Born in Nicholas County, West Virginia, Mazie started working at the age of six when she started helping her father pull out the weeds in the cornfields. She talks in detail about her early life in the country, where her father worked whatever jobs he could find, sometimes in the coal mines, or cutting timber, or making his own molasses – a process she describes in great detail. At the age of 13 Mazie worked in a nearby restaurant making pies and doing the wash. She earned seventy-five cents for a twelve-hour day. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mazie was 17 and she moved to Akron, Ohio to work as a riveter for Goodyear Aircraft. The death of her fiancé in combat affected her very deeply, and she threw herself into her defense work as a Rosie. After the war, she continued to work for Fletcher Enamel and eventually married and had a family.