Although Norman Rockwell's classic painting of Rosie the Riveter fetched $4.9 million at auction in 2002, it's hard to place a monetary value on something so iconic in American history.

After the image appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, the government used it to encourage women to volunteer for wartime service in factories working jobs previously done by men and to raise money for the war bond drives.It was later used as a symbol of feminism and women's economic power.Rockwell's Rosie was modeled by a real person, 19-year-old Mary Doyle Keefe from Arlington, Vermont.The painting shows a brawny, muscular woman in blue coveralls with a rivet gun across her lap and her feet resting on a copy of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf."Mary was in fact a petite, 110-pound phone operator.While being interviewed on the "The Tonight Show" in 2004, she told Jay Leno that Rockwell had called her and apologized for making her so large.She added that she was proud of the painting since it became a symbol of how women gave "up their nail polish" and did their part.Many other women like Mary worked on the home front, doing nearly every type of job that the men had been doing before they went off the war.I recently got to know another Rosie the Riveter named Muriel who worked on the P-47 Thunderbolt for Republic Aviation in Kentucky during the war.She shared a number of her personal stories with me, including how another male riveter on her assembly line eventually became her husband. Now 92, she's still a 90-pound bundle of energy who can light up a room.We also can't forget the 400,000 American women who served in World War II, working as nurses, the Army's Women Air Corps, Navy WAVES and other auxiliary service branches.There are over 26,000 female veterans age 85 and older in the United States today.Last Thursday, we lost Lucy Coffey, the nation's oldest female veteran, who died in San Antonio at the age of 108. The small-town Indiana girl was working at an A&P supermarket in Dallas when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.Originally rejected for being too short or too slim, she finally enlisted in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1943, becoming one of 150,000 women who served as WACs during the war.A highlight of her long life came last summer when she was given an Honor Flight to Washington and visited the National World War II Memorial and Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.John Mulrey, Coffey's nephew, told an interviewer at the time that his aunt was very shy about her time in the service and didn't talk about it much.Like all of the people of her remarkable generation, Lucy "just did what she had to do."By JIM ZBICKtneditor@tnonline.com