Betty Reid Soskin, the nation's oldest active park ranger, died at 104. She started her ranger career at 85, worked at the Rosie the Riveter park, and spent decades before that as a union worker, WWII auxiliary unit member, and Black record store owner in Berkeley. She published memoirs at 97 and kept working after a stroke at 98.
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Sad news for the National Park Service. According to the New York Times, Betty Reed Suskin, the nation's oldest active park ranger, has passed away earlier this week at age 104. Now, she didn't start working at the National park service till age 85. She used her own experiences with segregation during World War II to teach visitors about the overlooked roles of women and people of color on the home front. Her lifespan went from slavery's legacy, Jim Crow's desegregation and the presidency of Barack Obama. And she, as part of her job, told history the entire truth again. 104 years old. Didn't start the job until she was 85 years old. She worked at the Rosie the riveter park around 2007. She was a union worker back in 1942. During World War II, she was assigned to a segregated auxiliary unit. She was black, African American. She owned the first own black owned record store in Berkeley way back in 1945. She had survived burglaries when she was 95 years old. She did have a stroke in 2019, but went back to work. She had met President Obama and actually published her memoirs in 2018. Here's one of her memorable quotes. She said, I never had a sense of being anyone other than pushing papers. Meaning she didn't think of herself as special or fancy or elite. In some ways, she just showed up for work. I find this heartwarming and inspirational. We so often think, well, you know, if you want to be 100, you have to be like Brian Johnson and spend $2 million a year on all sorts of pills and potions and supplements and infrared treatments. Turns out for her, anyway, it was working. Finding purpose in life, being helpful to others, overcoming discrimination, other, other challenges. So I do think she's quite inspiring. I wanted to give her recognition because quite often people like this who just show up and do the work don't get a lot of attention. Now she is getting attention in part because she just did it a lot longer than anyone else getting to be 104 years old. Now, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of park rangers over my own career. I used to do all of the media training for the National Park Service, the northeastern region that included some Delaware Water Gap parks, things like that, parks in Long island, but also the Statue of Liberty is a national park. And what I found was universally all the people I met at the Park Service were really committed to America, to history, to helping citizens better understand it. And we now live in a time where a lot of these park Service people don't feel especially appreciated, especially when the government sort of willy nilly shuts down and says, ah, you're not really important, you're useless, just you're furlough, we're not going to pay you. And they just have to sit at home sometimes month at a time, no pay. And you know what? Pretty much all of them show up day one whenever the government shutdown ends. In my own experience, the park rangers really loved public service. They saw themselves as true stewards of not just the land, but the traditions of America. Because there are some parks like Yosemite, gigantic Grand Canyon, gigantic park, obviously, other parks like Grant's Tomb and Statue of Liberty, not particularly large in terms of acreage, but large in the minds and the spirits of Americans, of who we are, what we're about. And I do see a lot of the true patriots and yes, government workers. And yes, if you want to call them bureaucrats, you can do that. There is bureaucracy in any organization that has more than one person in it because people have to get organized. But the bigger lesson I see from her is, and forgive me for seeming like a nag, don't retire. I don't mean you have to work at a boring job you don't like that's physically laborious and draining you of energy. And never travel or spend time with your kids or grandkids or the community. What I do mean is find something of purpose. Because as much as your kids and grandkids love you, I don't really want to see you 18 hours a day. There's time to do both. And again, if you are a renowned spinal surgeon and you feel like I've done every spine spinal surgery I want to do, it's time to do something. Okay, maybe you become a park ranger or a community volunteer, but I do think it's crucial if you really want to have longest and happiest life, to be like Betty Reed Soskin, have a purpose, show up, have a job. Doesn't have to be a paying job, but have a job. And it could be simply taking care of five kids in your neighborhood, babysitting, and not even charging. Or maybe you do charge. It could be rather than a park ranger for a giant park, maybe it's taking care of of an abandoned lot at the end of your street so that neighborhood kids have a place to play. I don't know what it is, but what I do know is, and there's a great article in the Atlantic just this week about the problem of senior citizens having a cell phone retirement where all they do is sit around and look at their phone, look at Facebook, maybe look at pictures of their grandkids, rather than spending time with their grandkids looking at the news and complaining about politicians. It's an awful retirement, and I don't think that's the way to get to 104. So, Betty Reed Soskin, we salute you in a life well lived. And I'm hoping that I can get to 104 as well, and I'm hoping any of you watching do too.
