youngcheesecakegladiator-blog

[youngcheesecakegladiator-blog]

Forever Betty

Recently, my sister Wendi provided us with a nostalgic glimpse at our shared past in a Google photo collection.[1]  Sis’ montage has “taken us all back” a bit, and prompted me to take a retro-active glance at some of the people (and characters) that we, as a family, shared that road less traveled by.[2] Unsure of exactly where to begin or “who” to begin with, I opted to start with an acquaintance of our mother’s, to see if I couldn’t retrace the ‘life steps’ of that old family friend.  (And yes, since my twelve year old self is holding her hand in the picture above, I’m pretty sure that you’ve already guessed who that old friend might be.) For those of you who never knew her, or would ever know of her, well, her name was Betty. I know it will come as no shock to some of you that I’ve gone looking for (and to see whatever became of) the ever elusive and “big bonneted blue-haired,” Amazon, Betty Bodine.  

Now don’t get me started about why my adolescent self has somehow been frozen in time while holding the statuesque Betty’s hand in that late 1960’s California backyard photo. The truth is Betty held sway over my little kid’s brain long before that picture was ever taken. Betty was someone not unlike a super-hero to my little seven year old self, and she’s become kind of an enigma to all of the “me’s” since then. You see in a lot of ways, Betty (just like her hair) was truly bigger than life. She was a working mom in 1963 (nobody’s mom actually went to work in 1963) and she drove a BIG brand new’63 Chevrolet Impala sedan painted (what else but?) a silvery misty blue. She dressed up too, and no, not like our “Nana” did - poor Nana - who actually had to go to work.[3] No, Betty Bodine dressed like she liked to go to work. She raced off in that blue Impala every day, cigarette smoke trailing alongside the exhaust and her blue tinted hairspray. She was somehow free and yes, even (oddly) glamorous.                                                           

For those of you that never knew them, Betty lived with her husband Dave and her son Ricky. Betty worked at Hartfield’s at the local mall, a sort of ‘cut-above-average’ (not really…) dress shop that our mom could never afford to shop at. Dave was a “good old boy,” and Ricky was Dave and Betty’s only child. Ricky was kind of a sullen kid, a spoiled kid really; one who liked to play with matches alongside his chemistry set, and dig big deep army style “fox holes” in the backyard. After playing “army” Ricky would relish melting his toy soldiers, and when no one was looking (except maybe me) play “monsters” with them - and all this way before anything like The Walking Dead was ever thought of.[4]  Dave and Betty gave little Ricky whatever he wanted, and Ricky never wanted for anything. In fact, Ricky didn’t just have one bedroom for all his mostly melted toy soldiers. Ricky Bodine had two. Betty had torn down a wall between two rooms so little Ricky could have one giant bedroom – separated only by Ricky’s optional giant slider door between the two. All of this so Ricky could spread out with his many gifts (and melted soldiers) about the place. I think Ricky thought he was.                                               

Ricky was older than me. I think by about three years. It wasn’t that Ricky was a mean kid or anything. It was just that he was kind of a loner. Ricky didn’t talk a lot, but truthfully, next to Betty, I thought Ricky hung the moon. He had a wiseacre way about him that just said “totally cool” to my seven year old self. But like my sister Darla would say about him many years later, it always seemed like Ricky was just someone who was bound to meet a “bad end.” I sure hope that didn’t happen.

But back then though, at least for me, the Bodine family was kind of the bomb. Ricky’s dad, Dave, seemed to stay home all the time (our dad was always gone) while Betty flew off in the Impala to, of all exciting places in 1963 - the Mall. (Our mom drove a red Ford Falcon Station Wagon that looked like it was on loan from Search and Rescue.) Betty had a super cool blue tinted bee-hive hair-do. Our mom had little pink curlers that smelled like a permanent solution and scarf Nana had given her for Christmas. Dave did cool stuff when he was at home, like chop off the heads off of hundreds of (dead) fish and stuff them into wishing well planters he had made out of bricks in their front yard. (So cool!) Dave was always making something out of bricks. But truth be told, I think Betty seemed to like that Dave was busy making things out of bricks. And honestly, looking back, I don’t remember a lot of “Dave and Betty” moments, only Dave or Betty, or Ricky moments.

Betty liked to play cards, and I think Dave did too - though it seemed I played more cards with the crafty Ricky than either of those two. Betty liked to play Canasta – you know, with those HUGE decks of cards and extra suits of everything. [5] Betty did teach me how to play Canasta. I think she taught my mom to play Canasta too. In the very back of my mind I think I had a sleep over at Ricky’s (in his two bedrooms!) one night while mom and dad played (what else) Canasta with Dave and Betty. The cigarette smoke was so thick. I don’t think I knew where my sisters were. It seems like Wendi was a baby asleep in a crib in Betty’s living room. Maybe Darla was with me and Ricky. Ugh, girls.

We moved away from the Bodines’ in 1964. Betty and Dave seemed to split up not long after that, and well, Ricky looks to have stayed living with Dave.[6] Betty moved away, though I was never quite sure where. I know that Betty and Ricky came sans Dave to visit us at our new house up north once, but after that there was no word of Betty or Ricky. Mom said that Betty had gone away, that she’d had a baby boy out of wedlock with “some man” and well that was sort of the end of it. Mom said that Betty’s life was complicated, and that Betty had had to call the baby “a Bodine” when he really wasn’t. I remember that didn’t make much sense to me at the time. Once about 1970, after we’d returned to SoCal, Mom did drive back to see Dave. I remember being sad because Ricky wasn’t there. (Who was I gonna melt stuff with?) Ricky was older and gone by 1970. Dave seemed to live alone with nothing but tropical fish tanks everywhere. Dave had gone from cutting the heads off of fish for wishing well planter boxes to keeping fish in tanks instead. Dave had always seemed kind of lonely. I think mom was lonely too when she went to see Dave. He schooled me in the art of keeping an aquarium while he and Mom kind of smiled a lot at each other. And then, as quickly as we’d arrived back at Dave’s that last time, we were gone. I guess for me (and for mom) that was the last of Dave.                                                             

So in light of all “this,” and in light of the last nearly sixty years, well, what can I say, I wanted to know more. I wasn’t sure where to begin, but I figured I’d start with Ricky, and see where that might take me. While I had a general idea that Ricky was about 3 years older than I was, I had no clue how old Dave and Betty were – they were just older than mom and dad. To do this I was going to have to fall back on what I like to call our “vestigial memories,” and hope that those memories would lead me to the right place. (And that I would not just be bullshitting myself so to speak.)

Allowing for time and place and an approximate year of birth, finding Ricky was easy enough. I knew that Dave and Ricky had stayed in Fullerton at least until 1970, so that meant that Ricky (if he’d completed school) had probably gone to a local high school. Ancestry.com has a pretty good selection of yearbooks, so I was able to find a likely candidate for “Ricky Bodine” in the Placentia, California El Dorado High School year book for 1968. In comparing this yearbook picture to those backward pictures of Betty and Ricky from the late 1960’s I was pretty sure I had the right guy. Still I needed more.                                                                                                                    

So feeling confident, I decided I’d see what I couldn’t find out about Dave and Betty. Instantly, I had no luck. Armed only with the names of “Dave” and of Betty,” and with an address in Fullerton, California from 1963-1970, I got nowhere fast. And sure, there were PLENTY of “Dave Bodines” and no shortage of “Betty Bodines,” but none seemed to fit quite right. Ugh. So I went back to “Ricky” and took a chance. I looked to see if it was possible that Ricky had been born in California. Using an approximated birth year of “1952,” the great Gods of Google, and Ancestry.com, I almost immediately came back with a birth record for a “Rick Marshal Bodine,” born at Los Angeles, California, 6 June 1952. [7] Hmmmm….maybe? This record at least gave me a place to look – and a valuable clue. This Rick Bodine’s mother’s maiden name was “Marshall.” From there I decided to play it “random” hoping that some sort of a marriage record might “pop - up” if I simply sought out any sort of a marriage record between a “Marshall” and a “Bodine.” It was kind of a long shot that they would be “our” Ricky’s parents – and that his parents Dave and Betty would have necessarily have been married in California, but hey, that what we genealogist types do, right? 

No luck – I did not locate any marriage record for a “Bodine to a Marshall.” But I did find something else. If you can’t find a marriage record, what’s the next best thing? You guessed it – a divorce. The California Divorce Index led me to a divorce at Orange County, California, December 1967, for “Othel David Bodine,” and his wife “Mary Elizabeth Marshall.” [8] With this, I was pretty sure that I had the parents of “Rick Marshall Bodine,” aka Ricky Bodine. Now I don’t know about you, but who names their son “Othel?” (No wonder he went by “Dave,” and even less a wonder that I couldn’t find him.) And stupid me for looking for a woman named Betty. (Duh!) Very few ladies are actually ever named “Betty.” I will admit though that I didn’t expect Betty’s first name to have actually been “Mary.” However at least now I had a way to fill in some of the blanks.

Regrettably I found that Othel David “Dave” Bodine died in Arizona in 2003. He was a veteran of World War II, and is honored there with a military headstone. The records are unclear if he ever remarried or not, and I haven’t followed that rabbit down the hole too far just yet. He looks to have followed Ricky to Arizona (or vice-versa) where Ricky looks to be living now in Mesa, with what is probably Ricky’s second wife. Ricky doesn’t look to have met a bad end at all near as I can tell. Family trees list Ricky as the father of four children and several grandchildren. You go Ricky Bodine!

Betty’s life has proven to still be more elusive. I was able to discover that “Mary Elizabeth Betty (Marshall) (Bodine) Wolf was born in Los Angeles on May 5, 1926, and that Betty passed away in Los Angeles County, California on February 28, 2007. [9] (However, as of yet I am unable to locate her final resting place.) I did learn that Betty’s father, Joseph Marshall, died young, and that Betty’s mother, a woman called Mitzi Madzka, and was an Austrian immigrant from Vienna lived to be nearly 100. Betty did remarry at Reno, in July of 1971, a man named Dale Wolf. (From Dave to Dale?) I get the sense that there was some alienation between Ricky and his mother, as some family trees only acknowledge “Ricky” as Betty’s son, while others imply the private faces of Betty’s other children still living. The fate or destiny of Betty’s baby boy she had after Dave Bodine is still unknown.

I’m taking a chance, and this weekend I am reaching out to Ricky. In this day and age of Google locating his likely address in Arizona was not all that difficult, so I have dropped him a line the old fashioned snail mail way. We’ll see if he replies, and I will keep you informed should you care to learn his fate. It’s always interesting to me to study the lives of those that we have encountered and then parted ways with for whatever reason. I liked the Bodines, and well, I hope that wherever Betty and Dave are that they are finally happy, and maybe even a little bit at peace.

[1] “Around the house,” a Google album photo collection by Wendi Record, as viewed February 2020

[2] A misquoted line from  Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

[3] Alta Violet (Sage)(Lee) Dixon – (1909-2004)

[4] The Walking Dead, a television program 2010 -  and as taken from a graphic novel  co-created by Robert Kirkman

[5] Canasta: A card game of Uruguayan origins (1939) that became increasingly popular in the United States during the 1950’s with popularity waning into the later 1960’s; a member of the Rummy family, it is commonly played with a French deck, and commonly played by four in two partnerships, although variations for different numbers of players exists.

[6] California, Divorce Index, 1966-1984, Ancestry.com, for “Othel David Bodine” and “Mary Elizabeth “Betty” (Marshall) Bodine, at Orange County, California, December 1967

[7] California Birth Index, 1905-1995 Ancestry.com, for birth of “Rick Marshall Bodine,” at Los Angeles, 6 June 1952

[8] California Divorce Index, 1966-1984 Ancestry.com, for divorce of “Othel David Bodine” and “Mary Elizabeth Marshall,” Orange County, California, December 1967

[9] U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 Ancestry.com, for the death of “Mary E. Wolf,” born 5 May 1926, died 28 Feb 2007; U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007, Ancestry.com, for “Mary Elizabeth Wolf,” aka “Mary E. Bodine,” date of birth 5 May 1926, date of death 28 Feb 2007; California Birth Index, 1905-1995, Ancestry.com, for “Mary Elizabeth Marshall,” born Los Angeles County, 5 May 1926;  Nevada Marriage Index, 1956-2005, Ancestry.com, for marriage of “Mary Elizabeth Bodine” to “Dale Virgil Wolf,” at Reno, Nevada, 3 July 1971.