Folktales and Legends of the Middle West

by Edward McClelland

  When the band segued into “Begin the Beguine,” Vince was finally able to get close to his partner. Her name was Mary, and she lived, she said, on Damen Avenue in the Brighton Park neighborhood. That wasn’t far from where Vince lived, in the house he shared with his parents (something else he didn’t like to tell girls). As they slow danced, he noticed, for the first time, that the girl’s hands were cold, her skin brittle. Mary seemed to notice that he noticed it, so he made what he hoped was a light-hearted remark: “Cold hands mean you have a warm heart.”

  Mary smiled, and they danced together for the rest of the evening. After the final number, Vince offered Mary a ride home; her place was just a straight shot up Archer. But after they had driven north for a few miles, Mary insisted he pull the car over, outside the locked gates of Resurrection Cemetery, the graveyard of Chicago’s Polish community. Vince was baffled, but he complied. Mary opened the door, and stepped out onto the roadside.

  “I have to go, and you can’t follow me,” she said.

  Then she walked toward the gates, laid a hand on the iron chain that bound them together, and vanished.

  Vince spent the rest of the night driving his Chevy up and down Archer Avenue, looking for a blonde girl in a white dress. He drove until dawn, and then, when the cemetery gates opened, he drove through the rows of tombstones, engraved with crosses and angels and names such as Butkowski and Gwiazda and Pietrzyk. He was impelled not simply by the mystery of having seen a ghost, but by the hope that the girl he had danced with was not a ghost, that he could dance with her again on some future night. Catching no sight of Mary, he decided finally to drive to the address she had given him before they got into his car. It was a brick bungalow, on a street of nearly identical houses separated by concrete gangways a few feet wide. Only the adornments on the porches and in the yards—an American flag, a statue of the Virgin in a half-bathtub—differentiated the dwellings.

  Vince rang the doorbell. His eyes were red with sleeplessness, his dark beard had not been shaven for a day, and his hair had fallen loose over his forehead. The middle-aged woman who answered the door looked startled by the young caller’s dishevelment. She looked even more startled when Vince asked, “Is Mary home?”

  “Mary doesn’t live here anymore,” said the woman, who looked old enough, and enough like Mary, to be her mother. “Mary died in a car accident four years ago. Who are you?”

  “I knew Mary in high school,” Vince lied; it was the only plausible story for why he had been unaware of her death.

  “And you didn’t know?”

  “I went to college downstate after I graduated,” he said. That much was true: he had attended Illinois State University, in Normal. “I just moved back to Chicago.”

  Looking past the woman, who was still blocking the doorway, Vince spied a framed photo resting atop a piano in the front room. It was the girl he had danced with the night before: an ever-youthful face, never to age. The face of a ghost.

  “I am sorry to be the one to tell you,” the woman said. “Mary went out dancing with some boys she worked with at Brach’s, but they never made it to the dance hall. One of the boys crashed the car into the L at Wacker and Lake. Mary was thrown through the windshield and died on the way to the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Vince said, retreating down the steps. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “If you want to visit Mary’s grave,” the woman added, “she’s buried in Resurrection Cemetery.”

  Vince never returned to the Oh Henry Ballroom. Or to Resurrection Cemetery. (He had never learned Mary’s last name, so he could not have located her tombstone.) In fact, he was so shaken by having danced with a ghost that he never set foot in a dance hall again. But Resurrection Mary, as the girl’s ghost came to be known, continued to haunt Archer Avenue. When the Big Band era ended, after the war, Mary rested quietly in her grave, because the music she had hoped to dance to on her final night among the living was no longer heard at the Oh Henry. But in the 1970s, her ghost rose again.

  Mary’s family, not being wealthy, had buried her in a “term grave,” a rented plot which only held remains for a quarter century. By the time the term expired, all of Mary’s loved ones had joined her in the cemetery, leaving no one alive to renew it. During a renovation, Mary’s coffin was removed to an unmarked grave in a remote corner of the cemetery. One night, a suburban police officer received a report of a woman in a white dress walking through the grounds of Resurrection Cemetery. When he arrived at the gates, he found two bars pried apart, with scorch marks where a pair of hands would have gripped them. The following year, a couple driving down Archer Avenue saw a girl, wearing the same white dress, lying in the street. The man at the wheel swerved to avoid her, but she disappeared before his tires could make contact. In the 1990s, the owner of Chet’s Musical Lounge was pulling out of the driveway when he saw a man running up the road, waving desperately.

  “I need to use your phone,” the man said, in a stricken voice. “I hit a woman back there, but I can’t find her body.”

  “Was she a blonde woman in a white dress?” the owner asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “That was Resurrection Mary. Don’t worry, you didn’t hit anyone; you saw a ghost.”

  Despite these reappearances on Archer Avenue, Mary has yet to drink her Bloody Mary at Chet’s. When a ghost is roaming your neighborhood, though, you have to be ready to soothe her restless spirit.

  ROSIE THE RIVETER: THE WOMAN WHO BUILT THE B-24

  he most famous poster from World War II does not depict a soldier; it depicts a woman. She wears a red polka-dotted kerchief over her hair, and she’s pulling up the sleeve of her blue work shirt to reveal a powerful bicep.

  “We Can Do It!” the legend beneath the picture declares.

  The woman in the poster is Rosie the Riveter, who was meant to represent the millions of American women who worked in munitions factories while their fathers, brothers, husbands, and boyfriends fought overseas. The war changed life for American women, who learned that they could do jobs that had previously been considered “man’s work.” It also changed lives for rural families, who left their farms and followed the “Hillbilly Highway” up north to the factories of Michigan, which switched from building cars to building tanks and airplanes.

  There was more than one riveter named Rosie working in the war industries, of course. This is the story of a Rosie whose journey took her from a backwoods farm in Kentucky to a bomber plant in Michigan. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Rosemary McCumber didn’t hear about it on the radio. The electrical lines had not yet reached the farm in Kentucky where she and her husband Hill supported themselves and their two children, Billy and Doris, on a stingy crop of beans and corn, eggs from the chicken coop, and a hog every Christmas. As the McCumbers were unhitching their horse after a long service at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a neighbor boy came running up the dirt road. He had just been in town, where he’d heard the news.

  “Japs attacked us,” he said, out of breath. “I’m goin’ to Lexington to join the Navy.”

  “You ain’t but fifteen,” Rosemary said. “They won’t take you.”

  “I’m almost six feet tall,” the boy said. “I’ll tell ’em I’m eighteen. I was born at home, so I ain’t got a birth certificate.”

  Hill saddled up the horse and rode into town to gather more news. When he returned, he told Rosemary that he, too, planned to enlist in the armed forces.

  “You can get a deferment,” Rosemary argued. “You’re a farmer, and you got two kids.”

  Hill grimaced.

  “My dad was in the first big war,” he said. “My great-grandad and his brothers were in the Civil War, on both sides. Their dad was at Vera Cruz with General Scott. I ain’t gonna be the first McCumber who isn’t there when his country needs him. What am I gonna tell Billy when he asks what his dad did when the Japs attacked us? Anyway, this farm barely feeds us, much less an army. My combat pay will
go a long way here.”

  And so, that spring, Hill McCumber became a private in the United States Army, while Rosemary was left alone on the farm to plant the crop. Mama had been living with them since Papa died, so she could cook and look after the children, but Rosemary had to rise at five every morning to gather and candle the eggs, milk the cow, feed the hog and hitch up the horse for plowing. In the evenings, after the children went to bed, she had always enjoyed reading by the kerosene lantern—short stories in Collier’s, spiritually themed novels she traded with other women in the church sodality—but now she was so exhausted at the end of the day she didn’t have the energy to light the lamp, much less concentrate on a line of print. With the help of Hill’s army paychecks, Rosemary fed the family through the fall, while canning enough fruits and vegetables and smoking enough meat to survive the winter, but she dreaded another planting season. America had been in the war for less than a year, but with Hitler occupying half of Russia and the Japs taking over the Philippines, we were going to be in this one for a long, long time.

  That October, Rosemary received a letter from her cousin Alma. It bore an exotic, unpronounceable postmark: “Ypsilanti.” Preoccupied as she was with the harvest, Rosemary laid the letter aside for several days. When she finally opened it, this was what she read:

  Dear Rosie,

  I know you’ve been busy with the farm, so you might not have noticed I left town. I got a job here at Mr. Ford’s plant in Michigan, building engines for bombers! I went into Lexington to see a movie with Clay Gilmore, and I saw a poster that said “Women in the War, We Can’t Win Without You,” with a photo of a gal holding a rivet gun. Well, I asked around, and I found out they’re hiring gals to work in the factories while the boys are overseas. So I got on a bus and came up here and they hired me right away. They like the gals because our hands are better at handling the little engine parts, and they’re paying me a dollar an hour.

  Let me know if you hear anything about Clay. He’s not answering my letters. He thinks I left on account he’s 4-F because of the rheumatic fever he had when he was little. If you see him, tell him I just had to get away from the farm. I’m sharing a room with three other gals, but they’re building houses for families, and there’s a nursery if you want to come up here with Billy and Doris.

  Love,

  Alma

  A dollar an hour? That was as much as the farm paid in a whole day. Leaving the children with Mama, Rosemary paid a dear price for a bus ticket from Lexington to Ypsilanti, where she looked up Alma at the address on the envelope. Two days after her arrival, with the help of Alma’s recommendation, Rosemary was accepted for training as a riveter on the bomber assembly line. Rosemary had never held a “public job,” which required working indoors and punching a time clock. When she walked into the Willow Run plant for the first time, and saw the shooting sparks, and heard the thump of rivet guns, and saw the thousands of coveralled men and women clambering around bomber bodies as big as whales, she thought she must be in the biggest, loudest room in the world. This was not simply a country girl’s culture shock. Willow Run was three-and-a-half-million square feet, the largest factory every built. Inside were 40,000 workers—a quarter of them women. They were producing one B-24 Liberator, an airplane with over a million parts, every hour. There was no way the Japs and the Nazis could shoot them down that fast. Rosemary was just as proud of the McCumber family’s military tradition as Hill. This would be her way of carrying it on.

  With her first paycheck, Rosemary sent for Mama and the children. They all moved into a village of prefabricated houses near the plant. It was the first time any of them had lived in a home with electricity or running water. On her first day off, Rosemary took the children downtown to buy their first winter coats and their first pairs of store-bought shoes; Billy and Doris walked stiffly for a week, until the shoes were broken in. She wrote to the neighbor who was looking after their farm, offering to sell him the livestock and rent him the land. He sent back his acceptance, along with a money order. Then she wrote to Hill, who was now in England, telling him she had left the farm to work in a munitions plant.

  “Darling, that’s the best thing you could have done for me and for the USA,” Hill wrote back. “We already got a flock of B-24s here, and from now on, every time I see one, I’m gonna think of you again. The farm will have to be put on hold until this war is won.”

  Once her training was finished, Rosemary went to work fastening the aluminum skin to the center wing section of the bombers. Hour after hour, she pounded rivets into the plane’s ribbing. Every B-24 was held together with 700,000 rivets; by the end of each shift, Rosemary’s aching arm felt it had pounded in at least half that many.

  Every noontime, during the day shift lunch break, Rosemary took off her hard hat, so only a handkerchief held down her sweaty red hair. She rolled up the sleeves of her blue coveralls and took a ham sandwich out of a lunchbox on which she had painted “ROSIE” in white letters. A photographer from the Office of War Information was visiting Willow Run one day to take pictures for a poster recruiting women to join the war effort. He spotted Rosemary stretching and flexing her arm, to get the stiffness out.

  “Ma’am, can you hold that pose for a moment?” the photographer requested.

  “What for?” Rosemary asked.

  “A recruiting poster, to encourage more women to work in the factories.”

  Well, she’d gotten this job because her cousin Alma had seen a recruiting poster, so she could take a break from lunch to help bring more women into the plant. The photographer snapped off a few frames, and moved on down the assembly line. Rosemary forgot all about the picture until Lois, one of the other gals at the plant, showed her a magazine cover painted by America’s most popular illustrator: it depicted a brawny-armed red-haired woman sitting with a rivet gun on her lap, holding aloft a sandwich. Her lunchbox was labeled “ROSIE.”

  “Rosie, that looks just like you,” Lois insisted.

  “Oh, that could be any gal in the plant,” Rosemary said. “I’m not the only riveter named Rosie. It’s probably some gal building a ship in California.”

  But the gal on the magazine cover was striking the same pose Rosemary had struck for the photographer, flexing the arms she had built up on the farm. She hadn’t been holding a rivet gun on her lap, but the illustrator had to show what kind of work she was doing; if he had actually painted her riveting, the readers would not have been able to tell she was a woman. When workers put on coveralls, hard hats, and goggles, distinctions of sex disappeared. Walking down the line, you couldn’t tell whether a man or a woman was riveting, or welding, or spraying paint. The tools and the uniform made everyone anonymous, and equal.

  Despite Rosemary’s dollar-an-hour paycheck, the family’s only indulgence was a radio, to keep up with the war news, since Hill was now fighting in the deserts of North Africa. On Saturday nights, Doris and Mama loved listening to Your Hit Parade, on a Detroit radio station. Every week now, the program featured a young woman singing about “Rosie the Riveter”:

  “Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie

  Charlie, he’s a Marine

  Rosie is protecting Charlie

  Workin’ overtime on the riveting machine”

  “Mama, that’s you!” Doris exclaimed, when she first heard the song. “Your name is Rosie, and you work on the riveting machine!”

  “That is not me,” Rosemary corrected. “I do not have a boyfriend named Charlie, who’s a Marine. I have your father, who’s in the Army. But I am going to buy a war bond for you and your brother. Twenty-five dollars apiece, and I’ll buy you each a horse when they mature, because you’ll be old enough by then.”

  Lois suggested that Rosemary sue the illustrator and the “Rosie the Riveter” songwriters, for appropriating her name and her image.

  “They’re selling millions of copies of the magazine and the song,” Lois said. “You could get enough money to quit this dirty plant.”

  “I don’t wan
t to quit the plant,” Rosemary said. “If that picture and that song help the war effort, that’s good enough for me.”

  When a Hollywood actor came to Willow Run to make a short film promoting war bonds, he heard there was a riveter named Rosie working in the plant and insisted on including footage of Rosemary pounding rivets in a B-24. It was for the war effort, so once again Rosemary posed for the cameras.

  When the war ended, the Willow Run plant shut down. The army didn’t need any more bombers. The men went to work in Mr. Ford’s other plants, building new cars for drivers who had been nursing along their old jalopies since Pearl Harbor Day. The women were given pink slips and told to go back home to their families. Eighteen million women had built weapons during the war, but it was understood they had been doing men’s jobs, and that there would be no place for them in the factories once the soldiers came home.

  Hill, who was part of the force occupying Germany, was not discharged from the army until a year after V-E Day. In the meantime, Rosemary took a job as a cook in a dormitory at the university in Ann Arbor, and she moved the family into a rooming house near campus. They were living there when Hill returned.

  “We can all go home to Kentucky now,” he said.

  But Rosemary had other ideas. After four years in this modern, urban world, she didn’t want to go back to that primitive farm, where they worked as laboriously as pioneers just to survive. For the entire time Hill was in Europe, Rosemary had supported a family, paid bills, and learned to deal with bosses, union stewards, doctors, and schoolteachers. Now, Hill was asking her to return to a life of rural isolation, in which her only social contacts were at church on Sundays. Rosemary knew Kentucky had changed. The war had brought electricity, plumbing, and paved roads to their county. But that also meant that Kentucky would have no place for a yeoman farmer: agriculture was becoming a business rather than a way of life.