Betty Reid Soskin, America’s Oldest Park Ranger, Dies at 104

Betty Reid Soskin, who was the oldest ranger in the National Park Service, has died. She was 104.

Soskin’s family announced her death on Facebook.

“This morning on the Winter Solstice, our mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, Betty Reid Soskin, passed away peacefully at her home in Richmond, CA at 104 years old," the post reads. "She was attended by family. She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave.”

Soskin retired as a park ranger in March 2022 after more than 15 years at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.

She led tours at the park and museum honoring the women who worked in factories during wartime and shared her own experience as a Black woman during the conflict. She worked for the U.S. Air Force in 1942 but quit after learning that “she was employed only because her superiors believed she was white,” according to a Park Service biography.

“During the Second World War, I was hired to do clerical work for the Air Force, but they hired me without realizing I was African American,” she told AARP The Magazine in 2018. “When the lieutenant in charge of our section found out a few days later, he made it clear to me that I would never be promoted, so I left.”​

Soskin won a temporary Park Service position at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park at the age of 84 and became a permanent Park Service employee in 2011. ​

Soskin was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921 but recalled surviving the devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 while living with her Creole family in New Orleans, according to the Park Service biography.​

Her family then moved to Oakland, California, and Soskin remained in the San Francisco Bay Area, where in 1945 she and her first husband founded one of the first Black-owned record stores in the area, the biography said.​

She also was a civil rights activist and took part in meetings to develop a general management plan for the Home Front park.​

She was named California Woman of the Year in 1995.​

In 2015, Soskin received a presidential coin from President Barack Obama after she lit the National Christmas tree at the White House.​

In June 2016, she was awakened in her home by a robber who punched her repeatedly in the face, dragged her out of her bedroom and beat her before making off with the coin and other items. Soskin, then 94, recovered and returned to work just weeks after the attack. The coin was replaced.​

Soskin also was honored with entry into the Congressional Record. Glamour Magazine named her woman of the year in 2018.​