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Betty Reid Soskin is something like the national treasures she shares with the people who visit the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.
The 93-year-old, is believed to be the nation’s oldest park ranger according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. She has been working as such since 2003. Soskin, the great-granddaughter of a slave, recently sat down with a Today Show reporter to talk about how she sees her job as advocacy for young Black girls.
“I still love this uniform. Partly because there’s a silent message to every little girl of color that I pass on the street or in an elevator or on an escalator…that there’s a career choice she may have never thought of.”
Soskin helped develop the plans for the national park where she works, which opened in 2001 to honor the working women of World War II. She leads a tour called “Untold Stories and Lost Conversations” telling the stories of political activists and African-American women in the workforce.
“I’m not sure I even wanted to be [a park ranger]. This is the turn that my life took. Since I’m working from memory, my work tends to be ‘in the moment and depends upon my ability to respond to questions out of a well that seems bottomless at times.”
That well is full of experience. Long before Soskin became a park ranger at the age of 85, she was a file clerk in 1942 for a segregated union auxiliary. Afterward, she moved, with her husband to an all White neighborhood in California where the couple received death threats for building a home there.
Today, Soskin, who comes from a long line of women who live past one hundred years old, works five days a weeks and has no plans of slowing down.
She said, “And as long as that’s true, and as long as I’m developing new questions, then I’m going to go on living it.”
You can watch her full interview with the Today Show in the video below
