Bennie Bee's History Lessons:
`Rosie the Riveter' Vet Recalls Heyday
of Richmond's Women War Workers

SAN PABLO — Bennie Bee Smith had her first birthday party two years ago at the age of 80. It was a grand affair for the octogenarian who attended school in bare feet during the Great Depression.

Smith (who likes to be called Bennie Bee) grew up on a 100-acre spread in northeast Texas. It was the only farm with a telephone for miles around, but
her family had little else so birthdays weren’t celebrated.

“It was a wide place in the road,” she said of the farm, betraying a hint of a drawl. “We had food, but money wise, we had no money.”

Like thousands of other Southerners during World War II, Bennie Bee left home for the shipyards in Richmond. Forty years and three husbands later, she lives by herself in a senior’s mobile park off San Pablo Avenue.

Her first husband worked as an electrician in the defense industry and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was transferred from Texas to Kaiser Shipyard #2, which today is a memorial park dedicated to Rosie the Riveter, the famous World War II symbol of women working in American industry to support the war effort. Riveters worked on the aircrafts but they became a symbol of all women who worked in the factories while most men were drafted into the service. At the height of the war, there were 18 million women in factories across the North and West Coast, up 8 million from 1940, according to a plaque at the Richmond Rosie the Riveter Memorial.

Bennie Bee told her husband she wanted a job in his department, but he resisted and said, “you’re not going.”

“Of course, I went to the hiring hall,” she said. “Everybody wanted to go to work to get that money.” Her memory fails her when asked how much she made; the average weekly salary for women was $31, according to a placard at the memorial site.

She left her kids with the woman across the hall and learned how to use a blow torch to cut steel pieces for a naval boat. Like thousands of other women, she got laid off once the war ended in 1945.

Bennie Bee sits a little bit stooped because of the osteoporosis that eats at her bones, and even though she uses a cane, she recalls other details of her life quickly enough. She walks slowly across her living room to show her visitor a faded union withdrawal card from 1945 and black and white photographs, including one showing her outside a classroom, shoeless.

She has short, bright red curly hair that matches her outspokenness. More than once during a Saturday afternoon interview she said, “I tell you what,” or “listen to this” and then shared an outrageous story, often making herself laugh.
She recalls that once, at a gathering of 200 former shipyard workers four years ago, she stood on stage and told her audience that women and men used to have sex in the double bottom of the ships because “the supervisor would never go there.”

After the war, together with her first husband she opened an appliance store in Richmond.

Later, Bill Plant left her for another woman, but “I was actually glad to get rid of him,” she said. Then came husband number two, also named Bill, who she said was “hot to marry me when he found out I was single.” But he had a drinking problem and was haunted by memories of Vietnam.

They divorced, and years later when she was in her late 60s, she met her last husband, who was the welder leaderman of her crew in the shipyard. Larry Smith was a retired Army general and a millionaire, but “the stingiest man I ever met,” she said.

“He always made me pay half the tab,” Bennie Bee said. “And I was glad when he died.”

In between, and during these marriages, she earned free trips around the world for selling washers and refrigerators. She’s been to Spain, several East Asian countries, Brazil (the Amazon was her favorite trip) and to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Nowadays, Bennie Bee spends her time by watching CNN and the Oprah Winfrey Show alone in a mobile home that is surrounded by dozens of lush plants. Her grandchildren (she can’t remember exactly how many she has) visit when they’re not in school, but most days, it’s just her and a 29-pound cat.
Her relatives don’t care for her stories, including one she tells twice of how her father used to take her and four brothers and sisters to town once a week and give them a nickel.

“We could do whatever we wanted with that nickel and we’d watch the train go by,” she said.

Bennie Bee said she enjoyed the afternoon talk and finishes with another story, adding that’s she’s happy.

“If I die, I die, but you know, I want to live as long as I can,” she said.