Betty Ann Grimes was born on February 13, 1936, the sixth child of Mike Minor Grimes and Daisy Arazona Ellingwood. The family lived in Bald Knob, Arkansas until their farm was wiped out by a flood in 1942 and they moved to Bergman, Arkansas. There, Betty attended Oregon Flat School which became Bergman schools. She graduated with honors from Bergman HIgh in 1952. While in high school, Betty played varsity basketball.
From 1952-1954 Betty attended the College of Ozarks in Point Outlook for her general studies, then transferred to St Louis for medical technology sciences. For her graduation project, she came up with serum protein electrophoresis. More information can be found in the American Medical Technology Magazine of the American Society of Medical Technologists. I am not allowed to link directly to the articles as it’s copyrighted and it’s behind a paywall. If you do access those articles, I would love a copy for my files. After she graduated, she went back to Harrison with Roy Hornbeck so they could get married, December 7, 1957. They then moved to Poplar Bluff, Missouri for a year then they joined the rest of the family in Wichita, Kansas.
Betty worked at the hospital even while pregnant with her only child and her son was born April 1960, and she worked hard while her parents helped care for her baby son and at the time Betty lived at 221 West Gilbert St, Wichita, Kansas. Two months after her son was born, Betty packed up and moved with her family back to Harrison, Arkansas, and from that point on, Betty was a single mother.
On August 5, 1963 Betty filed for a divorce on the grounds of spousal abandonment. She got it finalized the following month. Betty was working at a doctor’s office at this time, as an in-house lab technologist. She loved her work and enjoyed being the only one in the lab. As part of her job, she had to attend various workshops and at one such workshop, she ran into a classmate from graduate school, Paul Conner.
After a whirlwind romance, Betty married Paul on April 16, 1965 in her sister Vivian’s home with her nieces as the bridesmaids. Betty was 29 years old and Paul had just turned 21 on the day of their wedding, so their wedding anniversary is also Paul’s birthday. On this day, her 5 year old son took on Paul’s last name and dropped the other last name. It was a very happy day for everybody involved, but tragedy struck a short three years later. Paul died on September 10, 1968 from an aneurysm. Paul had just turned 24. Betty may have been married to Paul for only three years, but Paul lived on as the love of her life.
Betty married Paul William Houston in 1974 and I can’t find a record of when exactly they divorced, but I do remember him, so it was after 1984 but before 1988. After she divorced Paul Houston, she went back to the first Paul’s last name, so she was Betty G. Conner until her death.
Betty had many hobbies. Sewing. Square dancing. Gardening. Composting. She even got published for her gardening hints in the newspaper a few times. Betty was the President of the Arkansas State Society of American Medical Technologists from 1982 to her retirement in 1996. She earned many awards that filled the entire office walls. She was well respected in her field and when Dr. Garland retired, she transferred to the hospital and she enjoyed her co-workers in the hospital.
When she retired, she had taped all the episodes of Star Trek and Stargate. Betty had these drawers of VHS tapes stacked up on top of her television and she enjoyed spending her retirement having the chance to catch up on all the episodes of her favorite sci-fi shows. Her favorite character in Star Trek was Bones. Also, when she retired, she threw herself into loving on her granddaughters and her grandnieces, raising them.
Betty got lung cancer in 1998 and lost her battle in 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment