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While her mom worked, she was raised by othersYakima Herald-Republic
GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic Versa K'ang is a Rosebud, the child of a father who served in WWII and a mother who joined the work force. She lived with other families during the war.
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Sure, the men went to war and the women went to work during World War II as the nation pulled together. Their stories have been chronicled for years.
But there were others who got caught up in the changes swirling through a nation at war.
They are the children of those service personnel and the women who joined the work force, now immortalized as Rosie the Riveter.
These children -- the girls known as Rosebuds and the boys as Rivets -- have their own stories to tell.
Versa K'ang, 68, of Yakima is one of them. After her father, Ralph Holder, joined the Navy in 1940 and her mother started working at the Martin Aircraft plant in Baltimore when the war began, the Virginia native had to live with other families. The concept of day care for children was still many years away. K'ang initially stayed with a grandmother who died soon after.
"A lot of women were working and a lot of them had children," she said. "We were farmed out to various places."
A retired director of the Yakima Valley Museum, K'ang also lived in a Catholic boarding school in Washington, D.C., while her mother, Clara, worked. It was there, in a strict environment, that she spent first grade and began a lifelong love of reading.
It would be 12 years before K'ang lived with her mother full time. The pair did spend her mother's days off together.
"I never felt abandoned or that my mother didn't want me," K'ang said. "I knew my dad was gone. There were other kids in the same boat."
According to the American Rosie the Riveter Association, the organization formed in 1998 to preserve the history and legacy of working women, more than 6 million women entered the work force during World War II.
Clara Holder was one of them. She held a variety of positions, first as a riveter in the aircraft plant. She later drove a munitions truck and operated the switchboard for the French embassy in Washington, D.C.
Her daughter said the experience and later years as the family moved around the country helped her learn to be independent, just like her mother.
"Mom was pretty independent. I felt very close to my mom, but I didn't depend on her presence," K'ang said.
She was young -- about 2 years old -- when she first went to live with an older farm couple and recalls only flashes from those years.
Things like baths in a big tub on the kitchen table, the food rationing, and heavy curtains covering the windows for the night blackouts.
K'ang said she was fortunate in the families with whom she lived. For the most part, they were nurturing experiences for her and the other children who shared the same circumstances.
"I was with other kids. It seemed natural and normal. I didn't have any trauma," she said.
Her parents separated and her mother remarried, beginning a life of moving around the country. They settled in Seattle, where K'ang went to high school. She graduated from the University of Washington with a political science major and a minor in English.
K'ang married and moved to Hawaii. She divorced and met her second husband, Lyle. On a visit to her parents, who then lived in Yakima, the K'angs decided to move here.
K'ang held a variety of positions, including the museum director's job, People for People, and Enterprise for Progress in the Community. She also consulted with the Yakama Nation Cultural Center.
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