By: Charity Meier | Royal Oak Review | Published October 13, 2025
ROYAL OAK — The image of Frances Mauro Masters, 103, of Chesterfield Township, will be immortalized as the symbol of the Greatest Generation’s homefront workers when a bronze statue made in her likeness as a Rosie the Riveter will be added Nov. 11 to the Michigan World War II Legacy Memorial in Royal Oak.
Mauro Masters, better known as “Rosie Fran,” grew up in Detroit during the Great Depression. As one of five children born to Italian immigrants, she was taught the value of hard work to support not just herself, but her family. When she graduated from high school in 1940, her first priority was to find a job to help support her family.
While working at a local grocery store and taking night courses to learn to use a comptometer, Mauro Masters learned of a job at the Ford Willow Run Bomber Plant.
“I had two brothers in the service, and my future husband, he joined the Marines at 17, and I thought, ‘I want to work to help win the war,’” she said of her reason to apply.
Mauro Masters and her two sisters, Angeline and Josephine, were all hired on the spot for the plant. She said they all worked in different departments, as they were not allowed to work together.
“Out of the three of us, I was the only riveter. They worked in small parts, but I was the only riveter,” Mauro Masters said. “I worked in small parts for the wing (of B-24 Liberators), on a press, riveting.”
Mauro Masters worked at the plant for the duration of the war. She said her greatest challenge with the position was actually getting to the plant.
She recalled having to take a streetcar from her family’s Detroit home near the city airport to downtown Detroit, and then caught a bus similar to a Greyhound bus that was privately owned by Ford Motor Co. and was sent for the Rosies. She said it took well over an hour for her to get there.
“It took us an hour to get there and an hour to get back, and a lot of us slept on the bus. Thank God for my mother having supper ready for us,” she said. “We would just go to work and come home. We didn’t go out because we had to get up early in the morning to go to work. We worked six days, sometimes seven days.”
Mauro Masters said that she worked eight hours a day. She would have to be there at 6 a.m. and said she got up very early to catch the bus, but said she liked it because she was able to go part of the way to work with her father, who worked at Eastern Market.
She said she had very little training when she started working at the plant. The employees had approximately one hour of training and then were on their own.
“No training. No. Just you do it this way and do it that way. When I was on the press, some of the rivets got crooked and you had to drill the rivets out and start over and put new rivets in,” she said. “I never complained, never made a mistake; I just did what they told me to do.”
The position at the plant paid $1 an hour. She said they were given a check each week, which she gave to her mom to help pay for their family house and expenses. She recalled that the house provided shelter for many family members who were in need, as money was hard to come by and they were the only ones that had a house.
“We didn’t keep any allowance,” she said.
Her son, John O’Brien, said he only found out about 20 years ago that his mom was a Rosie the Riveter.
“We knew my mom worked at Willow Run, but who cared? You know, as teenagers, who cared? I mean, she worked at Willow Run, ‘Oh, thank you, Ma.’ Because she worked her whole life when we were kids,” O’Brien said.
He said he found out when he and his brother took their mother to Willow Run after seeing an ad in the newspaper that they were opening up the plant to show the planes.
“We were totally shocked when we saw all the crowds, and I said, ‘Ma, are these the planes that you worked on?’ And she said yeah, and some young woman heard that and then she told her friends and they all took my mom and swept her away. I said to my brother, ‘What the heck is going on? What is this big deal?’ Well, as time went on we learned. We recognized that mom built these planes that were used in the war,” O’ Brien said.
Mauro Masters said she doesn’t know why she never told her kids, but she was proud of it. However, she didn’t think it was as important as some things her family members had done during the war, such as her two brothers, one of whom, Salvatore Mauro, was killed during the Battle of the Bulge. However, now she realizes her work during the war was very important.
“Now I always tell my friends when they ask what she did in the war, I say, ‘She killed Hitler,’” O’Brien said.
The job not only enabled her to help with the war effort, but also provided her with a skill that would grow into a career for her. Her first husband died young, at 40, leaving her with three young children. But unlike many other single mothers, Mauro Masters was able to get a job at the Chrysler plant as a riveter in an era when the factory jobs were a male-dominated profession, thanks to her experience as a Rosie the Riveter.
“It opened up the workforce for women,” O’Brien said.
“It was interesting, very interesting,” she said of her experience.
During the war, the plant produced more than 8,000 planes. Mauro Masters said they made one plane per hour.
She said she got to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he toured the plant. She also noted that Marilyn Monroe and Betty White were also Rosies.
“Marilyn Monroe was a riveter in California. A lot of people didn’t know about that,” Mauro Masters said. “But one of the presidents discovered her, and I said, ‘Well, why didn’t they come and get me?’ That was my joke.”
Bette Kenward, the Michigan director for the American Rosie the Riveter Association, said that Monroe was a Rosie, the collective term for the women who worked on the home front in the factories, but was actually a spray painter.
When the war ended, Mauro Masters said it was announced over the loudspeaker that it would be their last day of work, but they were allowed to finish their shift.
The memorial in Royal Oak at Memorial Park, 31100 Woodward Ave. at 13 Mile Road, is being commissioned in segments as the statues are funded. It will have a statue to represent all the different groups that helped to win the war. Mauro Masters’ likeness will be the second statue. The first is of Joe, a soldier. The memorial is being placed in the park where a group of trees were grown from acorns that were given to the U.S. by the British as a thank-you for American efforts in winning the war.
“They say the Royal Oaks in England saved the monarchy, so it was kind of a tribute to that,” said Judith Maten, a member of the memorial’s board of directors.
The acorns were nurtured by the Detroit Zoo until they could be planted in the park in an oval shape, and the memorial is designed to fit into the oval.
Maten said that Mauro Masters has been involved in the memorial from the beginning and was a natural choice to be the likeness for the statue.
“She has just been kind of the face of the homefront for us. It’s not that we haven’t had other Rosies involved, but Rosie Fran has always been there,” Maten said.
“The thing that strikes us whenever we talk to the World War II veterans or the homefront workers is their humility — the idea that they would do it all over again if they had to,” She said.
Mauro Masters said that she just likes to work and would gladly take a job even now if it were offered to her.
“I would do it again. I would. I want to work. It’s in my blood, I think,” Mauro Masters said.
The board is still working to raise funds to complete the memorial, which is estimated to cost $2 million. Each statue costs about $100,000 and the black granite wall costs about $300,000. The memorial board is still raising money for one piece of the plane panel for the Rosie Fran statue. The piece that they still need to commission is expected to cost $30,000. To donate to the memorial, visit michiganww2memorial.org or email John Maten at john.maten@michiganww2memorial.org.