Savvy Seniors: Betty Critser looks back at the first 99
Of all the wonderful seniors I’ve met while writing this column, Betty Critser is probably the most fun. This sprightly lady reads voraciously, sews and crochets, keeps her own house, where she lives alone, drives to Walmart, enjoys the casinos and her nieces and nephews. Next month she will be 100 years old.
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Born and raised in Alikana, a small suburb of Steubenville, Betty was one of seven children growing up there during the depression. They truly did have to walk three miles each way if they wanted to attend high school. In bad weather they could pay five cents and take the streetcar. She remembers that drinking water was provided in a bucket with a dipper, and she was warned by her older sisters not to sit on the outhouse hole closest to the wall because the boys had made a knothole there where they could peek. “I was terrified to go in there,” she said.
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“Every Sunday we each received 15 cents, five of which would go into the church collection basket, and 10, we got to spend on a fountain coke at the local drugstore. We had a large garden. During the depression, Daddy taught us to set snares in the woods to catch rabbits, and we kept chickens. We learned to can the meat.
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"Daddy also taught us other things that have followed us through our lives. As soon as you were in school, you learned to play Euchre. He also introduced us to “snipe” hunting. I recall that there were a couple of boys in the neighborhood we didn’t get along with. We took them snipe hunting into the woods by a creek, left them there after telling them we would chase the snipe their way. We went home and forgot about them. By late afternoon, the whole neighborhood was looking for them and we had to tell what we had done. One of our traditions was that you had to find your own stick that you were going to be whipped with. We got a good one for that little trick.”
One final story of her childhood: “All the men, during prohibition, made their own beer and wine,” Betty said. “When the revenuers came to town unannounced, everything had to be hidden quickly. One day Daddy hid his beer under their large brass bed. It was found and every bottle emptied out the window onto a small porch roof. Unbeknownst, the coon hounds were busy licking it up as it dripped off the roof, and were unable to hunt that night because they were all asleep.”
In 1939, just before she graduated at age 16 from Wells High School, Betty secretly married her sweetheart, Herbert Critser. Married students were not allowed in school. They had met at a square dance about a year before.
“It was OK with my parents,” she said. “They liked him. He was the only one of the beaus who asked if we could marry. My father raised pigs for meat, but he made pets out of them so couldn’t bring himself to shoot them. My husband was good with a rifle, and solved the problem. He fitted right in, but I never cared for the name Herbert so all of our married lives I called him Critser.”
“Critser" was raised in a huge house on a huge dairy farm belonging to his grandparents. Along with the cattle, oil had provided the home and its furnishings. She believes it was the first house in the county to have indoor gas lighting. The newly-weds lived with the grandparents for four years, during which time they tried farming. They moved into their own “chicken coop,” a garage once used to hold chickens and remodeled into a nice apartment, but earning a dollar a day would not provide, so the young husband went to work for Weirton Steel.
“It was a wonderful place to work,” Betty said. “They taught him to become an electrician. Then he was drafted into WWII and was gone for four years. When the men returned the company gave them back their jobs at the level that they might have been had they been working there all that time. He retired after 35 years."
Betty and several others were trained as LPNs by doctors at Ohio Valley Hospital. They took the state boards and began working. She retired in 1986. Later, her daughter would become an RN.
The couple’s only child, Bonny Altier, was born in 1942. She and her husband, Ray, live near Betty, who is now alone.
“I’m the only one left in my generation,” she said. “We were snowbirds for a while, but after Critser died, I didn’t want to stay in Florida any more. I told my friends I wanted to go back to Ohio, but I had never driven on the freeways. They told me just get in the middle lane and keep going. I showed up at Bonny’s door, and she didn’t know I was coming. That was when I was in my early 90s. I made two more trips after that, but Bonny insisted I get a cell phone. I have to apply for my new license next month and I’m not sure whether they will give it to me.”
Betty has lived in four different homes. She unfortunately saw the original farmhouse destroyed. Bonny discovered it was on fire one evening. She called the fire department while Betty ran in the snow, wearing a pair of crocheted slippers, to get her mother-in-law and aunt out of the building. Her mother-in-law, in shock, ran from the kitchen up a flight of stairs. All she brought out with her, was an old sweater. Betty said the kitchen floor was so hot it made her slippers steam. Today, she lives in an adult community where, as she says, “I have everything I could possibly need, including a nursing home, funeral home and cemetery.
“All I ever wanted was to live on a farm and have 10 children, one of which was to be a daughter with blue eyes and red hair. Not much of that worked out, but my daughter is the very best thing that ever happened to me, even without the red hair."
At almost 100, Betty reads, crochets, plays Euchre, bakes pies, spends time with young nieces and nephews and travels to the casinos with Bonny. She considers herself very lucky.
“I guess I’ll be here until I’m not here,” she said.
Now isn’t that a good way to look at it?
(Editor's note: If you know of a senior who is unique and deserves a story, please e-mail Lee Elliott at leeadirects@roadrunner.com. Please include contact information so she can share their story with our readers.)
This article originally appeared on The Times-Reporter: Savvy Seniors: Betty Critser looks back at the first 99
