Back in the 1940s, Betty Soskin was a file clerk for a segregated boilermakers union. She waited until she was 85 to join the National Park Service.
Now, five days a week, the 93-year-old takes tourists through Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Park, telling her own personal World War II story and highlighting the historic role other women played supplying the war effort.
95-Year-old Smashes 200m Record: ‘Bodies Can be Rebuilt at Any Age’
“I tell the story of the African-American workers,” Soskin said in an Interior Department profile. “My job as a clerk in a Jim Crow union hall was a step up; the equivalent of today’s young woman of color being the first in her family to enter college.”
Her mother and great-grandmother both lived past 100, and Soskin has no plans to quit, as long as “life keeps opening up”.
(WATCH the inspiring video below, or READ more from the Dept of Interior) Photos by Dept of the Interior