Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she initially gained widespread attention, effectively becoming a celebrity within the National Park Service. She held the title of the oldest full-time national park ranger in the United States – this was in 2013; she had become a ranger at the age of 85 – but she faced furlough along with 800,000 other federal workers during the government shutdown. News networks rushed to interview her. She expressed her frustration about not working, stating she had responsibilities to fulfill.
“In a peculiar way, that was the catalyst for many things,” Soskin remarks. Her memoir, Sign My Name to Freedom, was released in 2018, and a documentary highlighting her contributions, No Time to Waste, premiered in 2020. A new film is currently in development. Barack Obama described her as “profoundly inspiring.” Annie Leibovitz captured her likeness in a photograph. Glamour magazine named her as their woman of the year. Now 104, Reid Soskin reflects, “I’ve accomplished all that I was meant to do.”
She retired from her ranger position at the age of 100, having played a key role in establishing the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front national park in Richmond, California, where she shared the wartime narratives of people of color, noting, “what gets remembered is determined by who’s in that room making the memories.” At the time, she humorously indicated that her role felt almost “like I’m leading a federally supported revolution … I was acutely aware of my age and the limited time I had,” she states.
Naturally, Soskin’s perception of time has shifted as she has entered her second century, transforming into a more fluid concept. “Having survived a few more years, I genuinely feel old now,” she remarks. “My memories are fading, and events seem to occur both yesterday and years ago … time feels as if it has folded in on itself.”
Political happenings, too – she mentions Donald Trump’s use of the national guard in US cities – are seeming to collapse “in on themselves. And I perceive it all as interconnected.”
Soskin remains actively engaged. “I keep a close eye on the political landscape,” she says during a video call from her residence in Richmond, where she lives with her daughter, Di’ara. “Even throughout the 50s and 60s with civil rights, that was progress,” she states. “I don’t sense that same momentum now … It appears to me that [Trump] lacks awareness of his actions. I feel we have lost our direction. And that frightens me, because I will leave the world in such a state.
“I often ponder what [the future] will look like, and I have no answer. We are living in chaotic times … We journey through life with the hope of better things to come. For the first time, I’m uncertain that there is.”
Soskin, originally Betty Charbonnet, spent her early years in New Orleans; her family relocated to Oakland, California, following the floods of 1927. Her father hailed from a Creole lineage, her mother from a Cajun background, and her great-grandmother, who lived to be 102, was born into slavery in 1846. However, after gaining public recognition, new chapters of Soskin’s rich and varied life began to surface. There are many sides to Betty – she often refers to herself simply as Betty to distinguish herself from the men in her life – and for many years, she admits she was unsure “who Betty was.”
There was the Betty who opened Reid’s Records in 1945, one of California’s first black record shops, with her then-husband, Mel Reid. There was Betty the singer of protest anthems, who made a resurgence on social media a few years back with a collection of reel-to-reel tapes from her 30s. There was Betty the civil rights and community advocate who raised funds for the Black Panthers and later took on the drug issues in the vicinity of Reid’s Records. There was Betty who served in local government as a legislative aide. All this prior to her rise to fame as the oldest and potentially most vocal ranger in the National Park Service.
It was the loss of “the three men” in her life – Reid; her second husband, psychologist William Soskin; and her father – over a tumultuous three months in the late 1980s, that catalyzed a significant transformation in Reid Soskin’s life. “It’s as if I transitioned from one life into another,” she reflects.
“That was when my true life commenced. Because before that, I didn’t truly understand who I was. After that, I emerged as Betty. Oh, it was magnificent. I started to recognize my place in the world. I began to walk in my own shoes. I had goals to achieve – and that continued until I turned 100. I kept doing things. I was no longer in the process of becoming; I was simply existing.”
In 2015, she was invited to present Obama at the national Christmas tree-lighting event in Washington DC. (Previously, she had declined an invitation to the White House from George W Bush.)
“I recall being guided to where [the Obamas] stood between two flags. Instead of looking at the president, I was focused on her [Michelle] and exclaimed, ‘You are incredibly beautiful.’” On that day, Soskin carried a photograph of her great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, whom she knew well into her twenties. “I stood there like a page of history,” she shares. “I stood next to the president of the United States. I was in the shadow of the White House, which was built by enslaved people.”
She displays a commemorative coin to her camera: Obama had placed one just like it into her hand during their handshake. The original was lost in a home burglary, making this a replacement. “I don’t believe anything can compare to the experience of that moment,” she articulates. Mementoes are “like ashes. They are merely symbols of what existed.”
Soskin states she no longer perceives herself as a feminist or activist, but simply “as a person. I have never liked being labeled.” She doesn’t even see herself as “a singer”; she identifies as “a Betty who sang.” She began writing songs on a guitar, a Christmas gift from Reid, during the turbulent phase of their marriage. “I was in the midst of a breakdown, convincing myself I was just recalling things,” she says, realizing much later that she was actually creating them – “and managed to encapsulate all that mattered.”
She could have pursued a successful singing career. She performed alongside Pete Seeger, and filmmaker Henry Hampton encouraged her after hearing her at a Unitarian convention, stating, “he believed in my singing abilities and invited me to Connecticut. I spent two weeks with a musical director.” However, on the night before her audition to sing at the Village Vanguard in New York, she opted to return home. After attending a party in New York, she found herself among people using marijuana for the first time. “I decided that wasn’t the environment for me. I spontaneously chose to go home.”
Soskin shares that nowadays, she sings only in her sleep: “I recall every lyric of everything in my dreams.”
In an era that values longevity, how does she perceive her extended life? “I think it’s a gift bestowed upon us. I’m not certain that I could dictate my actions or my lifestyle. I just – I simply don’t. I perceive it as a blessing. I have no idea of where it will lead or the direction it will take. It’s just free. It’s unstoppable.”
