Betty Reid Soskin: The extraordinary life of the nation’s oldest park ranger

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2022-04-21 21:39Z by Steven

Betty Reid Soskin: The extraordinary life of the nation’s oldest park ranger

Berkeleyside
Berkeley, California
2022-04-01

Daphne White

Betty Soskin in her living room. Photo: Daphne White

In this 2018 interview with Soskin who retired Thursday at the age of 100, the nation’s oldest park ranger said she considers herself “an absolutely ordinary extraordinary person.”

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in February 2018. We’re resharing it because Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest active park ranger, retired Thursday at the age of 100.

Betty Reid Soskin, 96, considers herself “an absolutely ordinary extraordinary person.”

Soskin has dated Jackie Robinson, co-founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley with her first husband, served as a “bag lady” (delivering cash) for the Black Panthers, and hobnobbed with the leaders of the human potential movement as a faculty wife with her second husband.

She also served in a Jim Crow segregated union hall in Richmond during World War II, experienced redlining in Berkeley when she tried to build her first house, moved to a racially-hostile Walnut Creek in the 1950s, and accidentally catapulted to fame in her 80s, as she brought her lived experience as a non-Rosie to the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,