Betty Reid Soskin, National Park Service Ranger Who Retired at 100, Dies Months After Celebrating 104th Birthday

Betty Reid Soskin — widely known as the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service before retiring in 2022 — has died. She was 104.

Her family announced her death on Sunday, Dec. 21, saying Soskin passed away peacefully at her home in Richmond, California.

“This morning on the Winter Solstice, our mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, Betty Reid Soskin, passed away peacefully at her home in Richmond, CA,” her family said in a statement. “She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave.”

They also requested privacy as they grieve. “We understand the public nature of Betty’s life, however we ask that you please respect the family’s privacy at this time,” the statement continued. “There will be a public memorial at a time and place to be announced.”

Soskin became a national figure for her work at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, where she began serving as a ranger at age 85. Before stepping into that public-facing role, she contributed behind the scenes as a consultant while the park was being researched and developed. She was often the only person of color involved in those early conversations — and, by all accounts, pushed to ensure the story told there did not ignore or gloss over segregation and the realities faced by Black workers.

Over the next decade and a half, Soskin used tours as a living history lesson, drawing from her own experiences during World War II, including work in a segregated union hall. Her storytelling connected the wartime home-front narrative to the longer arc of civil rights, community organizing, and her own life as an activist and songwriter.

“I tell the story of the African-American workers,” Soskin said in a 2015 interview with Today. “When I’m on the streets or on an escalator or elevator, I am making every little girl of color aware of a career choice she may not have known she had.”

In 2015, Soskin received a commemorative coin from President Barack Obama. The following year, the coin was stolen during a break-in at her home in which she was attacked. When she returned to work three weeks later, she described the experience as “an adventure I wished I’d never had,” according to NBC Bay Area. “But it’s over now,” she added, also saying it felt “good” to be back and to feel “the support of the community.”

Soskin retired in March 2022 at age 100, after celebrating her milestone birthday just months earlier. In her retirement statement, she reflected on the significance of helping shape a national site that would outlive her — and the power of telling history through the lens of those who lived it.

“To be a part of helping to mark the place where that dramatic trajectory of my own life, combined with others of my generation, will influence the future by the footprints we’ve left behind has been incredible,” she said.

“Being a primary source in the sharing of that history – my history – and giving shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” she added. “It has proven to bring meaning to my final years.”

She later celebrated her final birthday with students at a middle school named in her honor.

Following her death, her family remembered Soskin not only for her public service, but for the many roles she held across a long life — “mother, daughter, musician, author, political activist, wife, record store owner, songwriter, painter, grandmother, great-grandmother, prolific blogger, and more.”

Her honors included being named Woman of the Year by the California State Legislature in 1995, receiving the National WWII Museum’s Silver Service Medallion in 2016, and the Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year Award in 2018.

In lieu of flowers, her family asked that donations be made to the Betty Reid Soskin Middle School in El Sobrante, California, and toward completion of her film, Sign My Name To Freedom.