Biographies and Obituaries
In loving memory
Betty (Miller) Smith
FAMILY:
Spouse: Glen Smith
The children of Glendon and Betty were:
Four Sons- Marty, John, and two unnamed
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Obituary:
Contributed by:
Biography:
Betty (Miller) Smith: Betty was raised in the Frankton, IN area with her father, John Miller and mother, Ethel Rosella (Pflueger). After her father was killed in 1933 (see notes on John Miller), her mother married Everett Johnson in 1937, and started another family.
Betty met a guy named Glendon Smith and they married in 1941 when she was fifteen years. They set up house in a drafty, cold little place with the nickname, "Yellowcat". The house is north of route 128, on the road that joins up with route 13 going into Elwood. Three of her four boys were babies there. She got plenty of advice on how to be a mother from her inlaws around the corner on the Smith's "Brookside Farm". And her mother, sister, Anne, and brother, John, were raising families at the same time!
Betty became the center of her family's universe while her husband served in World War II, worked the night shift at a factory, and began farming their own 80 acres SW of Elwood. One especially challenging night occured when the power for the heat lamps went out, and hundreds of baby chicks where threatened by the Spring cold. Betty and Glen brought hundreds of chicks into the living room of the farmhouse to save them. What a racket the little peepers made!
As the boys grew, Betty made sure they all went to the Aroma Methodist church, and made the school bus at the end of the lane to attend school in Frankton, and Little League baseball afterwards. She was active in church and Women's clubs, but Family activities were her main social outlet.
Glendon's health failed and she was asked to leave everything familiar and move to Arizona. Many tears were shed as the family pulled out of the Foust's barn lot with everything they owned in a little trailer pulled by a Ford station wagon, and headed west. The desolate scenery, the July heat and the loneliness was hard for her to bear. They stayed in Tucson with fellow Hoosiers, the Botts, while Glendon found a house in Tempe (NE corner of University and Rural). He began work at Motorola, and Betty set up a sparse household, and got the boys into school. Betty gradually expanded her activities and became a Reading teacher with the Mesa Public Schools district, and active in St. Andrews Methodist church.
As her boys moved out and started their own families, she seemed to be able to thoroughly enjoy her life in a nice home in Mesa on the Camelot golf course. But something very wrong was gaining strength in her body. She was diagnosed with leukemia, and given four years to live. Even to the end, Betty's life was a tremendous example of the best of Human Nature, and Christianity.
Sons Marty and John brought her ashes to the Aroma Methodist Church cemetery, buried them, and had a small interment ceremony with Peggy, Elizabeth, and the itinerant Minister of the church at the time. The grey day and a half dozen grey geese taking off from the bordering field, provided a somber ending to their efforts.
Buried in Row:21, Gs:10, southeast corner by the woods.
Contributed by: John P. Smith
"Betty (Miller) Smith was my mother. Boy, I still miss her. Thanks, John P. Smith."
[Submitted by J. P. Smith on 20 Oct 2001].