Betty Kennedy

Betty was born July 19, 1930. She’s now 95 and lives in Westminster West. Every Monday evening she joins her sixty league members competing at Brattleboro Bowl. She’s part of a team sending thirteen-pound bowling balls down the alley even though she broke her hip three years ago doing the same thing. She lives off a dirt road in Westminster West with her daughter Dottie and son in law David Osterholt. She drives out for lunch most days to small restaurants or eateries, taking the opportunity to sit next to people she doesn’t know. She frequents Café Loco in Westminster or the nearby deli at Allen Brothers. “Or I go to The Porch at the North End of Brattleboro or Fast Eddie’s on Main Street. Or if I’m in Keene…. We all can get lazy in our old age and sit around watching TV. I REFUSE to do that. I want to meet new people.”

Betty was born in Brooklyn in 1930 and grew up as an only child in Lawrence on Long Island, just across the water from where JFK Airport is now. At age seventeen, she remembers when the bus taking her home from school stopped and she heard a newspaper boy call out “FDR has died!”.

“After high school I enrolled in a three-year nurse’s training program at Long Island College Hospital. We young women slept in a dorm, showed up for classes the next morning and then at 3:00 in the afternoon we would show up at the hospital to work the night shift: 3:00-11:00 at night.

“I married one Wallace “Robbie” Roberts just before graduating in 1951. He was in the Marines and stationed at The Brooklyn Naval Yard. I got a job at Valley Stream Hospital on Long Island. My oldest daughter Joan was born July 1, 1953.Around 1953, The Marines transferred my husband Robbie to Camp Lejeune in Virginia. We moved there and I instantly got a job at the OBGYN Hospital in DC. We lived in Falls Church and attended a small church where I sang in the choir. Three years later my second daughter Dottie was born. I was then working at Norfolk General Hospital in Virginia. That’s where I saw southern prejudice firsthand. As part of my job, I worked in a home for pregnant unmarried women. I got in a couple tiffs with interns about the way they treated unwed women – black and white.”.

“In DC, I worked the 3:00 – 11:00 shift at a military hospital – Emergency Room and OBGYN. and then my mother moved in with my family. By 1958 we all moved to the Norfolk Naval Base at my husband’s new detail. I got a job at Norfolk General Hospital. That’s where prejudice came into high focus for me. I worked a medical floor and worked side by side with many knowledgeable, proficient black nurses yet I soon came to learn they were being paid half of what I was earning.Blacks were separated from whites wherever possible.”

“And that’s when my husband, a baker in the Mess Hall at the naval base, decided not to reenlist. He left the base for a job in a bakery in Maynard, MA. I moved with my daughters and mother to be with him. In 1971 I got a job at The Bank of New England (Now Bank of America). For seventeen years I was an Occupational Health Nurse and ran a clinic for tin Boston until 1988.

“During that time my daughter Joan moved to Florida to work on a horse ranch where she became a trainer. She now lives in Manchester, NH. My daughter Dotty graduated from Salve Regina College in Rhode Island in 1980 and began working for Landmark School, a pre-college school in Beverly, MA. When Landmark bought the Windham College Campus in Putney in 1985, the administrators asked Dottie to move to Putney and begin to assemble a new (and very first) college for students with learning differences. She has been working there ever since and has just retired in 2025. (Her profile will follow this one in The Reformer.) After my husband died, I decided to buy a house in Westminster West near Dottie. I was linked to Vermont.

“I retired from nursing and began to meet the people who lived here in SE Vermont. The Front Porch Café (what is now The Putney Diner), was my favorite breakfast spot. Jeremy and Steven, the chef and owners and I made friends and they introduced me to theirs’. I was launched. And then I started bowling at The Brattleboro Bowl in 2006. I was 76 and have been at it these 21 years. I started on a Wednesday Morning league but switched to the Monday Night League. We have sixty of us in our evening league – people of all ages, male and female - reserve the whole facility with its 20 lanes from 6:00 – 8:00 in the evening. I swing a thirteen-pound bowling ball and had a score of 174 two weeks ago in January, 2026. (The really good bowlers get scores anywhere between 200-300.) We bowl competitively within our own league.

“Unfortunately, just after Labor Day in 2022, at the beginning of a new season, (when I was 92 years old) I fell into a bowling alley and broke my hip. I was back bowling just before Christmas and was also back at Supreme Fitness two days a week for two-hour workouts – machine weights and exercises to build up leg muscles, arms, upper body… KEEP MOVING is my motto.

Then in February, 2025 I fell again at the bowling alley and broke my shoulder. I had problems with breathing and then they found other problems. I spent months at Grace Cottage in Townshend and all the time I was telling the nurses and doctors, “I have to be back bowling in September. And when I did get out of the hospital, I called Mary Hayward and now every Friday morning from 10:00 – 12:00 I paint with my watercolor brushes with Julie Hoskins, Irene Canaris and Mary in her dining room. It’s wonderful!

“I also love long rides in my Carolla Cross Track car I leased in 2024. I’ve seen a good part of Vermont but, for some reason, not the NE Kingdom.I just take off down back roads to see where they take me. I have the ap for “audible” so I hook my car radio with Bluetooth into murder mysteries on the radio. And as I drive, I observe, listen, stop for a photo or paint. I stop at General Stores or little eateries for lunch and meet people. I love that. My family tells me I’d talk to a lamppost if it talked back to me.”