Betty, You were an inspiration! BETTY SCHROEDER 1931-2009 (Presented at a Remembering of Betty, May 23, 2009) Betty was born in Cincinnati, at home, and was the middle child of 13. Her father was a Bailiff, appointed by the Republican administration. When she was old enough, she worked in the fields or in the greenhouse of the family truck farm, earning 25 cents a day. When she was in high school, she worked at a local movie theater box office for 10 cents per hour. Her family was Evangelical Lutheran, and the kids had to attend church every Sunday. By high school time, Betty was taking instruction to become a Catholic, but this required a year and a half because she asked so many questions and challenged the instructing priest. She refused to kiss the Bishop’s ring, a measure of her rebelliousness even at that tender age. By her high school years she was working as a nursing aide at the local hospital and for home care. She met her future husband Gene Schroeder through the Catholic instruction. He was a student of electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. After marriage, they lived in student housing on campus, where they started their family, as Betty was also continuing to work. Following graduation, Gene accepted a job offer at Sandia Labs and the family moved to Albuquerque where they completed their quartet of kids: one son, three daughters. Gene also worked at Los Alamos, doing work on the atomic bomb, though of course it was all very super-secret. Within a year of being at Sandia, Gene became ill with cancer, probably from working with radiation. He moved on to other military-related jobs at Minneapolis, Baltimore and South Dakota where he died in the early 1980’s. At that time Betty also became estranged from her children. Betty and I met at a nursing home in Columbia MD where she was caring for an elderly patient that I visited. She later worked at Howard County Hospital. After sharing an apartment, we purchased a townhouse in Columbia in 1987. We attended meetings of the Howard County Peace Action Community, and joined some of the peace marches in Washington, protests at the Pentagon and other protests while in the area. When she encountered patients at the hospital who had deformed babies, she probed, and learned that the father had been in Viet Nam, and that agent orange was probably the cause. When she could, she would give the mothers the names of veterans organizations that she hoped could help them. When she retired from the hospital, we moved to St Petersburg, FL, and spent three years there, watching the green mold grow on our leather shoes and luggage. After we re-located to Tucson we soon learned that we moved from one lightning capital of the world to the other. Betty was terrified of the lightning storms, but was more frightened of the hurricanes that plagued Florida. We arrived in Tucson in June 1994, 15 years ago. Betty had very strong feelings about militarism, peace & justice issues. Her first arrest was in Howard County, MD where Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab was located. It was early in the morning of a very frigid Martin Luther King’s birthday January 14, 1987. The action was planned by Jonah House, the home of Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister. Even though Betty was scared of heights, she climbed the long ladder to the top of the auditorium building of the APL complex, to join the 3 or 4 others. They dropped an anti-war banner as the truck with the ladder sped away. The Berrigan’s teen-age daughter Frida was part of the action, and one who gave Betty courage. Our friend John Heid also was part of the action, and provided good support. It required the police to bring a cherry-picker to lift the protesters from top of the building. This was a life-changing experience for Betty. She was arrested, of course, and spent 3 or 4 days in jail. I learned recently that Betty had also been arrested at Howard County General Hospital…for removing some X-rays (of deformed babies from Agent Orange). I can’t imagine what she planned to do with the X-rays… There were three additional arrests here in Tucson, two of which were at Raytheon. The first one was when Jack Cohen-Joppa, Betty and I were arrested trying to have a meeting with then-director Louise Francesconi. Previous correspondence requesting the meeting resulted in no meeting. So the three of us entered her office to wait until she could/would meet with us. This was on the same day as a large protest at Raytheon’s gate, on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Why we were not apprehended as we drove through the guarded entry gate amazed us…the guards just waved us through! Following our release from arrest, Jim & Lucille Burkholder drove us to reclaim our impounded car, our chance to ride in the Burkholder’s brand new Mercedes. The next Raytheon action was on a cloudy, threatening February 13, 2003 in the lead-up to the U.S. in

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