Betty Reid Soskin (now retired) was America’s oldest park ranger. She retired from active service in 2022 at age 100. This September she’ll be 103. We were fortunate to meet her and hear of her experiences during WW II at the Rosie the Riveter Monument in Richmond, CA.
Betty was not only connected to World War II, but she remembers her grandmother telling her that she was standing in Washington DC when Abraham Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing Betty’s grandmother from slavery—that connection.
Today I finished the 1143rd and final page of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In the last ten or so pages of the book accounts describe Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, retiring to his room in his underground bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945 in the afternoon. Hitler puts a revolver in his mouth and Eva bites into a cyanide capsule. And my brother Bill is celebrated by his family on his second birthday.