IndyCar legend Johnny Rutherford: “I’ve had a good life, except for losing Betty.”

One of the greatest race car drivers in history is 83, and while eating sour cream chicken enchiladas at “The Original” restaurant in Fort Worth no one here knows this man won the Indianapolis 500 three times.

They don’t know that along with A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Rick Mears, Mario Andretti, Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Dale Earnhardt and a few others, Johnny Rutherford built motor sports in America.

On a weekday at 1:30 p.m. among the business lunch crowd, Lone Star JR is an anonymous patron who happened to lead an extraordinary life that could not escape ordinary problems.

“I’ve had a good life,” he says, “except for losing Betty.”

For more than 50 years Johnny and Betty Rutherford were inseparable, until she contracted dementia and died in 2019.

Rutherford, who graduated from North Side High School, is not too different from many seniors who lived the last year alone. This has been a hard year for everyone, especially single seniors.

“Thank God for television,” he said.

He’s sharp, and his memory can pick out shards from his career when he was known as Lone Star JR. With the Indy Car races coming to Fort Worth this weekend he’ll participate in some of the pre-race activities. Then he plans to head to Indianapolis for the month of May to watch the Indy 500 as a guest of his former racing team, McLaren.

But living alone in his 6,000 foot square house on a two acre lot near the old Carswell Air Force Base can be lonely.

Johnny met Betty in May of 1963. She was an OR nurse who probably could have become a doctor.

Once she was convinced Johnny wasn’t married, they started dating. A little more than two months later, on July 7, 1963, they married.

“It really was love at first sight,” he said.

For more than 50 years the two were the embodiment of the strong married couple. She went to the races, and worked with Rutherford’s team keeping times and scoring.

She raised their two children, and kept their home in the west side of Fort Worth in order.

Only until she was gone did it hit Johnny.

“I realized what she had done for me,” he said. “She kept the pressure off me, and let me do what I had to do to race, and ultimately be successful.”

When Rutherford retired from competitive racing in 1994, he did so with the understanding that was it. That there would be no un-retiring.

“She always told me, ‘If you ever retire you’re not going back,’” Johnny said. “I’m pretty sure she would have broken me somewhere.”

The couple lived out a nice retirement existence, until about six years ago when Johnny noticed the signs that something was not right.

He was not sure it was dementia, but he knew Betty had something.

“She would sit in the den at home and ask me, ‘What happened to those four people that were just sitting over there?’” he said. “I said to her, ‘I didn’t see them when they were there.’ There wasn’t anybody there.

“Then we might get into an argument about the house. She would say, ‘This is not my house. I have another home.’ I think the fact that it was so big and she had to work so hard to keep it up.”

As Betty’s condition grew worse, and with her memory diminishing, Johnny knew he had no choice.

The young woman who became his wife and life partner was increasingly not there. He could not keep up with all that was required to care for someone in that state so he begrudgingly moved her to a facility that was equipped to do so.

“She had been there for only two or three days and she stopped me as I was leaving,” he said. “She looked at me right in the eyes and said, ‘What am I doing here?’ It broke my heart.”

For three years Betty Rutherford lived in the memory care center, and the family would celebrate holidays and birthdays together.

Johnny would see his wife every day, but as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months the Betty he knew was there less and less.

He figures in the last five or six months of her life she no longer knew her Johnny. The couple’s two children would visit their mom, and he knew by the look in her eyes that the family visits were no registering.

With her body failing, he stayed with her in her room one day as she went to sleep. It was after dark, and he went home.

He had been home for one hour when the care center called and urged him to come back. By the time he arrived, Betty was gone.

“It’s one of the things I’ll always regret, that I was not there to hold her hand as she passed,” he said.

Betty died on Jan. 20, 2019 at the age of 80.

Johnny is still living his life, as best he can. But the void is inescapable.

He has no ambition to move out of their house. Her clothes are in still in the closet.

He was there for his daughter when she had some rough moments, and he sees his family regularly.

He follows racing, and stays in touch with his friends, including A.J. Foyt, who lives in Houston, and Mario Andretti, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Johnny Rutherford still has a wonderful sense of humor, and several lifetime’s worth of experiences and stories. His goal is to make it to 100.

He knows he’s had it good, and he knows Betty made it all just a bit better.