was this line:
“Pretty Naomi Parker looks like she might catch her nose in the turret lathe she is operating.”
Dr. Kimble located Mrs. Fraley and her sister, Ada Wyn Parker Loy, then living together in Cottonwood, Calif.
So I imagine Miller’s working on it in the summer and fall of 1942.”
As Dr. Kimble also learned, the lathe photo was published in The Pittsburgh Press, in Mr. Miller’s hometown, on July 5, 1942.
For Dr. Kimble, the quest for Rosie, which began in earnest in 2010, “became an obsession,” as he explained in an interview for this obituary in 2016.
