Blog 3814 – 05.2.2026

Happy Birthday, Betty

Today is the birthday of the beloved matriarch of our family, Betty Lou Stokes. It is supposedly a lapse of etiquette to ask a woman her age and yet little girls and grandmas are both proud to announce the achievement of arriving at yet another birthday. Betty celebrates her eighty-ninth birthday today, Betty’s youngest son Luke’s second daughter Kayla also celebrates her birthday today and I will not risk breaching etiquette to speculate regarding what number birthday that is for her except to say she is probably sweet sixteen yet again.

We have the wonderful privilege, my wife and I, of spending two day a week with Betty in our home while Sarah her daughter works. Betty married Wallace, my wife’s dad after her birth mom died when Linda was only four. Wallace, a veteran of WW2, farmer and father of Harold, Esther, Jack, Linda and baby Paul lost his first wife Willie Mae and did not know how he was going to manage the farm and his family after that terrible her death.

Then he met Betty, a beautiful young waitress, with a young son of her own, Gene. Wallace immediately set out to win her heart. People said why in the world would any young attractive woman take on a man with five children already and she with one of her own. I think it was because Wallace was able to convince Betty that he truly loved her and love like that is hard to irresistible.

Wallace and Betty married and added two more children to there mix, Sarah and Luke. Meal time must have looked like chow time in the military. Some years ago Wallace died. Betty and Wallace had over sixty years together. She still misses the great love of her life and I have heard her said many times, “that man really loved me.” 

Anyone who has ever met Betty knows that she is one of those wonderful and rare people that are so easy to love. Wallace like most of us had to make the extra effort to win people over. He knew right away after meeting Betty that she would make a wonderful wife and mother to his children, his, hers, theirs. I suppose I should add to Wallace’s titles of veteran, farmer, father – expert salesman for indeed having sold Betty on marrying him could as the old saying goes, “Sell refrigerators to Eskimos.”

I ask Mom yesterday what she would like for her birthday today. She just smiled and did not answer, but I knew by the shining look in her eye, one more day with Wallace. I like to think that Betty and Wallace’s great love story is yet to be continued. I happen to think that these adventures in time and space have already had mostly unremembered prequels, will have multiple sequels, and that they are all populated by those we previously met and loved and will again and again.

Perhaps Wallace has already begun a new adventure and is waiting for Betty to arrive and take the leading lady role in this new adventure. Happy Birthday, Betty. And as the saying goes: “Many Happy Returns.”

Your friend, fellow traveler, one of Betty’s boys,

David James White