Ranger Betty Reid Soskin Was Married Twice — Let's Meet the Lucky Men Married to This Legend

At the age of 101, Betty Reid Soskin was asked about her life, which began in 1921. In a profile by the Brief But Spectacular YouTube channel, Betty discussed the many paths she traversed during the century she had been alive. "I have been so many women, so many times," said Betty, "that it's hard to even remember who they are."

She went on to describe herself as a daughter, a mother, a businesswoman, a federal worker, and a government employee. "I've actually been so many things," she said wistfully. Despite the fact that Betty was married twice, she didn't mention being a wife. Either it slipped her mind, or it wasn't a descriptor Betty thought informed who she was. Here's what we know about her husbands.

Before Betty was making history as a civil rights activist, and long before she became the oldest serving National Park Ranger, she was married. According to the Easy Bay Express, Betty and her husband, Mel, were married in 1942. At the time, Mel was working at the shipyards in Richmond, but things changed for the couple when they met a "wonderfully kind man" named Aldo Musso.

Aldo ran his own business in which he placed jukeboxes in restaurants, diners, and bars. It was called a jukebox route, and Mel was interested in joining him. They bought a duplex from Aldo in Berkley, Calif. In 1945, Mel and Betty opened up Reid's Records in the basement of the duplex. "Mel saw that there was no way to get Black records — they were called ‘race records’—and the Black population had absolutely declined during the war," recalled Betty.

Though the record store went through a few changes, it was still in operation when Betty and Mel divorced in 1971. Seven years later, she found Mel in the back of the store in a coma. He died in 1988 following a long battle with diabetes. By then, Betty had been married to her second husband for a decade, but he ended up passing away within months of Mel.

Betty and Mel had four children together, all of whom were adults when she married Dr. William Soskin in 1978. "I insisted upon carrying both my married names during our 10-year marriage due to the fact that my kids were all Reids and in order to remain connected to my family, it felt important," wrote Betty in a March 2014 entry in her blog.

William was a psychology professor at UC Berkley and, from 1968 until 1979, "ran Project Community in Berkeley, a settlement house that persuaded several hundred youngsters to reject drugs," per his obituary. Betty wrote that she straddled two worlds as William's wife. In her former life, she was the wife of a well-known Black businessman. She went on to become a civil rights activist. In her later life, Betty was a "faculty wife of a brilliant professor who was doing groundbreaking research."

She tried to be a dutiful partner to an academic, but Betty found she had no taste for that life and soon returned to political organizing. After working on numerous civic matters, Betty became a park ranger with the National Park Service in 2007. She retired in 2022.