My beautiful birth mother Betty celebrated a birthday in heaven this past week – her 105th!
With her remarkable gifts as a vocalist, I have no doubt she spent part of the day doing what I’ve learned from the full siblings I found in 2005 that she loved doing – singing. But Betty probably does that often these days.
Of my uncountable blessings over the past 21 years, one of the most treasured is getting the chance to hear Betty’s singing on wonderful recordings from over 70 years ago, and from late in her too-short life when she recorded a cassette of Christmas songs for my sibs a handful of years before she died of lung cancer at 71, days before Christmas 1992.
My siblings knew little about Betty’s early life before we became a family 21 years ago, but between my research and my sister Terry’s genealogy, we’ve pieced together a few details. Betty Louise Campbell was born July 22, 1921 in West Virginia to Ed Campbell and Olive Helen Rowe. She suffered the tragedy of losing her mother in 1934 when she was only 13, after Olive had complications resulting from a hysterectomy.
School records I obtained showed that Betty left Huntington High School midway through 10th grade in 1937 when she was 16 and went to work at Walgreens (see the first sweet photo with this post). We don’t know when or where she met my birth father Robert “Bob” Workman, born Orval Bradford Workman in September 1916 in Covington, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati. His family moved to Huntington when he was very young and his father, also named Orval, was working for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.
When they married in September 1939 in Ironton, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Huntington, Betty was 18 and Bob was a few days from turning 23 and in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
We don’t know many details of their marriage years because my sibs – born in 1944 (brother Crys), 1947 (late brother Robert/Robin) and 1954 (sister Terry) – were just kids. But we know Bob drank to excess and that, and the problems it caused, ultimately was the reason for their breakup in the late 1950s. I managed to get their divorce decree the year I found my bio family, and it was dated April 1959, the judge mandating that Bob stay away from Betty and their three still-young children.
Apparently, though, he didn’t – and Betty seemingly let him back into her life, although to what degree none of us are really sure. Whatever twist of fate led to my conception a little over a year after that decree, we’ll never know. If I’d searched for my birth family sooner, I might have had the chance to meet Betty, build a relationship with her and learn at least some of what happened from her – if she’d been willing to share any of those details with the son she gave up for adoption at birth in February 1961.
From what I’ve learned, Betty was a pretty private person. Knowing she lived the last 31 years of her life never telling her children, relatives, work colleagues/close friends (some of whom I spoke to before their passing in the years after finding my birth family) or another soul about me, it’s very possible she would’ve been reticent to share life details even with me. My sibs have put up with my incessant questions about our parents and other subjects for 21 years. Who knows how Betty would’ve handled the undying curiosity of her baby son the journalist if we’d been blessed with the chance to meet in this life?
I love, respect and honor Betty today and always, knowing she was a good, kind and compassionate woman. This despite the hardships of being married to an alcoholic man who couldn’t hold a job and molested his oldest child; working as a drugstore clerk as a single mother through the 1960s after my birth/adoption; and continuing to work until she was almost 70 because her second alcoholic husband – 17 years her junior – never worked; he only drank. And all this struggle for a woman who never had a driver’s license.
So happy birthday, dearest Betty. We all love you and miss you very much. One day, we will meet.
Here’s a recording of Betty performing with a small dance band at a March of Dimes benefit in Logan, West Virginia in about 1950 or ’51. I never get tired of listening to her sing. 
A Life of Words 