Lynn Kashino knows that sense of absence will be especially keen this weekend. Mary Martin Kashino, her mother, died a year ago in May, and Mary made a point of attending the Rosie tea.
“She loved it,” said Lynn, recalling how her grandfather, an immigrant from Nova Scotia gassed in World War I, worked for years at Bethlehem – which is also where her mother held a job during the war.
After it ended, Mary married Nick Kashino, an Army Air Force combat veteran who felt lucky to be home, and a guy who eventually retired from the South Buffalo Railroad. He died in 2007, but Lynn said the family looks at it like this:
Somewhere this weekend, her mother and her dad are dancing again at the old Woodlawn Hotel.
Viola Hippert: Hands that garden in 2020 were part of the factory effort 75 years ago. (Sharon Cantillon/Buffalo News)
Even today, if the museum had been able to hold the event, there would have been enough of a turnout for a table filled with stories. Margaret Ann Vullo, for instance, could share the tale of how she came to Buffalo from Arcade to work at Curtiss-Wright at the side of a close high school friend, Eileen Jones Nichols.
At 95, Vullo is missing Nichols, who died a year ago this month. Both women met their future husbands on the job. In a written remembrance in the archives at the steel plant museum, Vullo described how they were initially required to wear uniforms they detested, uniforms they replaced with street clothes as quickly as they could. She recalled how she took a job as a riveter on a C-46 Commando, where the women wore hats or nets for protection after they saw what happened to friends whose unprotected hair – in a time before strict industrial safety regulations – was sometimes snared painfully and ripped out by industrial drills.
