Jeanne Gibson described welding steel for wartime destroyers with a seamstress's vocabulary: tacks, a careful hand and an arc of molten metal guided along the join. Gibson, the Todd Pacific Shipyards welder who became an educator, pilot and tireless interpreter of the women's home-front experience, died on July 29, 2026, at 100, Pacific Historic Parks announced.

Her welding comparison was more than a clever turn of phrase. In 1944, at 18, Gibson left Minnesota with her school friend Esther Harri and took a bus to Seattle. They entered a shipyard world of heavy steel, protective face shields, tight spaces and the afternoon-to-night swing shift. They braided their hair away from sparks and bought wool underwear with their first paychecks to blunt the waterfront cold. In Gibson's concise formulation, recorded by Military Families, "Welding is a lot like sewing." The hand had to be gentle and exact even when the material was massive.

Gibson and Harri welded plates for destroyers at Todd Pacific Shipyards during 1944 and 1945. Gibson later told NPR that the work felt exhilarating, but its urgency made it seem ordinary to the people doing it. "I mean, everybody was doing something, and this was it," she said. After about a year the friends continued north to Juneau, Alaska, where Gibson prepared manifests and hatch lists for the Army Transportation Corps Embarkation Center. Those documents organized lumber shipments bound for the Pacific. She watched the celebration of victory over Japan from her Juneau apartment.

The war had trained Gibson's hands, but it also enlarged the range of choices she acted upon. When she moved to California after the war, she took a job with an insurance company and discovered that a male file clerk earned five dollars more each month. She quit. A bookkeeping position brought quick advancement followed by another boundary, as her employer assumed marriage and children would end her ambitions. Gibson left that job too and turned toward education.

She earned an undergraduate degree, a master's degree and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Across a 30-year teaching career, she worked with generations rather than steel plates. She also helped develop national science curricula with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the period after Sputnik. Speaking with NPR, Gibson described her teaching career with a teacher's count: "I had a thousand kids, because I taught school for 30 years."

Aviation supplied another demanding skill. In their 40s, Gibson and Harri again learned side by side, this time earning private pilot licenses. They joined the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots. Welding, advanced study, teaching and flight each widened the path beyond the restricted futures Gibson had encountered as a young woman.

Gibson told NPR that she had not considered herself a Rosie until a new friend's daughter heard about her wartime work and recognized her as one. At Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, Gibson became a regular volunteer at Rosie Fridays. She brought visitors inside the practical details of shipyard work and used those memories to speak to younger women about equal pay. Her retirement work made the distance between an icon and a human life suddenly small: the familiar Rosie symbol had a voice, a shipyard badge and cold-night work clothes.

Public recognition arrived on a national scale in April 2024. Gibson joined 26 other Rosies in Washington, D.C., as the women who had supported the World War II effort accepted the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to them collectively. The ceremony took place in Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol, according to the Office of Senator Susan Collins. That June, Gibson traveled to Normandy and visited Omaha and Utah beaches. In December she returned to Pearl Harbor commemorations, the place associated with the event that had first moved her toward wartime service.

She kept carrying the story to people who could not remember the war. In March 2026, Pacific Historic Parks brought the 100-year-old Gibson to Pearl Harbor National Memorial to meet visitors and sign commemorative posters for National Rosie the Riveter Day. Back in Richmond, she continued speaking with students. Shortly before her death, the park unveiled a Wall of Honor banner bearing her name, her 1944 to 1945 welding service and the face from her Todd Pacific identification photograph.

What persists in Gibson's story is a chain of learned skills placed in other people's service: weld beads on destroyers, cargo lists for the Pacific, science lessons for students and firsthand history offered every Friday. Her shipyard badge and Wall of Honor banner now give the public a face to place beside the Rosie symbol. Her classroom work, her recorded interviews and the visitors she taught preserve the more demanding lesson beneath it, that capability grows when someone is permitted to try and then passes the knowledge forward.