Museum Attempts Saving Rosie’s Plant

Museum Attempts Saving Rosie’s Plant

The historic Michigan factory where the iconic Rosie the Riveter and thousands of other women built Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers during World War II could face the wrecking ball two months from now.

A modest nonprofit is trying to raise enough money to salvage some of the massive plant, which Ford sold to General Motors after the war.The Yankee Air Museum figures the factory is the perfect place to start anew, after a devastating fire destroyed its collections in 2004.

The huge hangar doors on the old Willow Run assembly plant are majestic in proportion. Thirty-two feet tall and 150 feet wide; the doors were built big so that finished B-24s could roll out of the factory, then tested on the site’s airport runway, before going to war. “What’s remarkable to me,” says Grant Trigger, cleanup manager for GM’s former properties in Michigan, “is this is more reliable than my garage door. Built by engineers with slide rules in 1942, and it still works today.”

For the complete story by Tracy Samilton of KQED-TV, click here.

Updated: August 5, 2013 — 11:09 AM
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