Betty May (nee Donkin) Totten

Betty was born at the old West Seattle General Hospital on February 22, 1925 to William Allen Donkin (1901 - 1965) and Mary Nethery Lindsay Donkin (1900 -1974). She was preceded in death by her parents and her brothers, William Lindsay Donkin (1920 - 1967) and Robert Lindsay Donkin (1922 - 197?).

Betty grew up along North 39th Street in what she and her mother used to euphemistically refer to as "Lower Woodland" but which was actually Fremont, long before Fremont acquired the hipster vibe and high rents. Back in the days of Betty's childhood, it was a neighborhood with taverns with sawdust floors, a working lumber mill and lumber yard and lunch counters catering to the hard working and hard drinking clientele. Before Betty was of Kindergarten age, the Great Depression hit, and during her adult years Betty could rattle off the addresses of over one dozen houses that she, her mother and brothers lived, in and around North 39th Street between Leary Way and Fremont Avenue North. Times were tough; things were hard.

Betty attended the now defunct Ross School where she had many friends. In the 1990s, Betty had the great joy of attending a reunion of surviving students from the 1930s. Among those, was her good friend Vivian DeVore. One of her treasures was a photograph of the surviving "girls" of Ross School gathered in front of a blow-up of their class picture.

Betty attended Alexander Hamilton Junior High and graduated from Lincoln High School in 1943. She attended business college where she excelled in typing (100 words per minute on a manual Underwood typewriter) and took Gregg shorthand (225 words per minute). She could also do a speedy sum on a 10-key adding machine.

After business college, Betty landed a job in the Vance Building for the DeMille Agency. There she made lifelong friends of Phyllis Heffinger Mott, Lois Gormley Wieltschnig and Marge Saxe. The errand boy in her office later became the noted housing developer Martin Ochsner whose homes house many families in North Seattle and Shoreline today. During the 1949 Seattle Earthquake, Betty and Marty ducked in a doorway (then thought to be a safe place to be during an earthquake) and watched the wheeled cart with Betty's DictaPhone dictating machine go from one side of the office to another during the course of the earthquake. Betty's soon-to-be-husband, Louis Totten, watched as all the display windows at Le Bon Marche, now the downtown Seattle Macy's store, burst out into shards of glass onto the busy downtown sidewalk.

On April 20, 1947, Betty married her childhood sweetheart Louis H. Totten in Fremont Baptist Church and they took up housekeeping in the Triangle Apartments (it's still there). In 1951, they moved in a new house at 4025 Dayton Avenue North, and in May of 1955, during a blistering heat wave, they welcomed a son, William Edgar Totten, into their lives. Betty chose to raise a family and end her career (for a time, she made more money each month than her husband, Louis, who worked at Pacific Bell (later Pacific Northwest Bell)). Betty was in the hospital for an extended period of time and Louis took vacation to help with the new baby. The refrigerator did not cooperate, using the heat wave as an excuse to fail, so baby was taken to his aunt's, Ruth Helen Totten Hornig, upsetting that household for a few weeks. For this kindness and others, Betty always considered Ruth more of a sister than a sister-in-law, despite the tiffs and differences that always arise in families. Ruth and Bob Hornig and daughter Shari were close relatives and friends of the Tottens and very dear to Betty's heart all her life. Her niece here deserves special mention for the love and devotion she showed her aunt during Betty's final illness with regard to seeing to Betty's care and helping with the estate.

It's useless to document Betty's life without mentioning the importance of a geographical location dear to her heart: Lake Roesiger, Snohomish County, USA. Specifically, Roesiger's Resort, which is now the Lake Roesiger Snohomish County Park. Betty first went here in 1939 where her mother rented a cabin for the day so Betty and friends could have a day of boating, swimming and fishing. Over the years, Roesiger's Resort became a fixture with the Donkins and Tottens up to and including the very last season the Resort was operating in 1968. With the sale of the Resort to Snohomish County by Solon Roesiger after the passing of his beloved wife Gladys, Betty and Louis looked at earnest for that other "special place" at Lake Roesiger, settling on a cabin with 100' of lakefront, a dock and boathouse on Tulloch Road located on the "third lake" portion of Lake Roesiger. This was paradise to Betty and Louis and their happiest hours were spent here with family, friends, relatives and pets, especially Betty's beloved Wire Haired Fox Terrier, Rags (1962-1978). Rags loved the cabin so much the family chose to bury him there after he died in February 1978.

Louis retired from U.S.West (the successor to Pacific Northwest Bell) in 1984. With advancing age and more repairs to do than time allowed, Betty and Louis reluctantly sold the Lake Roesiger cabin in 1992. Neither one of them ever returned to the Lake again, preferring to keep the memories of a lifetime unaltered by the then rapidly changing area they had once known as a semi-wilderness during their youth and salad days.

Betty was a doer. She cooked, did yardwork, was a PTA mom, was a chorehelper and caretaker for her mother, May. She was executrix of estates, took school principals to task, took back rotten meat or fish to the butcher (and then they became best friends), gave cool drinks (beer or soda) to the garbage collectors on a scorching hot day, collected door-to-door for Multiple Sclerosis (her beloved mother suffered from this condition from her early 50s until her death at age 74). She cooked lasagna (the recipe given to her by her lifelong friend, Lois), pizza, cookies and pies and stocked the freezer. Louis grew tomatoes and vegetables which Betty canned. The hills surrounding Lake Roesiger yielded succulent blackberries which became freezer jam in Betty's kitchen and in Louis' basement winemaking lair became potent liqueur or wine. She was known to give rides for residents of the Four Freedoms House from the local stores to their doorstep and occasionally invite them spontaneously to the family table for Thanksgiving dinner. And all of the above is only a portion of what she did.

Only the onset of Alzheimer's Disease slowed down the doing, cooking, trips to Reno, crossword puzzles, calling friends and her patented and undefinable sense of humor. The love of people and life, however, never vanished. It never could.

The end chapter came unplanned, just like life. First, Louis became ill with pneumonia and complications in late 2002. From that time until March 26, 2007 (his passing) Louis never returned home and was in and out of hospitals and skilled nursing facilities

In early 2003, Betty was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and in June 2003 Betty was put into skilled nursing care where she resided until her death from complications of a stroke on December 18, 2010.

She is survived by: her son, William Edgar Totten, of West Sacramento, California; beloved niece Shari Ruth Hornig Morrison of Bothell, WA; nieces Marci Louise Totten of Lynnwood, WA; nephew Marc Louis Totten of Seattle, WA; sister-in-law Terri Feeney Totten Truesdell; nephew Michael Totten, Des Moines, IA; sister-in-law Helen Nelson, Seattle, WA; niece Bonnie Nelson Powell, East Wenatchee, WA; niece Susan Nelson Bach, Kirkland, WA.