Betty L. Long

How do you sum up a life spanning almost a century in 1,500 words or less? Who was this young woman who gave birth to me 66 years ago? Betty Louise Lamphear was born in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1926. The eldest of 3 children, she helped raise her younger brother and sister when her parents were working. At the start of World War II her father took a job in Washington D.C. She was 14 at the time. He never returned, eventually divorcing her mother, so Betty began waitressing to increase the family income. She graduated from Evanston High School in 1944, joined the Salvation Army for a time, met my dad, Donald Long, at a church dance and they married when she was 22 in 1948. Thus began a close bond between them that lasted for 60 years until my dad's passing. Several months after their wedding they moved to Southern California where Dad had already secured a new job. Of all his family's summer car trips around the U.S. he liked California the best with its mild climate compared to Chicago's extremes. They were in for a surprise that first winter in Los Angeles when there was a freak snowfall! A favorite pastime of their young married life was ballroom dancing to Big Band music at nightspots like the Hollywood Palladium or The Cocoanut Grove near downtown. They also loved the movies and would go to double features and sometimes even triple features. They bought their first house in Duarte near Pasadena and began raising a family. My brother John was born in 1953 and I arrived in 1956. After I was born we moved to a 2nd house in Paramount near Long Beach. Mom drove her first car, a tiny Fiat, and received her first speeding ticket on an L.A. freeway for driving too slow! One of my earliest memories at around 3 years old was a vacation trip to Laguna Beach where Mom found a secluded cove filled with seashells and brought me there to string together shell necklaces. Over the years she pursued many hobbies such as gardening, cooking, sewing, watercolor and oil painting, china painting and pastel portrait drawing. Mom and Dad planted a bed of roses in our front yard and soon they joined the Rose Society and we all went to rose shows. John and I brought our skateboards in case we got bored and we would practice our jumps and wheelies in the parking lot.

Betty loved learning new things and wanted to go to college. Unfortunately, having to work at a young age delayed her pursuing higher education. She did experience a brief taste of college life when my dad sent her in 1950 to the Vassar College Summer Institute and she thoroughly enjoyed it, taking seminars on homemaking, income management, personal appearance and parenting young children. She even heard former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt lecture there. Around that time Mom and Dad became interested in politics and followed the elections. Later when we moved to Irvine, they volunteered to assist on the campaigns of local candidates running for office. Mom always wanted to work in the public schools and she took her first part-time job as a noon duty aide when I was in 3rd grade, and with promotions over the years, she went from office clerk, studying typing and shorthand dictation along the way, then secretary to the high school athletic director, and finally elementary school office manager before retiring in 1986. Her dream of becoming an elementary school teacher was not realized but she did complete an Associate of Arts degree later in middle age.

Mom always made sacrifices for our family. She ensured that everything ran smoothly and on time. In 1966 we moved to Orange County to the new community of Irvine, not an incorporated city yet, but a remote outpost on the vast agricultural Irvine Ranch. There were no grocery stores or gas stations so we had to drive to other towns to get what we needed. That first summer Mom enrolled us in the Boys Club in Laguna Beach and delivered us there every weekday. We did fun activities like wrestling and bus trips to the beach at Scotchman's Cove. We also had tennis lessons at Corona del Mar High School. The next summer she volunteered to run a family film program at the newly built University Park Elementary School and she spooled the big film reels on a 16 millimeter projector for kids to watch movies like Flipper, The Swiss Family Robinson and Sammy the Way Out Seal. She also drove us to the beach on summer afternoons for many years. Mom helped my dad too, made sure his suits were pressed and that he left for work on time throughout his career, first in engineering, then aerospace and finally administration at the University of California, Irvine. Later when they were retired Mom became proficient with computers and would type up Dad's dictations for him. When I started high school Mom went to work again full time in the Newport-Mesa School District and continued for the next 20 years. Later in college she let me borrow her car to drive to class and she rode the bus to her job in Costa Mesa. When I began working after college she spotted a used car for sale at a gas station that I ended up buying, my first car purchase a vinyl-topped 1967 Super Sport Impala. And lastly, she helped me find my first apartment.

Mom and Dad spent their last years together traveling and pursuing their hobbies, especially in the visual arts. They always enjoyed driving trips since they were first married to places like Lake Tahoe and Southern Mexico, and later as a family we traveled around California and took a train trip to Chicago to visit our relatives when I was 8 years old. They also took a cross country driving trip to Wisconsin for a family reunion in 1989, stopping at all of the big national parks and art museums along the way. Another time they went to the desert Southwest with their grandchildren Amber, Kevin and Robert. Finally, they flew to Europe twice and saw many of the famous art museums as well as Monet's garden at Giverny and Henry Moore's sculptures at his estate in the English countryside.

When my dad passed away in 2008 I wanted to help Mom, my brother did too, and Mom said to us, "I don't need another man in my life, I have my boys to take care of me now." The first project that I did for Mom was to landscape her backyard as a memorial to Dad and also to comfort Mom with her loss, and eventually I renovated her front yard and courtyard as well. Mom didn't mind living alone in the big house I grew up in, as she liked having the freedom and peace and quiet to pursue her own projects. Well into her 80s she was still taking college classes in computer literacy, and wrote biographies about my dad and her family growing up. She still loved to cook, and taught me too, as my grandma had taught her. She had her recipes on 3 x 5 cards and knew how to make barbecue sauce and Thousand Island dressing from scratch. She showed my daughter how to make apple pie with the apples off of her backyard tree. She continued to exercise at the senior center gym, riding the stationary bike, taking yoga classes and participating in a global current events discussion group. She made numerous friends there including Edith Avise who lived to 101 and Behin Baseghi who had been a medical doctor for her career.

Mom was fiercely independent and didn't want to give up driving her car. She was actually the best driver in the family for many years, very focused with quick reaction time, but finally around age 90 she started having little fender benders and we convinced her that it would be better and safer to have us chauffeur her around town.

Toward the end she was still writing letters to family and friends all over the country. She also sent cards to loved ones with notes to them in her beautiful cursive handwriting. She had folders on her computer for every person she corresponded with, and files of pictures for every event. She was very organized that way. I would bring her groceries and we would take turns cooking for each other. Sometimes I'd have to ask her where certain cooking utensils were because she frequently reorganized the kitchen shelves. My brother and I shared driving her to doctor appointments, the bank, pharmacy and hair salon. She was aware that she had outlived many from her generation including her only remaining sibling, her brother Gil last year at age 92, and her cousin Alice in August, who Mom had grown up with and was Mom's maid of honor at her wedding and the last surviving member of her wedding party except for Mom. Also, Mom always talked how Queen Elizabeth was exactly 1 month younger than her and she just passed away in September. All 3 ladies, Alice, Elizabeth and Mom were 96 years old. On her last week she took a walk with her neighbor Laura and they stopped to chat with Dan and Jeanne Stokols, commenting on the egret standing on their lawn. When I phoned her the last time to tell her I was watching my first real snowfall in Arizona and that I would send her a video of it, she said she was cooking a new recipe, porcupine meatballs in a tomato sauce plus oatmeal raisin cookies and asked if I had seen her ground cloves spice that she needed for the sauce, and I replied, "Oops, I borrowed it to make a pumpkin pie, sorry!" That last night she had been working on the computer learning the Spanish language with the Duolingo program, which she had enjoyed studying for several years. Her body was found near the computer the next day and she appeared to have passed away peacefully. Her Duolingo program was still on the monitor screen and said, "Congratulations, you have reached the next level." I often told Mom, "One day you'll be gone and I'm really gonna miss you ... but I will never forget you!"