Community Corner

At 102, Original Rosie the Riveter Honored

Bea Cohen receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. She worked as a riveter at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica.

Much of the information provided below comes courtesy of Fourth District Supervisor Don Knabe.

Bea Cohen, a silver-haired World War II veteran who still actively volunteers, was honored Tuesday morning with a "Lifetime Achievement" award from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. She is 102.

Born in Bucharest in 1910, she grew up in Romania where she survived World War I bombings. She came to America in 1920 with her family and was raised in Fort Worth, TX.

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When World War II erupted, Cohen assisted by collecting material for submarine periscopes and learning riveting. She was one of the original "Rosie the Riveters," working at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica.

"Round rivets, flat rivets, big rivets, little rivets," she told Air Force Print News Today in July 2012. "I learned how to rivet, and then they sent me to Douglas to go to work."

"Each section was unaware of what the other sections were doing so no one knew how the plane all fit together," she said. "There was also a camouflaged tarp that covered the entire parking lot outside. It had fake houses to make it look like a little town from up above," she continued in an interview with the paper.

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She enlisted in the Women's Army Corp and was deployed to England before the Normandy Invasion. She worked in the communications departments with top-secret files, helped to work the kitchens on base, served in a choir and on a women’s baseball team as a third baseman.

Today, according to KCET, Cohen attends ex-Prisoner of War meetings at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus and of the Blinded Veterans Association of Southern California.

Cohen's husband, whom she met in 1945, was a prisoner of war himself for 42 months in Corregidor. The two were married 57 years before his death in 2003.

"I don't want people to forget the ex-POWs because they gave their health and their life to help us be safe," she told Air Force Print News Today.

When KCET asked what she would like to accomplish in 2012, she answered, "...to collect clean, white socks for homeless veterans, and to meet First Lady Michelle Obama."


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