Regina Sawina Tollfeldt, a “Rosie the Riveter” featured in Legacy Washington’s 2016 book, “Washington Remembers World War II,” died in Montesano on June 24 at the age of 97.

She was one of the last of the some 15,000 women who worked in Boeing’s Seattle factories during World War II. Eight hours a day, seven days a week at the apex of the war, she wriggled through the wing jigs for the gleaming B-17s leaving Plant No. 2 at the rate of a dozen a day. Her job was to drill the holes for the rivets that fastened the bomber’s aluminum skin to its ribs.

With the war won, “naturally we were all fired by Boeing,” she remembered in an interview with former Daily World Editor John Hughes, now a state historian who wrote about her in the Legacy Washington book. “Contracts were cancelled and the men returning from overseas would want their jobs back. But women had done all kinds of work during the war, and I think ultimately that’s what opened the eyes of a lot of women and changed society.”

She invested her last check from Boeing in four months’ of business school, and met a handsome young carpenter, Roy Tollfeldt, just home from the war. She landed a job as secretary to the director of the State Board for Vocational Education in Olympia.

Regina was a mainstay at the vocational rehabilitation office in Aberdeen until her retirement in 1978. “In all, I worked for the state for 32 years. I loved vocational rehabilitation,” she said. “We were one of the departments that spent money on people, found them jobs and kept them as productive taxpayers. We had to find them jobs, and that’s where I really excelled because I love people. All they had to do was come in one time. I’d write their names down and then I knew them. I treated them like an equal—the way everyone should be treated.”

Here’s the link to her remarkable life story:

https://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/washington-remembers/stories/regina-tollfeldt/pdf/regina.pdf