Thetford —
While Betts is perhaps best known as a pioneering home economics teacher at Thetford Academy — where she taught for 24 years — her tenure there is merely one part of a life that was devoted to helping others.
The woman referred to as “the Energizer Bunny” by her former student and friend Linda Bonnet was an independent working woman in the 1940s, instrumental in consolidating Thetford’s elementary schools in the 1950s, a town clerk and a weekend postmaster in the 1960s — and she still managed to raise six children, take in wayward teens, cook and reach out to shut-ins, organize relief drives at her church, and sing in the choir. For fun, Betts and her best friend of 55 years, Lois Page, used to paint and wallpaper their houses and take long drives in Vermont. Their last excursion was to the Whippi Dip in Fairlee a few months ago. When concerned family members protested that they shouldn’t go alone, the two old friends laughed them off.
Claradella (Snow) Betts was born in Barre, Vt., in 1921. Her mother, Mattie Snow, was a schoolteacher, and her father, Leon Snow, was a machinist at a local quarry. Though he was a voracious reader, Leon Snow’s formal education didn’t extend beyond the eighth grade. When Dell was born, Snow purchased a life insurance policy to be used for her college education.
“It was highly unusual at the time,” said Janet Bingham, Betts’ eldest daughter. “(Leon) was an unusual man and he raised an unusual daughter.”
On a rainy June evening, three of Betts’ children — Jed Betts and Marty Betts Moses, both of Thetford Center, and Bingham, of Burley, Idaho — gathered in the Thetford Center home where they grew up to share stories about their mother. Sitting at the kitchen table, they flipped through photo albums and chuckled at the realization that they often remembered different versions of the same family tale.
They recounted how, two weeks after graduating with a degree in home economics and extension service work, Betts was hired by the state as an extension agent. The fact that she didn’t know how to drive didn’t deter the 22 year-old; within two weeks she had learned, and her father bought her a car.
For the next seven years, Betts drove around Orange County, speaking at home demonstration clubs, and visiting people on their farms to teach women skills such as meal planning and sewing, and men how to prepare income taxes.
“The women and little girls loved it, and they couldn’t wait to see what Miss Snow was wearing,” Bingham said. “Mom was always in heels and very stylish. A few years ago, some of the women who are older now told her that they tried to emulate how she acted and how she dressed. They thought she was wonderful.”
“There’s this one story where she was at an isolated farm and visiting with the woman of the house, and this odd fellow kept staring in the window,” Jed Betts said. “When she went home, she told the story to her friend Dick Betts (her future brother-in-law) and he told her never to go to that place again. He thought it was dangerous for a woman to go out to those farms alone, but she was never afraid; she was too focused on helping people.”
According to family lore, both Dick Betts and his brother Charles had their eye on the young Dell, and flipped a coin to decide who would get to take her to the Tunbridge Fair. Charles won and made the most of the opportunity; he and Dell married in 1947. They had six children.
Following her marriage, Betts retired from her job as an extension agent and set to work on their home in Thetford Center, which had been purchased for $1,000 and, according to her children, was a mess.
The next Christmas, the Betts hosted a party to thank all the townspeople who had helped them. Charles Betts, who was a chef at Dartmouth College, made a big pot of spaghetti and Betts made cookies and hot chocolate. Dell and Charles Betts took spaghetti to those who couldn’t attend and sang Christmas carols for them, establishing a family tradition that has continued for 50 years. When Betts last took part, in 2014, she ignored her difficulty in moving around, insisting on getting out of the car to sing at every house.
It was at that time that Betts served as the weekend postmaster in Post Mills, and joined the committee to consolidate the schools in Thetford, which took four votes to accomplish. She often told the story that, when the measure finally passed, Carl Anderson, head of Thetford Academy, looked at Betts and told her to get to work on the churches.
In the fall of 1962, following the unexpected departure of the home economics teacher at the Academy, Anderson asked Betts to step in. Betts agreed to be the interim teacher until the end of the school year. However, she was such a hit with faculty and students that she was asked to stay on permanently. She loved teaching, but lacked a teaching certificate, so the academy offered to pay for her to go back to school.
Despite caring for four children at home and teaching full time, Betts returned to school for her certificate. She did relinquish her town clerk job to her husband, who had been her assistant.
“I deeply admired her and see her as someone whose life story I would lean on if I ever had to face hardship in my life,” said Gail Dimick, pastor of the United Church of Thetford. “She’d pick herself up and move on and never look back.”
Betts experienced her fair share of adversity during her 94 years. She lost her father and husband within months of each other in 1966, and in 1978 her son Albert was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 20. While daughter Betts Moses said that her mother never really got over the loss of Albert, she didn’t let the tragedy slow her down.
Her strength and perseverance had taken root early. As a child she contracted pneumonia, and was given no hope of survival by the doctor. Her father promised to build her a dollhouse big enough to play in if she got better, and from that moment on, she began to recover.
The dollhouse — more accurately described as a playhouse — remained in Barre until a young Marty persuaded her parents to move it to Thetford Center. A few years ago, when Betts noticed a little girl was spending time at a neighbor’s house, she invited the girl to play in the dollhouse.
Betts made sure she always had freshly baked cookies for tea parties during the girl’s visits, which soon included sewing lessons, and which continued until a few weeks before Betts’ death.
“One of the things she liked to say, ‘If you’re depressed, find somebody that you can help.’ That was her philosophy and that’s probably what got her through,” Jed Betts said.
When asked about a story that their mother took in the newborn of a local teenager so that the girl could finish high school, the Betts children replied, “Which time?”
“There were so many girls that came and stayed here when there was trouble in their lives, and not just girls,” Betts Moses said. “Lots of kids lived here. She just took care of them no matter how they needed it; we never had an empty house, ever.”
Demick recalled that following Hurricane Katrina, Betts stood up at church and said, “We’re going to make buckets.”
“She didn’t say, ‘Do you think we ought to?’ she said, ‘We’re going to do it,’ and she did. We had about 20 buckets filled with cleaning supplies that Dell presented to a representative from Church World Service, and after that we affectionately called her ‘The Bucket Lady.’ She was a remarkable person and touched a lot of lives in different ways.”
“She was very tolerant and very open-minded,” Betts Moses said. “It wasn’t that she liked everybody, but she always found something positive in them, and she always gave them grace.”