https://resourcehub.togetheroutdoors.com/resource-detail-page?recordId=recqVFcM1M7w5FprR
By Jennifer Schuessler
Published Sept. 20, 2021Updated Sept. 22, 2021
The Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park, which sprawls across the former shipyards in Richmond, Calif., on the northeast edge of San Francisco Bay, tells the enormous story of the largest wartime mobilization in American history and the sweeping social changes it sparked.
Visitors can climb aboard an enormous Victory ship, one of more than 700 vessels produced in Richmond — and, in the gift shop, pick up swag emblazoned with the iconic image of the red-kerchiefed Rosie herself, arm flexed up with “We Can Do It!” bravado.
But for many, the park is synonymous with another woman: Betty.
Betty Reid Soskin, who turns 100 on Sept. 22, is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service. Over the past decade and a half, she has become both an icon of the service and an unlikely celebrity, drawing overflow crowds to talks and a steady stream of media interviewers eager for the eloquent words of an indomitable 5 feet 3 inch great-grandmother once described by a colleague as “sort of like Bette Davis, Angela Davis and Yoda all rolled into one.”
She has been photographed by Annie Leibovitz, interviewed by Anderson Cooper and invited to the Obama White House (where she introduced the president at the Christmas tree lighting in 2015). And as she approaches her centennial birthday, she has, to put it mildly, persisted. She suffered a stroke in 2019, but has since resumed her ranger talks (by videoconference), and even narrated a commercial for The North Face clothing company that dropped in July.
President Barack Obama greeted Betty Reid Soskin, a ranger in the National Park Service, at a Christmas tree lighting in Washington in 2015.Credit...Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Watch even a brief online clip of one of her ranger talks, with her gentle but uncompromising tell-it-like-it-is style, and you understand her appeal. But Ms. Soskin herself still seems a bit bewildered by “all that,” as she put it during a recent interview, gesturing toward a wall covered with framed citations and honors in her comfortably overstuffed apartment in the Richmond hills.
“I don’t have any sense of being that important,” she said, adjusting her tiny frame in a huge armchair. The only thing she has ever tried to do, she said, is “tell the truth.”
Ms. Soskin became a park ranger in her 80s, almost by accident. In 2000, she was working as a field representative for a California state legislator who asked her to sit in on early planning meetings for the park, which had just been authorized by Congress. At the first meeting, she blurted out that she had a “love-hate relationship” with the Rosie the Riveter icon, which she saw as telling a white woman’s story.
The half-million Black women who worked in home-front jobs included some who worked as welders and riveters, but Ms. Soskin’s experience was different. During the war, she worked as a file clerk in a segregated unit of the historically all-white Boilermakers union, which had resisted demands to allow full membership to Black workers.
At a later meeting, as she looked at the historical structures that would anchor the park, like the housing and child-care centers that supported the shipyard workers, Ms. Soskin — the only person of color in the room, as she recalls — saw places of segregation. What part of the park would tell her story?
“What gets remembered depends on who is in the room doing the remembering” — it’s something of a mantra for Ms. Soskin, who stayed in that room, and at that park, and kept talking: first as a community liaison, then as a seasonal tour guide and, since 2007, as a full-time interpretive ranger.
In that role, she speaks not to the experience of Rosie the Riveter, but to her own experience. “When I became a ranger,” she said, “I was taking back my own history.”
Today the park tells the story not only of women who went into “men’s jobs” to support the war effort but also of Mexican American braceros, the Japanese American flower growers of Richmond who were sent to internment camps and the boxcar “Indian Village” set up to house newly arrived railway workers from the New Mexican pueblos...
Keep Reading at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/betty-reid-soskin-100.html
