Born August 10th, 1925, she has had her gravesite and headstone in place ever since she lost her first husband a train wreck, 1954. While he had been fighting with Patton’s Third Armor in the Battle of the Bulge, his fiancée was riveting wings of B-24 bombers at Consolidated/Convair in San Diego.
She’d already lost one brother to the war, Uncle Art, whose military portrait hung on her living-room wall, between two windows, and a splendid photo of an air-borne Liberator over the pacific, at the entryway.
She was next-to-the-youngest by one, her favorite sister Lila, who preceded her in death. Betty The Riveter’s next oldest sibling was her beloved brother Dell Dickinson, (alas, also gone) a handsome young Marine, taking shrapnel on Iwo Jima, after several days awash in the bay on a landing craft, the cockswain shot dead, and the Japs zeroing-in their new field howitzers on the derelict. Betty’s next older sister Mary — Aunt Molly, actually — was a US Marine, herself. And she’d just married a veteran of Guadalcanal, the dashing Uncle Carl Calcara.
Widowed at such an early stage of her life, with three wee lads, her loyal sister Lila came to help. They plugged a radio in the old cabin her brother Dell had given her, and together the sisters took care of the Three Little Pigs, as the boys soon were known — behind their backs, all smiles and kisses up front!
Union Pacific, who owned the train that hit her husband’s new dump truck and killed him, gave Betty a new car to compensate, a 1954 Chevrolet coupe. The boys would be in the backseat, Saturday nights as this car piloted its way to an open air dance hall, all white stucco under a high canopy of cottonwoods. The sisters would park down by Otter Creek and let the rills and burbling of the creek sooth the sleepy kids.
The Purple Haze dancehall was probably where she met her second husband, just back from bombing the Burma Road out of Calcutta, Merwin Brown. The kids were awake to the rumbling drums and strumming guitars to some extent and keen to look for Aunt Lila coming back from the grill with hamburgers and hotdogs.
Merwin, Betty loved and devoted herself to. Even in a crisis between Merwin and her children, she differed to his judgment. Tensions arising from the growing stepsons were relieved by the specter of another war, and the maturing boys were hurried off to Vietnam, Okinawa, and Stuttgart, as soon as they came of age. Soon he house Dell gave his sister became Merwin’s property, an artifact of chauvinism both Merwin and Betty were long-accustomed to.
Merwin had a drinking problem, a glamorous debility of the war in those days (what we call PTSD, nowadays), which he shared with Uncle Dell, and Betty sometimes looked like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, as Merwin played Marlon Brando’s role.
Betty took over Merwin’s recovery. She opened her house (an old newspaper office) to Alcoholics Anonymous; she deep-fried kilotons of doughnuts and brewed a river of coffee. She made every sacrifice to save her marriage. And took care of her three, then four, then five; finally, six boys, all at the same time. And she prevailed.
Besides her beauty, Betty’s gift was at the cookstove. We all know she got her noodle recipe from her mother Lula, but her dinner rolls were far and away to die for over Grandma’s — not even any of the Great Aunts, not even her celebrated Aunt Jane, whom she was named after and whom she idolized, not even Aunt Jane, could make better rolls than Betty and, as Secretary of the Treasury, Cousin Ivy Baker Priest said in her autobio, Green Grows Ivy “I’ve never seen Betty so happy as when [her Aunt] Jane told her her rolls were better than her mother’s [Lula’s].”
Aunt Ivy, as we were taught to address her, had been US Treasury Secretary for Eisenhower, later in California for The Guv. Ronald Reagan. She had grown up in a boarding house and knew good rolls from bad. They — everyone from Pat Nixon to Mimi E., everybody had a recipe and they put out a cookbook Betty had known the secrets of long before. President Eisenhower played the fool, Col. Stupenagel: How to Sty a Frake — burp!
Betty also had a book, first edition, signed by the author, addressed to Lula and found on a rubbish heap after Grandma’s funeral services.
None of the Dickinsons, excepting Lula, were avidly literate, to put it mildly.
Betty and Leila read Margaret Mead, or not at all! One of the brothers gave her a collected works of Earl Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and a Zane Gray series. One of her boys had to have his hands slapped and ears boxed for snooping into this mysterious library which served as an emblem of rectitude and social standing more than any source of pleasurable escape from the daily tedium. One day they were jettisoned to clear room for a new TV.
It was Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink, with a recipe for suet pudding written in Betty's mother’s beloved hand on the back pages. None of her siblings seemed to want it. Betty opened it and saw why: Girls in grass skirts cavorting with bare breasts, drunken old men passed out on the beach, a fire burning and a pig roasting. A devout Mormon who never let even her wedding toast sip of champagne pass her lips, she slapped the book shut and hid it in a closet; Trader Vic had served liquor to three of her brothers, her sister, and at least one of her husbands. No wonder, Betty must have thought. She certainly said it often enough.
Merwin Brown had many virtues, but his sense of humor wasn’t one of them. Betty was avid for compliments on her cooking, and she knew she was good enough to be deserving. For Merwin to have taken a little notice would have meant the world to her. And sometimes she would be hanging on to every bite her husband took, expecting an adjective.
But the Browns are Scotch; thrifty, sour old cynics to a man.
“Bruce,” he’d snarl, “go out and get the axe so I can cut your mother’s steak.”
At table, Betty learned that compliments could be more devastating than insults.
She wouldn't let us see her cry.
She loved to work with her hands and to be included in whatever humble capacity she was capable of. She proved to be capable in many things, and won a prize for devotion to helping others in a number of aspects: It was an engraved silver bowl, and she kept a verse on a scrap of paper in it, in her own precious hand, of a Mother Teresa sentiment.
Good-bye, Betty the Riveter. You won the war and saved the casualties, fed them the best stuffed pork chops, venison tamales, and fresh baked dinner rolls any of them ever ate in their lives.
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