A new start after 60: I found my feet in midlife, became a park ranger at 85 and retired happily at 100

"Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US this was back in 2013; she'd become a ranger at 85 but she had been furloughed along with 800,000 other federal employees during the government shutdown. News channels flocked to interview her. She was aggrieved not to be working, she told them; she had a job to do."

"She retired as a ranger at 100, having helped to establish the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front national park in Richmond, California, where she shared, day after day, the wartime experiences of people of colour, because what gets remembered is determined by who's in the room doing the remembering. At the time, she joked that her job was almost like I'm running a federally funded revolution ..."

Betty Reid Soskin became a national park ranger at 85 and achieved widespread recognition during a 2013 government shutdown. She helped establish the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front national park in Richmond, California, and devoted years to sharing wartime experiences of people of colour. Her public profile included a memoir, a documentary, high-profile photography, and praise from national figures. She retired as a ranger at 100 and later reflected on fading memory and a changed sense of time while living into her second century.

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