The National Park Service announced that the country's oldest active park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, retired last week at the age of 100.
Soskin first became a park ranger at the spry young age of 84, and worked for more than 15 years at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.
She gave tours teaching visitors to the park about women who worked in factories during World War II. She just so happens to have been one of them.
According to the National Park Service,
Soskin knew first-hand that the story of women who worked in wartime industry also included experiences with racial segregation and discrimination and that these stories needed to be included in the park's interpretive material and historical documentation.
Soskin worked for the U.S. Air Force briefly in 1942, before discovering that she was only hired because her superiors believed she was white. She promptly quit her job.
She was also named California's Woman of the Year back in 1995 (back when California could still define "woman"), and was awarded a presidential coin by President Obama after lighting the White House Christmas tree in 2015.
She even survived a robber in 2016 who grabbed her while she was sleeping in her house and punched her repeatedly (and stole the coin, which was replaced), when she was 94 years old.
She returned to work as a park ranger just a few weeks after that!!
Soskin said of her time at the National Historical Park,
"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. It has proven to bring meaning to my final years."
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