by Lisa Congdon
Betty: I was serving as a field representative on the California State Assembly when the park was being created in the district I represented. I attended the planning meetings and subsequently became a sort of informal volunteer consultant to the National Park Service in that role, and then that morphed into me becoming a term park ranger.
Lisa: Did you have to go through special training to become an official park ranger?
Betty: Absolutely not [laughs]. I am working way beyond my capacity. I’m doing things I was never trained to do!
Lisa: What keeps you going to work every day?
Betty: My first eight decades were spent collecting dots, and now I’m connecting dots. I’m in what I assume to be my final decade, and so everything I ever learned I’m using now. I’m still having first-time experiences at 95. I feel like an evolving person in an evolving nation in an evolving universe.
Lisa: And what kinds of things do you do when you go to work every day?
Betty: My work consists mostly of outreach. I do three to five talks a week in my theater. I show an orientation film, which was named for this park. Every national park has an orientation film and ours is about a 15-minute story, which deals with the history of Richmond itself. I do a commentary at the end, which makes for about an hour’s program. Because the history is so multifaceted—there are so many stories within the story of the home front—it can’t be encapsulated in 15 minutes in the film. And the feminist stories are in conflict. So I flesh that out and also layer back in the complexity of the times, which includes the African American story.
Lisa: You’re celebrated as a voice for the historic preservation of the wartime experience of African Americans. How do your own experience and the experience of your family inform what you discuss with park visitors?
Betty: The park had been inspired by the Rosie the Riveter story, and because I am a woman of color, that story did not sit well with me because I considered it a white woman’s story. The women in my family had been working outside their homes since slavery. What I do is watch the film that was created for us, which is, incidentally, a very fine film. And then when the film ends, I add to that story by adding a woman of color’s history, which is my own.
My story varies from the norm because, unlike the white women who were emancipated by the Rosie the Riveter role into nontraditional labor, I was a child who’d grown up on the West Coast outside of the hostile South. This meant that in 1942 (I was in my early 20s) at the opening of the war and the great migration of black and white culture from the South, the entire system of Southern segregation came with them. So unlike the white women who were released into their “Rosie roles,” at that time I discovered my limitations. I was working in a Jim Crow union hall because unions were not yet racially integrated. And so my life story turns out to be something of a revelation to people who didn’t live it.
Lisa: What is it like to share your story on a stage twice a week with people who would otherwise not ever hear the perspective of a woman of color of your age?
Betty: I find that people are open to hearing the story. Part of what I talk about is admitting that the film is a disappointment to me because my reality was not included. My story represents who we were as a nation in 1942. What I’m doing is admitting that this was where we started, and then owning where we started leads me to how far we’ve come. And comparing 1942 with today (and not from outside the circle, but from inside the circle) is a novel picture for my audiences. I was a clerk in a Union Hall in 1942, and then fifteen years ago I became a field representative under the California State Assembly. Which means that this is not a case of personal achievement. It is a case of how much social change occurred in this nation over those intervening years. And so that’s how I approach the story, putting that history in the past, but bringing people into the present and the future.
Lisa: What is your message about the future to the people you talk to?
Betty: That by recounting who we were in 1942, including the limitations that we were living under (segregation and all the rest of it), that Henry Kaiser and his workforce of mostly sharecroppers completed 747 ships in three years and eight months right here in his four parks in the city of Richmond. And by doing so, he literally outproduced the enemy and helped to turn the course of the war around and bring peace.
We did that under a severely flawed social system, and my telling of my story outlines that severely flawed social system. But what I do then is say that now our children and grandchildren are confronted with a new threat— that of global warming and rising sea levels and climate change—and they’re going to have to match and exceed that great mobilization of the 1940s, and that mobilization could be seen as the equal of the Great Wall of China or the building of the pyramids. That this was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great “Arsenal of Democracy.” And I explain that they’re going to have to match and exceed that same mobilization in order to save the planet, and they’re going to do it under a still flawed social system. Because the nature of democracy is that it never will stay fixed—it wasn’t intended to. Every generation has to re-create democracy, and the 39 percent turnout in the last election does not bode well for our ability to sustain our governance. The system of national parks allows us to revisit almost any era in our history, the heroic places and the contemplative places, and the scenic wonders, and the shameful places and the painful places, in order to own that history and process it so that we can move together into a more compassionate future. And that’s really what the purpose of the parks is for me personally. And helping to bring that into being, I consider that to be almost like a holy grail—that I get to live my last decade helping to bring the awareness of that to the public, and I think that’s a gift.
Lisa: Your mother and grandmother lived to be over 100, is that true?
Betty: Yes, my grandmother lived to be 102, meaning that I was 27 years old, married, and a mother by the time she died. And I knew her as the matriarch of my family. And my mother lived to be 101. The three of us bridge everything from Dred Scott and the Civil War through Orlando.
Lisa: Obviously, you have good genes. But is there also a way you live your life that might account for your longevity and enthusiasm for living?
Betty: I have lived my complete life in a total state of surprise. I am not a planner and I’m still having first experiences. I’m still wondering what I’m going to be when I grow up.
Lisa: Recently on your blog, you were reflecting on your “new normal”—your sort of late-in-life career as a park ranger and the growing public attention. What do you make of all this fuss about you at this stage of your life?
Betty: It’s not comfortable at times, partly because it’s almost unbelievable. It’s kind of unreal. I have lost anonymity, and I think that was always some of my protection. I don’t know how to feel about it. I think had it come earlier in life, it might have been easier to deal with. It’s hard to take seriously at this point. It’s hard to account for the fact that celebrity becomes self-generating after a while. That it grows on its own and, as such, it’s suspect. In some ways I think had it come twenty years ago, I might have been able to deal with it better. But now it’s very hard for me to take seriously.
Lisa: In a recent Tavis Smiley interview on PBS, you said, “I don’t live in the past or future; my life is now.” I’m curious: what does “living in the now” mean to you?
Betty: I’ve spent my entire life being contemporary to the times in which I’m living. I am working now as a 95-year-old in a world that’s much, much younger than I am. There are no elderly rangers. The only people who are a reminder of my stage in life are when tour buses drive up with people from retirement homes, and the people file in and I have to remind myself that these are my contemporaries.
Lisa: And I am sure most of them are younger than you!
Betty: Absolutely. Many of them are! I’m so in the present, and I’ve always been. And I don’t know how others live their lives, or how the way I live com
pares to the way other older people live. I don’t resent aging. I’ve never hidden my age. I’ve never done anything to stall the aging process. I really do see that this is my last decade and that feels right to me.
Lisa: We know that because of genetics, science, and technology, people are going to live longer, healthier lives and are going to stay in the workforce longer and contribute in significant ways. For those women who are younger than you are and might find themselves in your shoes in some ways, healthy and able to give back, but are unsure whether they can or should, what do you say to those women?
Betty: I think that because I am physically fit, because I’m not Botoxed and I’ve not given in to any kind of plastic surgery, because I’m still working five days a week, and because I’m still fully engaged in life—that I am perhaps offering an alternative to a system that involves the adoration of youth culture. Maybe that’s why I’m catching the attention of the boomers who are now moving into the possibility that you are describing. That living longer and opting out of the workforce at 65 will no longer be practical. Maybe we’re going to start looking at aging differently, and maybe I’m a forerunner. It’s certainly not that I’m exceptional. I don’t believe that’s true. It’s that life is still opening up for me. Over the past several months, I’ve been seated at a laptop in our conference room doing a session with high school kids in an auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, on Skype. I’m doing it again with the Philadelphia Annual Flower Show, serving on a panel with two other rangers across the entire country. I mean, these are crazy things! I never know what the days are going to hold, or what the weeks are going to hold. I can’t wait to see.
I think there’s a whole wave of people approaching their 70s, and they’re wondering whether or not they should fold their tents, and I think maybe the fact that I’m still active is opening some doors for some possibilities that people may not have dreamed possible.
I also think aging is contagious, even for me. I was at a training at the Grand Canyon some time ago and the young receptionist at the National Park Service Visitor Center invited me to go down the mountain to Sedona. And I was curious about the vortexes and experiencing that. I remember driving down through the canyon in a top-down convertible, and I’m in my blue jeans and my T-shirt, and I was really excited. We approached the vortex and there were some elderly people coming down the first plateau, and I overheard the woman saying, “It’s okay to go up there, but when you’re coming down, you have to sit down on your bottom and slide down because you’ll get really dizzy.” And immediately after hearing this, I could not go any farther, because I became old. I never did get to the vortex. I think if I hadn’t heard that conversation, I’d have been bouncing all the way to the top.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am enormously grateful to the huge number of people who made this book come to life. In fact, so many people contributed to it that in some ways this book doesn’t even feel like it’s entirely mine. First and foremost, I would like to thank my studio manager and assistant, Kristin Wilson. As with everything she touches, Kristin embraced this project with unadulterated enthusiasm. She did countless hours of research, editing, writing, permissions gathering, people wrangling, and scheduling—all with fantastic grace and organization. Thank you, Kristin, for everything you are and everything you do to support my creative endeavors!
Huge and heartfelt thanks also to my beloved editor at Chronicle Books, Bridget Watson Payne—along with everyone at Chronicle Books—for continuing to believe in me and my ideas! Thank you to my literary agent, Stefanie Von Borstel, for her continued support and kindness. Thank you to my sister, Stephanie Congdon Barnes, who wrote several of the profiles and offered endless hours of supportive listening as I toiled over the making of this book. A gigantic collective thank-you to all of the interviewees and essayists, who each gave not only time and energy to this book but also inspiring stories of perseverance and joy. Last but not least, thank you to my wife, Clay Lauren Walsh, for your unending devotion to me and to everything I pursue. Your love gives me wings.
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