ROSIE THE RIVETER

IN MEMORIAM

Betty Shokin died yesterday at age 104. If you don’t know who Betty was, the National Park Service kinda made her famous and used to describe her as the agency’s oldest ranger, as though age was her claim to fame. But that was a severe short-changing of Betty. She was way more than just old. I was a Park Service Ranger, living and working in the backcountry. She was so much more than that. I guess I’d call her a ‘Lived Historian’.

I met Betty in the spring of 2019 where she worked at Rosie The Riveter National Historic Park in Richmond CA on the East Bay as what I am calling a ‘Living Historian’ – a term I think I might have just concocted.

The job of most historians is not just to regurgitate history, but to help you make sense of it…to join the past with the present and learn from it. Some historians are good at that. Others not so much. Betty was at the extreme top of the heap. I was so taken with her that I saw her three times in the space of about two weeks. My primary thought was, “If only.” If only every person in America could hear her, she would single handedly change the country. Not that she would have brought this fractured country together as one. She wouldn’t have – and we don’t really want everyone to be in the same choir anyway. But she brought such a deep understanding of where we’ve been, what we’ve been through, and hinted at where we might be headed – all without expressing judgment or political affiliation.

History is not only informative, but it’s just downright interesting. But from a first-person account? …someone who was there? It’s amazing.

Betty was raised in the south by her father and great grandmother who was born into slavery in the 1840’s. She was an adult and a mother before her great grandmother passed. So this one family lived, worked, experienced, and discussed history that ran from the Dred Scott decision – where the Supreme Court decided that a slave had no standing to take part in the court system because they were not citizens – nor even human; through slavery; the Civil War; the Emancipation Proclamation; Lincoln’s presidency and assassination; Reconstruction; Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s Plessy vs Ferguson decision that determined segregation was fine and then Brown vs Board of Education that determined it was not; Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs; Lindbergh’s flight and Amelia Earhart’s loss; two World Wars and Korea; McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Kent State and People’s Park; the murders of Martha Luther King, Malcolm X and Emmett Till. The moon landing; the mars probe; the assassinations of the Kennedys; the World Trade Center bombing; Sandy Hook; nine people in a prayer circle in Mother Emmanual Church in Charlston; 12-year old Tamir Rice; Micheal Brown; Treyvon Martin; Freddie Gray; Black Lives Matter; 26 people in a small church in Texas (Sutherland Church 2017); and the swearing in of America’s first Black president in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial where the cycle all began.

Betty was part of all of that before she answered the call and went to work in the same Naval shipyard famous for Rosie The Riveter. But Betty was Black, so was offered only the less prestigious and lower paying job of file clerk. But still…she was part of history.

Here are Betty’s words about her personal history and hints of where her beloved country might be going.

All that [history] happened within the lifetime of three women who were all adults at the same time. And to add to that the fact that on January 20th of 2009 as a guest of George Miller, I’m seated on the Capital Mall, with a picture of my great grandmother in my breast pocket, witnessing the inauguration of America’s first African American president. In the shadow of the Lincoln memorial. Lincoln whose life was contemporary with the life of my great grandmother. And that’s how fast the time goes. Can you imagine? I know how my generation confronted the threat of its day, a very real threat. World War Two I’m not sure we could have avoided. We did that, we fought that war. We did it both on the battlefield where we lost 54.8 million lives and on a home front where there were 37,600 causalities in industrial accidents.

We did that under a completely flawed social system. We none the less prevailed. Our kids are now facing a new threat, that of rising sea levels and global warming, and climate change, and they’re gonna have to match and exceed that great mobilization. This time, internationally, 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 such that it’ll never stay fixed. It wasn’t designed to. It’s a participatory form of governance. It requires all of us. Every generation has to recreate democracy in its time or it will die.

Help us fight for our democracy. Eracism

The 39% turnout four years ago in the general election was predictive of the 40% turnout in the most recent general election. An election in which only 17% of those between 18 and 24 voted. But 52% of us over 51 did vote so we were opting for yesterday rather than tomorrow.

Democracy cannot be sustained in that way. We have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong. A constitutionally protected right to be bigots if that’s what we wish to be. But, we also have created this incredible system of national parks, where though they were not designed for the purpose it is now possible for us to visit almost any era in our history. The heroic places, the contemplative places, the scenic wonders, the shameful places, and the painful places. In order to own that history, so that we may process it - because I do not believe that we have yet as a nation processed the Civil War. That we may begin to in time forgive ourselves in order to move toward a more compassionate future together. And this is why at 85 I became a park ranger.

But is that not an amazing story? There’s a place on the film where Agnes Moore - a still living Rosie, says, “It was the greatest coming together of the American people that I have ever lived through.” During the first months when the film was released I used to stand against the wall and watch the faces in that half-light, and every time she’d say that I’d think, how can Agnes say that? She knows that isn’t true.

Then one day after my 90th birthday, I became aware of the concept of ‘conflicting truths’, that we all create our own reality. And that there are many truths. There are truths that raise out of religious conviction, there are truths that raise out education, truths that raise out of life experience, there are many truths, and many of those truths that we all harbor, are in conflict. And I knew from that day forward that as long as there was a place on the planet where Agnes’s truth and mine can coexist, that that was gonna be enough for me. Thanks.

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