Jane Tucker was born in Alabama in 1927. When her father left the family, Jane moved into her grandparents’ home in Lineville with her mother, Iris, and her sister, Betty. As a teenager Jane got a job making a dollar a day in a five and ten cent store. Her mother worked twelve hours a day as a telephone operator, making $25.00 a month, and if people could not pay their telephone bills, Iris Tucker did not receive a paycheck.

After the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, Jane’s mother heard from a cousin that jobs were available at Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation in Savannah, Georgia. Jane, her mother, and her sister traveled to Savannah by train and sat on their suitcases, because every other seat was taken by a soldier. In the shipyards, Jane worked a twelve-hour shift and made $1.20 an hour. She was a rod welder, fusing sheets of metal in the hull of the ship. Her mother and sister were also rod welders but worked on different crews. Between 1941 and 1945, shipbuilding crews worked around the clock to build eighty-eight Liberty Ships which carried supplies and ordnance to Europe.

After the war Jane returned to Lineville to complete high school. She attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama and dental hygiene school at Northwestern University in Chicago. She settled in Rome, Georgia, where she started the local chapter of the American Rosie the Riveter Association in 2010.