They tell a story about Naomi, one that captures the real-life grit of this anonymous waitress who lived nearly her entire life unaware that she would end it as an American icon.
The story is that Naomi once got a different waitressing job. She usually worked in nightclubs, because the tips were better. But this job started early. She needed to wake before the sun rose.
Naomi didn’t own a working alarm clock. She didn’t have the money to buy both an alarm clock and dinner.
“ ‘What will we do, Joey?’ ” she asked her son.
“Buy the clock, mom,” Joe Blankenship said, according to family lore. “We can eat later.”
Naomi Parker Fraley, who died Saturday at 96, was a survivor. She chased better jobs, better housing and a better life in the working-class tradition, the American Dream that’s not always quite so dreamy when you’re living it.
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She was something else, too, something Naomi — and the country — didn’t realize until recently, when a Nebraska-born World War II expert published 21st century research upending our understanding of a beloved 20th century image.
Naomi is probably the real-life inspiration for Rosie the Riveter. A 1942 photo of her taken at a California naval plant most likely was used by the artist to create the “We Can Do It!” poster — the image that became a feminist icon.
“She didn’t want any glory or honors,” said Marnie Blankenship, Naomi’s daughter-in-law. “What she wanted to make sure of is that when people saw the lady at the lathe (in the photo) it was Naomi Parker. She wanted her identity. She felt it had been robbed.”
The story of Naomi and the iconic Rosie poster is a twisting, turning tale illustrating that American history — what we think we know about our past — is often a fun-house mirror of distorted faces and fictions confused as facts.
The poster itself, today instantly recognizable, wasn’t actually well-known at all until the 1990s, when it was resurrected as a symbol of female strength. (A Norman Rockwell painting of his version of “Rosie,” the WWII-era moniker hung on women who helped the war effort, was the famed image in the ’40s.)
After the “We Can Do It!” poster grew famous, a Michigan woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle claimed that she was the real-life likeness of “Rosie” in that poster. She was widely credited as such and celebrated by TV networks, major magazines and newspapers then and when she died in 2010.
Just one teeny problem: Hoff Doyle was nowhere near the California plant where the wire service photo believed to be the inspiration for the “We Can Do It” poster was taken.
No one bothered to check, until James Kimble did.
Kimble, a Norfolk native and University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate, is now a Seton Hall professor specializing in World War II propaganda. He did six years of research into the photo and poster, and unearthed an original caption on the photo, a caption suggesting that a woman no one had ever heard of — a woman named Naomi — was the woman in the photo and thus the poster.
Naomi herself had noticed the error when she and sister Ada Wyn Loy attended a West Coast reunion of “Rosie the Riveters” in 2009, Marnie Blankenship said. Reunion organizers had placed a blown-up version of the famed poster and the photo that likely inspired it side by side.
That isn’t Geraldine Hoff Doyle, Naomi told her sister. That’s ... me.
My 2016 column on Kimble’s research broke the story into the mainstream. And, in a move gratifying to the Nebraska-born researcher and Naomi and her family, the national media and public took notice, following with stories and widespread recognition until she succumbed to cancer Saturday.
“I’m so glad she had a few years at the end for people to understand who she was,” Kimble said.
Who Naomi Parker was seems a wholly American tale, both the good parts and the bad.
She worked as a mechanic during the war, left at war’s end — when women were expected to exit the workforce — and was married to a brick mason named Joseph Blankenship.
After they divorced, she struggled to make ends meet as a waitress.
Her son, Joe Blankenship, remembers changing schools nearly three dozen times between kindergarten and high school graduation as his mom chased better jobs up and down the California coast, and also frequently moved them to be near her beloved sister Ada.
Naomi got married to a second husband, who died young, and then a third who died after 19 years of marriage. She found some financial stability. After their husbands’ deaths, she and Ada lived together for nearly a quarter century.
She took college courses and computer classes. She wrote and performed songs.
She became a devoted buyer of thousands of knickknacks and a devotee to giving them all away.
“You didn’t dare walk into her house and say ‘that’s a cute vase’ because you would end up going home with it,” Marnie Blankenship says.
She became a mother to Joe, a stepmother to six, a grandmother, a step-grandmother and a great-grandmother.
And then, in 2015, a Seton Hall professor she didn’t know arrived at her California home bearing a bouquet of flowers and startling news: The anonymous retired cocktail waitress was about to be unmasked as the real-life Rosie the Riveter.
At age 94, Naomi Parker Fraley posed for photos in People magazine. This week she has been eulogized by every major media outlet in the country.
When I glance back at Naomi and Rosie’s stunning story, I see two truths.
The first: Accuracy matters. It matters in tweets and in this column and in our history books. Pursuing the truth leads us toward it. Being careless with that truth leads us astray.
“The more we make up stuff, or just pass along stuff ... the more unmoored we become in our relationship with history,” Kimble says. “Eventually history becomes make-believe.”
The second is a lesson from Naomi’s family, a belief that it was correct but not crucial that Naomi got her long-overdue Rosie the Riveter fame.
It wasn’t crucial because Naomi knew who she was, her family thinks. She was Naomi Parker Fraley, a proud mechanic during World War II, a retired waitress, a believer in the Golden Rule, a good person.
In that way — in her own way — she was an American icon, even if that photographer had never shown up at her factory during World War II.
“She always said, ‘We all raised our hands,’ ” Marnie Blankenship says. “ ‘This is what we all did. I just happened to have a picture taken of it.’ ”