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Betty Smith, my dad’s sister, who was the center of gravity of the Smith family and the glue that held us together, died last week. The loss is deeply painful.

Aunt Betty was always the shining light of the family. She was warm, gracious, gentle, friendly, and disarmingly pretty.

She exhibited every admirable trait possible, and there was nothing whatsoever in her character that was negative or unpleasant. She was genuinely nice, genuinely good, selflessly devoted to home and family and friends.

At the funeral, one of her longtime Savannah friends said to me, “I was always amazed that someone so beautiful could be so nice.”

Betty died a few months shy of her 90th birthday. She was the baby of her family and the last of her generation. She and her parents and her brothers are together now at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

Betty lived in Savannah her entire life. She was two years old when her family moved to Gordonston, a stately old neighborhood not far from downtown. That house on Kinzie Avenue was her home until she died.

To give you an idea about Aunt Betty’s life and character, here is an article I transcribed from a yellowed clipping from the Savannah Morning News.

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Spotlighting Our Trees

By Tom Coffey, March 21, 1982

Lucile Huff, who married W. C. Sutton, Jr. 30-plus years ago and moved out of the Kinzie Avenue house where she had grown up, is one who clings to old-neighborhood ties. In the yard of her Duffy Street home she has a crab-apple tree whose roots can be traced back to Kinzie. Thanks, she says, to Martha Elizabeth Smith.

That’s Betty Smith to those of us who have known her since high school days, and Betty really does maintain old-neighborhood ties. She still lives at 201 Kinzie, the home her parents, the late Mr. and Mrs. Walter Anthony Smith (he of the Savannah Cotton Exchange) bought in 1926. Betty is one of my tree people, and we need more like her.

When Betty was a child, a streetcar line ran down the Kinzie Avenue median, serving Gordonston, Ingleside and environs and terminating, as I recall, at Thunderbolt. When the streetcar gave way to progress, the tracks came up, and the median remained — unadorned.

Betty’s pleas for trees in the median went ignored by the city. So she took matters into her own hands, and those dogwoods you now see adorning the median are the results of her own transplanting efforts. She set them out and watered them.

Betty Smith’s dogwoods, however, have a rival — two rivals, in fact — for springtime loveliness. The main rival is the wild flowering crab-apple in her front yard, the one pictured here as my “Tree of the Month” in this series spotlighting Savannah’s tree heritage.

At the far left of the picture photographer Beau Cabell snapped last week can be seen another crabapple. It’s the other rival of those dogwoods you see in the median. That other tree was a shoot from betty’s crab-apple tree; she gave it to her neighbors, just as she gave the Suttons one.

Now, look more closely at Betty Smith’s tree. Its height is estimated at 30 feet, and its spread is immense. It has four separate trunks from a common base. If you ride by there this afternoon you’ll see a breathtaking display of flowers blending white, pink and purple (if Wednesday night’s storm didn’t play havoc with the blossoms).

That’s mainly what a wild crab-apple is good for — to give us beauty. The little apples it bears are quite small and seedy. But the beauty is sufficient to justify Betty’s having nurtured this tree since she planted it there about 30 years ago.

A friend gave her a rooted switch, about 2 feet tall, and she set it in the front yard so it would receive nourishment while she made up her mind on a permanent location.

But then, Betty recalls, the tree suddenly began to grow and she decided that the “temporary” location was good enough. Her decision to leave it there was a good one.

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The Lucile Huff mentioned in the first paragraph above is Betty’s lifelong friend Cilie Sutton, who still lives two blocks away on Duffy Street. Virtually every night for the last two decades, Betty and Cilie spoke by phone at bedtime to say good night and be sure all was well.

Circumstances determined the direction of Betty’s life. When she was in college, her father died. Instead of being free to make her own life, she took a job and remained at home to support her mother, accepting the obligation willingly. She never married.

Years later, when her mother died, Betty was in mid-career at Great Dane Trailers, with a large circle of friends and co-workers. Nothing changed, except from that time forward, she lived alone.

Betty retired after 44 years with Great Dane, but again, nothing much changed. She had countless friends in Savannah. She had her gardening, civic and neighborhood interests, and a widening family of cousins, nieces and nephews, great-nieces and nephews, and great-great-nieces and nephews.

No matter where any of us lived, Aunt Betty’s house in Savannah was the de facto Smith family home. Every month or two, someone in the family was passing through Savannah to visit Aunt Betty.

Sometimes, our visits overlapped. Aunt Betty helped us stay connected.

We all knew Betty was slowing down, but her health was good. And in the end, she died with minimal distress and discomfort.

One day, she complained of shortness of breath and “a tickle” in her chest. She had suffered a heart attack. She was too old and frail to recover from the damage. In a matter of days, she faded away.

As the last of her generation, Betty leaves us with a huge volume of family papers, photographs, and heirlooms dating back several generations. Organizing and preserving it will keep us occupied for a very long time.

I don’t mean to diminish the loss that everyone who knew and loved Betty is feeling, but I have an added reason to grieve her passing.

When I started this blog five years ago, Betty was keenly interested in the project and wanted to read every post. But she didn’t own a computer. The concept of the “internet” eluded her.

So, I began a routine of printing out the stories and mailing them to her. On the first of each month, I would send her an envelope containing all my posts from the previous month.

And every month, after she read the stories, she would call me to discuss and critique them.

She told me which quotes she liked. She gently corrected me when I got a family fact wrong. She thanked me when she learned something new and interesting. She chided me for using an occasional vulgarity.

Her favorite posts, she said, were the stories about my grandkids, because they gave her a glimpse into the girls’ daily lives.

Betty didn’t throw away my stories after she read them. She saved the posts in ring binders, in the order received. A row of six or seven large binders is now lined up on a shelf in her bedroom.

For the last 62 months, part of my ritual in posting a story on this blog has been to print a copy to mail to Aunt Betty. I won’t be doing that any more.

Betty was the best of the lot of us. I miss her terribly.

Betty in 1937, age 12.

In high school.

After retirement.

My last photo of her, February 2014, telling Paco goodbye.