A Visit with Rosie Marian Wynn

On May 6, 2024, Executive Director Sarah Pritchard and Park Superintendent K. Lynn Berry journeyed to Fairfield,CA to have lunch with Marian and present her with a Congressional Gold Medal. For many years Marian served as a Rosie Ambassador at the Rosie the Riveter WWII/Home Front National Historical Park, sharing her stories with visitors every Friday.

Marian's Rosie Story:

When Marian’s Wynn’s father left the family’s Minnesota home for work in the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond in 1942, 16-year-old Marian begged to go with him. One of 11 children living in a one-room house, where she slept on the floor and worked after school tending cows, she dreamed of a better life. When her father insisted she stay with the family and finish school, she counted the days and saved up her meager earnings until she graduated the following year. Then, after a summer job to earn bus fare, she boarded a Greyhound bus and headed for Richmond. Hired as pipe welder in Shipyard #3 she earned what then seemed like a whopping $1 an hour, plus overtime pay on weekends.

Marian recalls that housing for shipyard workers was so scare she had to share a small trailer with her father, who made a point of refusing to allow her to date the mostly older fellow shipyard workers. Undeterred, she struck up a friendship with a sail0r at the nearby Treasure Island Naval Base, the son of the owner of the trailer park, and they were soon married – a union that lasted for 60 years, until his death in 2005

Marian stayed on at the shipyard until July 1945, when widespread layoffs threatened her job.  For the next four decades, she parlayed her shipyard work experience into numerous jobs in cannery operations and assembly work in the East Bay. Having retired in 1984, Marian was a regular docent at the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Center.