Betty Reid Soskin, once nation's oldest park ranger, dies at 104

Betty Reid Soskin, once nation's oldest park ranger, dies at 104

Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY

Tue, December 23, 2025 at 1:23 AM UTC

3 min read

Betty Reid Soskin, a fount of history who was the National Park Service's oldest ranger when she retired a few years ago, has died at the age of 104.

Soskin, whose family confirmed her death on Dec. 21 in a Facebook post, had spent more than a dozen years sharing her stories as a park ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, intent on filling missing chapters of the U.S. narrative that only someone like her could know. They did not share her cause of death.

Born in Detroit in 1921, Soskin was the great-granddaughter of a former Louisiana slave, according to “No Time to Waste: The Urgent Message of Betty Reid Soskin,” a documentary about her life produced in association with the Rosie the Riveter Trust.

Soskin's Cajun-Creole family moved to California six years later, where she grew up in Richmond and worked as a file clerk in a segregated shipyard union hall supporting U.S. efforts in World War II. Decades of discrimination would steel her character and resolve.

As a child of what she called the “service workers generation” – i.e. bellhops, laborers, Pullman porters and domestic servants – Soskin was well aware of racism and its effects. Her gig as a union clerk, she said, represented a step up, the equivalent of someone in more modern times being the first in their family to go to college.

“I wasn’t making beds in a hotel or taking care of white people’s children,” she said in “No Time to Waste.”

According to the National Park Trust, Soskin was one of the nation’s first Black record store owners. She worked with the Black Panthers in California’s East Bay Valley and would ultimately pen a memoir, produce spoken-word recordings and write songs reflecting her emotional highs and lows − the latter as a way of maintaining her sanity, she said.

Betty Reid Soskin, the oldest full-time National Park Service ranger in the United States, poses for a portrait in her home in Richmond, California, a day before her 100th birthday on September 21, 2021. Soskin worked at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, leading tours and answering questions about how Black women like herself supported the U.S. war effort despite the challenges of racism. Soskin worked as a file clerk for Boilermakers A-36, a segregated union hall in Richmond, during the war.

Maintaining hope wasn't always easy, she said, but she succeeded more than not, buoyed by the throngs who took to American streets during the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrations of 2020.

“There are others out there working on the same thing,” she told USA TODAY in July 2020. “And one of us will someday make it. The people in the streets are now multiracial and that’s different. That means that the question is no longer there for me as a Black person. It now involves everyone.”

In 2015, Soskin was invited to attend the National Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony at the White House Ellipse, where she introduced President Barack Obama. Meeting the Obamas, she said, was “the high point of my life.”

In 2007, by then in her mid-80s, Soskin became a National Park ranger, schooling visitors on Black women’s contributions to the WWII effort in the face of discrimination.

“I feel like I have lived my life fully," she said. "I don’t have any regrets. I don’t have anything that I feel I left undone. I feel like I’ve had my life and I’ve lived every minute of it.”

Contributing: Autumn Schoolman, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Betty Reid Soskin: Nation's oldest park ranger dies at 104

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