Berg was ‘Rosie the Riveter’ during WWII

by Carol Crump
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 2:04 PM MST

World War II gave Doris “Dodie” Berg a chance to be on her own, work at a high-paying job and find a husband. The soon-to-be 86-year-old spent 1943 as a “Rosie the Riveter,” building bombs and shells in munition’s plants in Nebraska. “I built them and he dropped ‘em,“ she said of her husband, Armond.

Berg was a ranch and farm girl, born in Cody, Neb., one of the middle children in a family of three brothers and four sisters. Her father had homesteaded the ranch, and she could drive a stacker with a two-horse team with a pair of her father’s 99 horses. She also helped her mother feed the hands that worked the fields during harvest, often making the gravy. “I was used to hard work,” she said.

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When her older brothers and sisters started high school, the family moved to a farm her father bought in Gordon, Neb. They alternated summers on the ranch in Cody with the school months in the farm house in Gordon. “Dad always said he didn’t want any town brats,” Berg said.

When she graduated from the county high school in her class of two — the other graduate was a boy she had a crush on — Berg went away to a private business college in St. Paul, Neb. At 18, her father thought she was too young to be on her own, so she lived with her grandmother. By Christmas break, Berg had heard about jobs with the U.S. Army that paid $72 a week — “a lot of money,” she said. “I promised I would go back (to school) but really I was trying to break loose, like all teenagers.”

Building 1,000-pound bombs

She doesn’t remember that there were any qualifications or training for the Army job at the Grand Island, Neb. Army Ordinance plant where she went to work building 1,000-pound bombs. “I was just a body. If you put in an application, you could get in anyplace, there were so many boys in the service. You just got on the line and did what they told you. I was used to that,” she said.

Berg was one of two women who pushed two TNT-filled bombs at a time on a cart down the hall from the first part of the assembly line to the next. She worked the night shift of three round-the-clock shifts and initially rode to work from her grandmother’s house with a fellow employee. His fast, scary driving gave her an excuse to move to a dormitory located at the ordinance plant. With one of the new girlfriends she made at work, she eventually moved on to share a basement apartment.

“It was just a bedroom, and Miss Graham wanted boys because she thought girls would hang panties all over the place,” she said.

In April, her roommate fixed her up on a blind date with her future husband, Armond, who was a tail gunner on a Liberator B-24 bomber stationed at the Grand Island air base. From then on, Berg didn’t have to worry about sharing a bed. “Instead of going to bed, I’d go out with my new boyfriend. I could push that cart in my sleep,” she said.

Miss Graham was very strict and wouldn’t let Dodie and Armond sit on her front steps to visit, so the couple sat on the side of the house. “I hoped the folks didn’t realize what all I was doing, but I didn’t lose my virginity. I wouldn’t let anyone touch me,” she said. When Armond once put his hand on her knee, she warned him not to ever do that again until they were married.

It wasn’t long before Dodie and Armond were engaged. He was transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah. She couldn’t follow him to Salt Lake, so she changed jobs to work in Hastings, Neb., at a Navy plant that made six-inch shells. She wore big rubber gloves to wash the grease off each individual shell and shared an apartment with a set of twins and another girl. The four girls worked different shifts, so they used the same bed.

Dodie, Armond reunited in Idaho

When Armond was transferred to Mountain Home, Idaho, in September 1943, he sent her a telegram, asking her to come. She quit her job and was on the train headed west the next morning. She didn’t let her parents know, since she had already gotten their consent to marry, “as long as we had a preacher and not a Justice of the Peace.”

Mountain Home was full of soldiers and short of housing but Armond had made arrangements for a two-room apartment for his new wife, in spite of waiting lists everywhere in the small town.

“They were renting out chicken houses,” she said, so the tiny apartment with a little four-legged stove with a flat top that was used for both heat and cooking was a good deal.

For the three days the couple had to wait for blood tests, Armond would come in from the base and they’d go out on the town. With their license in hand, they went to the first church they found, which turned out to a Baptist. The minister was so enthusiastic, he made her staff sergeant future husband so nervous, “He tried to introduce me and forgot my name,” Berg said.

By the time Armond was transferred again to Wendover, Utah, and then overseas to the European and Italian theaters, Dodie was three months pregnant. She went home to stay with her family and their first son, Mike, was born in October 1944. During the difficult, 29-hour labor her mother told the doctor, “This baby has to live, his daddy’s overseas.”

Three more children — Myra, Marsha and Marvin  followed in the five years after Armond was discharged when the war ended after her had been overseas for 10 months. Mike was four months old, and Berg remembered how uncomfortable Armond was holding the new baby. “Once we started with the “m” we had to keep it up,” she said. “I was always pregnant.”

Bergs settle in Casper

The Berg family eventually settled in the 1950s in Casper, where one of Dodie’s sisters was living. Armond ended up working for the post office. Dodie went back to school at Casper College, which was then one building, to brush up her typing and get a job to help pay the kids’ dental bills.

Her skills landed her a job at Memorial Hospital, working for the Director of Nursing. She quit once more to stay home with the children she missed and then came back to the hospital to work for Vivian Strand in Medical Records. The Bergs, who eat every day at the Senior Center every day it’s open because Dodie doesn’t want to cook anymore, have seven of their nine grandchildren living and seven great grandchildren.

“We just put in our time,” she said of her Rosie the Riveter days as one of the 18 million American women who were working by the end of World War II. “I’m so glad I had the experience. My sister got married at 17 and so never got to leave home.”

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