Digg



del.icio.us



Newsvine



Reddit



Facebook SIMSBURY, Conn.  At 79, Patricia Berberich is certainly old enough to have heard of Rosie the Riveter, but when it came to placing a face with the name, she admits her mind was blank. So, when the woman dining with her one evening this spring at the McLean retirement home mentioned having been the model for artist Norman Rockwell's World War II-era heroine, Berberich politely excused herself to do a little research. "My instinct was to get right to the Internet and look it up," she said. "Then I sent off to (the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.) to get a poster so she could sign it." Berberich was hardly the first to make that request of Rosie, whose real name is Mary Doyle Keefe. Since posing for Rockwell in 1942, she has signed countless posters and autographs. The painting, for which Keefe posed twice and was paid $10, came to embody the can-do attitude of American women whose work helped win the war. It is arguably among the most recognizable images of World War II and transformed Keefe from a small-town switchboard operator into an American icon. Keefe thinks of herself as an accidental celebrity and still gets a thrill out of telling her story of posing for Rockwell when she was a red-haired 19-year-old. She went on to graduate from college, work as a dental hygienist, marry and raise four children. Now 85 and living in an apartment at the McLean Home, Keefe said the buzz surrounding her being Rosie began spreading soon after she moved there from New Hampshire two years ago to be closer to a daughter who lives in Granby. "I got a kick out of it," said Berberich, a neighbor at McLean who dines with Keefe regularly. "I remember my classmates going off to war after graduation." "It's quite an honor to be asked by Norman Rockwell to pose for a picture," added Marion Strindberg, another neighbor at the home. "It's generally known, but she just told a small group of us. She is very quiet about it. Word went around slowly." Asked to recount the serendipitous events that led to her fateful encounter with Rockwell, Keefe recites a well-worn script she committed to memory long ago. She was living with her family in Arlington, Vt., at the time, not far from where Rockwell lived with his family and had a studio. "The telephone office was in my mom's house, and he would come in to pay his bill," Keefe recalled. "He knew who I was and asked if I would sit for a picture. Gene Pelham, his photographer who moved from New York, would take a picture and Norman Rockwell would cut out what he wanted. You didn't sit there while he was painting the whole thing, which was good." For the first sitting, Keefe wore a white blouse beneath her overalls and a pair of saddle shoes. The look, however, wasn't quite right, she said, so Rockwell had her pose a second time wearing a blue blouse and penny loafers Keefe said she has received endless ribbing about the now famous image of a brawny working woman breaking for lunch with a ham sandwich in hand, pneumatic riveter on her lap and copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf underfoot. Her body looked nothing like that in real life, said Keefe, especially the muscular arms. Rockwell sent her a written apology. "The kidding you took was all my fault, because I really thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen," Rockwell wrote in the 1967 letter. Rosie first appeared in 1943 on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and, later, on war bond posters. Keefe said she didn't think of herself as special. Lots of townspeople posed for Rockwell during the 10 years he lived in Arlington, she said, including her uncle, who was in all four of the well-known Rockwell images popularly known as the "Four Freedoms". Keefe's oldest son, Bill Keefe, recalls family trips to Arlington as a boy when his mother would walk down the street saying this or that person "was in such and such a painting by Rockwell." "It was always a topic of conversation," he said. "It's part of the Keefe family legacy. We never had a problem coming up with a unique school project or something for show and tell." But perhaps his proudest memory is of the Rockwell exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., about 10 years ago, to which his parents were invited and given a private tour. And in 2002, Mary Keefe and her late husband, Bob, were invited to New York by Sotheby's for an auction at which the Rosie the Riveter painting fetched $4.9 million, the world record for Rockwell's work at that time. There, and at dozens of other events, Mary Keefe has gladly signed posters and given brief talks about her experience. She also has been a guest on national television, appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Good Morning America during the 50th anniversary of D-Day. At McLean, she keeps a lower profile, but even there can't escape attention. To promote a Nov. 5 flu shot clinic for employees, Denise Yorio, a registered nurse and staff infection control practitioner, put up posters bearing Rosie's image and asked Keefe to autograph pictures. Nurses dressed up in "Rosie get-ups," she said, and rolled up their sleeves. "We made it a big social event," Yorio said. "We've never done so many in such a short time." Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Share this story: Digg del.icio.us Newsvine Reddit Facebook Enlarge By Tia Ann Chapman, The Hartford Courant via AP Mary Keefe sat for Norman Rockwell for his war bond posters featuring Rosie the Riveter. Keefe holds an example of one such poster featuring her as a young woman. Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.