THUNDER BAY — More than 20 years after Thunder Bay film producer Kelly Saxberg and the National Film Board released the documentary Rosies of the North, the stories of the local women who helped win World War ll for the Allies remain as impressive and meaningful as ever.
Now, even more details of their experiences during the assembly of about 2,300 Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft and Curtiss Helldiver bombers have become available.
A project of the Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple supported by a grant from the Thunder Bay Community Foundation provides new insight into the experiences of the female workers who built military aircraft at the Canadian Car & Foundry plant.
Their recently-launched interactive website includes not only the research material and interviews Saxberg collected for the film and for a CBC radio documentary, but also a great deal more information gathered from various archives and from the families of wartime Can Car employees.
Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple was already in possession of historical records donated by Bombardier Transportation.
This year, those materials together with items submitted by families were digitized by history students at Lakehead University.
"We digitized every woman worker's card from wartime. I had already digitized all of my interviews. I had this idea that we would digitize the workers' cards, images, archival, and create videos out of these audio tape interviews," Saxberg explained in an interview with TBnewswatch.
She described the involvement and interest of families who have contributed material as "remarkable," saying one woman even interviewed her own grandmother who had worked at Can Car during the war.
Although the website is up and running, it will be refreshed from time to time with new information.
"The whole idea is that it's interactive. Families and community members can help us add to those stories of all those thousands of women as the public discovers the website," Saxberg said.
She noted that an interview with the stepdaughter of Elsie MacGill, the trailblazing chief aeronautical engineer at Can Car, is just one of many components of the website that have never been made public before.
The 52-minute acclaimed film that was released in 1999 is also accessible through the site, but it only focuses on some of the women, leaving much more to tell.
"This is not a story that's going away," Saxberg said, adding that interest in the Rosies of the North shows no sign of abating in the community.
"I think there's barely a family that doesn't have a connection in Thunder Bay...So many young people have seen the film at their high school or at the university but they didn't really get that it has such an intimate connection here."
Saxberg expects that once word spreads about the online project, even more stories and material will be contributed.
