At 104, Betty Reid Soskin has had the most extraordinary life, from protest singing to civil rights activism to meeting the Obamas. She reflects on what it takes to stay strong and keep going
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etty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US – this was back in 2013; she’d become a ranger at 85 – but she had been furloughed along with 800,000 other federal employees during the government shutdown. News channels flocked to interview her. She was aggrieved not to be working, she told them; she had a job to do.
“In a funny way, I suppose that started lots of things,” Soskin says. Her memoir, Sign My Name to Freedom, was published in 2018, and a documentary about her work, No Time to Waste, was released in 2020. Another film is in the works. Barack Obama called her “profoundly inspiring”. Annie Leibovitz photographed her. Glamour magazine named her woman of the year. Now, Reid Soskin is 104, and “all of whatever I was supposed to do, I’ve done”, she says.
She retired as a ranger at 100, having helped to establish the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front national park in Richmond, California, where she shared, day after day, the wartime experiences of people of colour, because “what gets remembered is determined by who’s in the room doing the remembering”. At the time, she joked that her job was almost “like I’m running a federally funded revolution ... I was very aware that I was in my 90s and I really didn’t have time to waste,” she says.
