‘We would dance, oh, we would’

Watch: Videos of Nita Overby and Rosa Lee Gillespie speaking about their experiences in World War Two.


Nita Overby remembers the nights spent on the assembly line, working side by side with an Edmond teacher and building airplanes to help the boys fight the war overseas.

“I thoroughly enjoyed working at Douglas Aircraft,” Overby, 82, of Oklahoma City, said. “I really did. There was a lot of noise, but there was a loudspeaker in there that played all the war songs. ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas,’ all those good tunes.

“I met a lot of good people. A lot of them.”

In 1943, Overby — then a recent high school graduate — moved from an Indiahoma farm to Oklahoma City, where her brother-in-law encouraged her to apply for a job constructing C-47 planes. She did, and a day later she reported to work.

Just like that, she became a Rosie the Riveter — one of about 6 million women who took up manufacturing jobs between 1940 and 1944 as more and more men went overseas to fight.

Overby was no dummy. She’d heard the stories about the assembly line.

“There was a story that the suction was so strong from some of these planes and equipment that they’d just pull your scalp right off,” she said. “My brother-in-law told me to wear a scarf over my head so I wouldn’t lose any of my hair.

“So my first day, I was prepared. I had a bandana over my head, and I didn’t have one single hair out. I had rubber bands ... tight around my ankles.”

When she got there though, she felt ridiculous. No one else was dressed like her, and the danger had been greatly overstated. Her brother-in-law had just been teasing her.

Over time, she settled into the job. Her task was to supply other workers with parts.

“We had booths set alongside the assembly line,” Overby recalled. “We had to make up the parts that the people would come to get. And the rivets. All different kinds of rivets. All through the day, we just had to keep that going.”

Overby worked the swing shift, getting off work shortly before midnight. Some stores stayed open to attract late night business, and the movie houses were still open. “They’d always have a little carnival right downtown,” she said. “It would always be going strong. I don’t guess they ever closed down.” On the weekends, the big attraction was dancing at the USO.

“We did that faithfully,” Overby said. “It was Sunday afternoons. We would dance, oh, we would. Mostly with sailors. A lot of sailors.”

‘We did without’

Rosa Lee Gillespie helped the war effort in a different way.

“I couldn’t work because I had two children,” Gillespie, 88, of Midwest City, said. “When the war started, I was having my second son and was not able to work. So I set up a nursery and took care of other people’s children.”

The demand was high. With so many women in the work force, the need for child care soared. Gillespie kept as many kids as she could in her 3-bedroom home.

“They (parents) paid us cash,” she said. “However, it didn’t amount to much. You never asked for very much. If they were working at Tinker, then they were contributing.”

Like everyone else back home, Gillespie stretched her resources.

“We learned to cook without sugar,” she said. “We learned to carpool and join with each other to go shopping or go to work, whatever we needed to do. I guess you could say that was another case where everybody pulled together, just like we did during the Oklahoma City bombing time. It was that way, only more so, during the war.

“Everybody just did what they needed to do, whether it was working at Tinker or taking care of people who were working at Tinker. We cooked with honey and molasses. The ships were used for war supplies and services and for troops. That’s what they were for.”

“We did without the things we’d been used to. ... You didn’t complain about the things you didn’t have because you knew where it was going. We wanted the men overseas to have what they needed.”

The world has changed a lot since then, she said.

“People think if they don’t have televisions or cell phones ... they’re badly mistreated,” she said, laughing. “Even my sons have all those things.”

Chocolate bars, war bonds and light bulbs

Others recalled helping out any way they could:

As a child, Nancy Dobson, 70, took part in a statewide light bulb drive and was pictured in the Oklahoma City Times clutching a large bulb in both hands.

“Whether she knows it or not,” the caption read, “Nancy ... is playing with bullets. Housewives have been requested to save burned out light bulbs for the Salvation Army because there is enough metal at the end of each bulb to make a bullet.”

In a note this year to The Oklahoman, Dobson wrote: “As you can see by this ... picture, I got an early start in the war effort! Memories: rationing, grade school war bond stamp books, victory gardens, troop convoys rumbling down N May Avenue.”

Eleanor Kay Cooper, 86, of Oklahoma City, worked for Douglas Aircraft when the plant was first being built.

“They had the idea of bringing people in from outside and training them so that when the plant was finished, they’d have someone prepared to work in it,” Cooper said. “I did go out there to learn and work in the plant from the time they started building the north end.”

In a bizarre quirk of timing, Cooper quit her job a day before the war ended. Her part of the plant immediately closed down.

“I quit a day before I would’ve been terminated, anyway!” she said, laughing.

Julianne Lemoine, 73, of Oklahoma City, was a latchkey kid during the war.

“We were all, even children, dedicated to the war effort,” she said. “We would save our pennies to buy some kind of little war bond.”

Her father joined the military after Pearl Harbor. Rations were scarce; people could get only one or two pair of shoes per year, and candy was almost a myth.

One day, her father came home on leave, bringing with him an entire box of Hershey chocolate bars.

“That was just the best thing he could possibly have brought,” Lemoine said. “Kids all up and down the block came to get chocolate bars, and we were the most popular people in the neighborhood.”