Betty Jeane Slate Chord

Betty Jeane Slate Chord has been a Portland girl for most of her life. She was born October 10, 1921 at Emanuel Hospital, the third and youngest child of Edith Dell Rohrbough and Thomas Benton Slate. Her birth was the fulfillment of her mother’s desire to have “at least one of my children born in Portland,” a city that Edith had claimed as her own. However, Tom Slate’s work as an engineer/inventor soon took the family away from Oregon. Long years of Betty’s girlhood were spent in California where her father was building the world’s first all-steel dirigible, in Washington, DC, and finally in Betty’s final year of high school in the little town of Morehead City, North Carolina where he was testing the use of his invention, dry ice, in fisheries.

It was in North Carolina that Betty met and married her first husband and the father of her three children, Gerald Phillips. Not until 1949 did Betty return to Oregon, where in 1950 she and her husband pooled their meager resources with those of her parents to purchase a house in Portland large enough for both couples and the children, Geri Ellen, Daniel, and Kathryn. There Betty and Gerald and Edith and Tom raised the children in a home filled with love, joy, and respect for one another, despite the fact they were not wealthy in worldly terms.

The advantages that Betty wrote of in a 1948 letter to her parents were passed on to her own children: “The constant knowledge that my folks had faith in me and were proud of me. The understanding and sympathy that were mine in my troubles. The many, many happy hours.”

Working mothers were a rarity in the 1950s. Nonetheless, Betty worked as the secretary in the Gerber Baby Food Company’s Portland office to help support the family during those years. When her marriage ended in 1964, Betty went to work as a file clerk for Portland Federal Savings & Loan. The next years brought increasing recognition of her talents and abilities as Betty advanced from file clerk to, finally, Branch Manager and Assistant Vice President of what had become Far West Savings & Loan. The years also brought further adversity. Her 1969 marriage to James Bradford ended in his sudden death in 1971. A third marriage, to Harold Chord in 1977, also ended in widowhood. After faithfully caring for him through Alzheimer’s Disease, Betty lost Harold in 1989.

Betty returned in 2007 to the Southeast Portland neighborhood where she raised her children. She boasts nine grandchildren (one deceased), nine great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. She has many, many friends.

It seems to those of us who love her that her life has been rich, though for many years finances were a struggle. Her children appreciate in her what she appreciated in her own mother: “You always respected my judgment and allowed me to shoulder my own responsibilities. I count you as my dearest friend!”

What more could we ask from our heroine?

Written by Ellen Howard, Daniel R. Phillips, and Kathryn A. Mayo