Hurricane Betty

While Hurricane Irene drenched Hatteras Island, I wrote about David and me visiting Betty Rahn in Michigan.

In 1962 Wally was transferred from Chicago to Detroit. My family moved to Michigan just before school started. On the first day of school, waiting in the hallway outside the classrooms, I struck up a conversation with another young mother. We discovered we both lived in Graefield Apartments. After enrolling the children, we all walked home together.

In the next four years Betty and I saw each other almost every day. We bought a house on Derby Road, and the Rahns bought an old house about a mile away. We became typical suburban housewives. We had coffee and tea every morning, did things with the children after school and during vacations.

Her children and mine were stairsteps: My Karl, 7; her Susan, 6; Martha, 5; her Richard, 4. We made art projects at Betty’s house and put on plays in my basement. We loaded all four kids in a car and went exploring: picnicking on Belle Island, climbing the ramparts on Old Fort Wayne, trying gadgets at the Cranbrook Museum of Science, and seeing puppet shows at the Art Institute of Detroit.

Betty held my hand through my pregnancy with David. She stood as godmother at David's christening in St. James Church.

My family left Michigan, following Wally to Dallas, to Philadelphia, and back to Chicago. We were in Woodridge, Illinois, when Betty divorced Loren. She came to see us while on a year’s tour around the U.S. While on the beach in San Diego, she met a couple staying at the Four Seasons Hotel. She said, “I told them, ‘I’m staying there, too.’ They had a room in the hotel. I didn’t tell them I was sleeping in my van in the parking lot.”

Betty was a resourceful traveler. She was my inspiration when I traveled around Europe driving a new BMW but without any money.

After her big trip, Betty settled in Hatteras. When I returned from Europe and didn’t know where to live, I drove from Norfolk, Virginia, down the length of the Outer Banks along the narrow highway where I saw waves roiling in the ocean like the ones this week during the hurricane. Betty lived in a little red house near the ferry to Okracoke. As the rain poured down outside, Betty painted doll house furniture, and I read paperback books. When I drove back north, encouraged and refreshed by Betty’s company, the ocean was as calm as I was.

I fled to Betty several times during the three terrible years when I was suing Wally for support. I always came away admiring how she made a successful life for herself with only $300 a month from Loren, a vice president of B. F. Goodrich.

Betty stayed in her house during Hurricane Hugo, which destroyed 90% of the homes on Hatteras Island. Betty looked out her front window as water swept over the road in front of her house and up her front steps. As water bubbled up through the floor boards, Betty jumped on her bed with her vacuum cleaner. Betty and her house survived.

Yes, Betty was a survivor. She showed me how to survive, and to have fun doing it.