Two More Memorable Women

The next two women I want to celebrate died this past summer, united not only by longevity but by the pioneering spirit which pervaded their lives. I had not known one of them long, but the other had been an honorary member of our family for four decades.

Ernie and Betty often shared their experiences teaching Latin

Betty first appeared in the pages of this blog two years ago when we were honored to be present at her one hundred and second birthday party. Just a year later we celebrated with her at her one hundred and third. Those two posts contain the details of an extraordinary life and of an extraordinary woman who was the granddaughter of a slave and who went on to attend Wellesley College, earn the honor of being elected to Phi Beta Kappa and have a distinguished career teaching in the Detroit Public School system.

She was always up-beat and positive, although I can’t think it had been easy being one of a handful of black students at a college attended by the elite daughters of the wealthy. She was gracious and in remarkably good physical shape. Although she was already in a wheel chair when I met her, her mind was sharp. She watched the television news avidly and loved to talk politics as well as literature. She and Ernie had some common links in the Detroit Classical world and he often went to visit her, taking along the bars of chocolate she loved. Betty was Wellesley College’s oldest living alumna the college and they did a splendid job of putting her life in it historical context.

A wonderful woman.  I just wish I had known her longer.

When my children asked how we made the acquaintance of the second memorable woman who died this summer, I found myself saying I just couldn’t remember. Somehow she seems always to have been there. I suspect it was through our church, where she often taught children’s classes, though she couldn’t bring herself to use the assigned text books, but preferred to use her own experiences and her expertise as a high school science teacher—an approach which wasn’t always appreciated! But so typical of Lynne, who marched through life doing it her way.

In her case too I marked two birthdays, her 85th and her 87th. I know that she appears tucked into various other posts, such as the New Year's Eve’s when she joined us for cut-throat scrabble games (mainly cut-throat on her part: she was a fierce competitor) or the post I wrote at the time she was getting ready to move and was having such a hard job with her possessions. The end of my entry describes it well.

I didn’t write about the time she found the perfect table and chairs for her dining nook and had us accompany her to Jacobsons to get it. They told her that she could take it from the store and avoid paying a delivery charge, so we lugged it all into the elevator and outside the store—where suddenly warning bells went off and we found ourselves the object of curiosity on the part of the store security guards. Then there was the time Lynne was appointed chair of the Symphony Show House gardens. Already in her 80’s, she sat gracefully outside the large house and organized a small army of helpers, of which I was one. I especially remember digging up beds of iris from some auxiliary flower beds, putting them in a wheelbarrow and transplanting them artfully under Lynne’s watchful eye.

Andrew, our friends Jerry and Sally, Lynne and Garth

She died a couple of months short of her 97th birthday. She did get to see my grandson Joe (she loved children and had only been blessed with one grandchild, so she liked to “borrow” ours) and here she is at Lucy’s wedding with Garth, who was a devoted companion to her in her last years. When she died the world lost a flamboyant personality (her hair still red) and an avid traveler, gardener, woman of faith and advocate for various causes. She had run for public office when men were the big players in politics.  Lynne kept the newspaper article where her rivals were described as "throwing their hats in the ring”, while she “threw her apron in the ring.”

Her daughter put together a slide show for a woman who was truly “Unforgettable.”  Our whole family will never forget her.

Footnote: I am delighted to say that in my post of November 30 where I started my series on remarkable women, I hazarded a guess for the cover of Time Magazine. I was pretty much right!