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Ranger's voice spans East Bay history
Sunday, January 31, 2010

Lee Hildebrand, Special to The Chronicle

Betty Reid Soskin is a "phenomenal woman," to borrow the title of a famous poem by Maya Angelou. In her 88 years, Betty has been a shipyard worker, proprietor of a record store, housewife and mother of four, singer and composer of art songs, community activist and, for the past three years, a ranger at Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park in Richmond.

She's the oldest active National Park Service ranger in the country and works at the park six hours a day, five days a week, doing community outreach and giving guided tours of the now dormant Kaiser Shipyards where she worked during World War II.

Born in Detroit

She was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921 to bilingual Creole parents from New Orleans. She has traced her European ancestry to France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest relative of African heritage she's been able to identify was her great-great-grandmother, a former slave named Celestine who married her former master, Cajun plantation owner Eduouard Breaux. Their daughter, Betty's great-grandmother Leontine Breaux, was 19 when they married.

"Marriages were relatively common between Cajun slave owners and their slaves," Soskin explains. "Their marriage papers are dated 1865, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. His signature is there alongside her 'X'. Her name is given, in French, as 'Celestine of no last name.' "

Betty and her parents returned to New Orleans not long after her birth and moved to East Oakland when she was 6. "It was an interesting time to grow up," she says. "There weren't enough blacks here to have rules made against us. We faced those problems when the war came and suddenly there were enough of us to set apart. Then it got ugly."

She was attending Castlemont High School when she met Mel Reid, a handsome teenage athlete from a pioneering black California family that had come to the West shortly after the Civil War to work at a gold mine owned by a former black cavalry captain. Betty and Mel wed in 1942 and opened Reid's Records three years later.

By the early '50s, the store had become so successful that Betty and Mel decided to have a home built in Walnut Creek. Future Oakland mayor Lionel Wilson's wife, who was white, signed the deed for the Reids because, being black, they would have been unable to buy the lot using their own names.

When some neighbors realized who actually was building on the lot, there were threats, Betty says, "to burn our lumber as fast as we staked it." Rumors circulated, she adds, that flamboyant Philadelphia preacher Father Divine "had bought the property to put in a heaven." By the time the house was finished, however, neighbors had warmed to the Reids.

Courtesy of the The San Francisco Chronicle