Naomi Parker Fraley, the inspiration for the iconic female World War II factory worker Rosie the Riveter, has died. She was 96. 
 
 The Tulsa, Oklahoma, native, who was born on August 26, 1921, died on Saturday in Longview, Washington, according to the New York Times. The California waitress-turned-factory worker began her job at the Naval Air Station in Alameda and was among the first women to be assigned to the machine shop after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941. 
 
 Then in 1942, 20-year-old Fraley posed for a photograph wearing her signature red-and-white-polka-dot bandana and working on a turret lathe, for a photographer touring the Naval Air Station, where she and younger sister Ada drilled and patched airplane wings as well as operated rivet machines. 
 
 Ramona Rosales 
 
 The picture was quickly featured in newspapers and magazines nationwide before it caught the eye of artist J. Howard Miller, whose 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster bears a striking resemblance to Fraley’s photo, even down to the exact bandana. 
 
 Naomi Parker Fraley working at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California, in March 1942 Corbis/Getty 
 
 However, Fraley was not identified as the muse for Rosie because another woman, named Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who worked in a factory in Michigan, was labeled “the real-life Rosie the Riveter” since she believed she saw herself in an uncaptioned reprint of Fraley’s photo in the 1980s. 
 
 Fraley was unaware of her identity on the poster for 30 years until she was informed that her photo had been misidentified. “I couldn’t believe it because it was me in the photo, but there was somebody else’s name in the caption: Geraldine. I was amazed,” Fraley told PEOPLE in September 2016. 
 
 However, it was too late to set the record straight as Hoff Doyle’s identity was already cemented as Rosie. “I just wanted my own identity. I didn’t want fame or fortune, but I did want my own identity,” Fraley recalled. 
 
 Naomi Parker Fraley, 94, in July 2016 Ramona Rosales 
 
 That was until 2015, when she met James J. Kimble, a professor of communications at Seton Hall University in New Jersey whose six years of research led him straight to Fraley’s door. 
 
 “She had been robbed of her part of history. It’s so hurtful to be misidentified like that,” Kimble told PEOPLE at the time. “It’s like the train has left the station and you’re standing there and there’s nothing you can do because you’re 95 and no one listens to your story.” 
 
 Most poignantly, given the current social climate in Hollywood and many industries, Fraley’s message about working women still resonates. 
 
 “The women of this country these days need some icons. If they think I’m one, I’m happy about that,” she said. 

 Distributed by the Acme photo agency, the photograph showed a young woman, her hair in a polka-dot bandanna, at an industrial lathe. It was published widely in the spring and summer of 1942, though rarely with a caption identifying the woman or the factory. 
 
 In 1984, Mrs. Doyle saw a reprint of that photo in Modern Maturity magazine. She thought it resembled her younger self. 
 
 Ten years later, she came across the Miller poster, featured on the March 1994 cover of Smithsonian magazine. That image, she thought, resembled the woman at the lathe — and therefore resembled her. 
 
 By the end of the 1990s, the news media was identifying Mrs. Doyle as the inspiration for Mr. Miller’s Rosie. There the matter would very likely have rested, had it not been for Dr. Kimble’s curiosity. 
 
 It was not Mrs. Doyle’s claim per se that he found suspect: As he emphasized in the Times interview, she had made it in good faith. 
 
 What nettled him was the news media’s unquestioning reiteration of that claim. He embarked on a six-year odyssey to identify the woman at the lathe, and to determine whether that image had influenced Mr. Miller’s poster. 
 
 In the end, his detective work disclosed that the lathe worker was Naomi Parker Fraley. 
 
 The third of eight children of Joseph Parker, a mining engineer, and the former Esther Leis, a homemaker, Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Okla., on Aug. 26, 1921. The family moved wherever Mr. Parker’s work took him, living in New York, Missouri, Texas, Washington, Utah and California, where they settled in Alameda, near San Francisco.
– Former wartime factory worker Naomi Parker Fraley has died at age 96, years after a discovery that brought her great joy: She's believed to have been the real-life inspiration for the iconic "Rosie the Riveter" poster. Michigan factory worker Geraldine Doyle, who died in 2010, was long thought to have been the woman in a bandanna working at an industrial lathe in a photo that inspired artist J. Howard Miller. But after years of sleuthing, scholar James Kimble discovered that the photo was actually of Fraley, then 20 years old, working at a turret lathe in the machine shop of the Naval Air Station in Alameda, Calif., in 1942, soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the New York Times reports. "Pretty Naomi Parker looks like she might catch her nose in the turret lathe she is operating," says the original caption of the photo obtained from a vintage dealer by Kimble, who stresses that Doyle made an honest mistake when she thought she recognized herself in the photo, which can be seen here. Fraley worked at the plant with her younger sister, patching airplane wings, drilling—and riveting. Fraley, who kept the photo after the war and was shocked to see somebody else's name on the displayed image when she visited the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park for a reunion of war workers in 2011, told People in 2016 that she didn't care about fame, but that she was glad to have the record set straight. "The women of this country these days need some icons. If they think I'm one, I'm happy about that," she said.