School Story:
“We just wanted to do something worthwhile,” Betty says of a girls’ club she joined shortly after moving in 1952 from Baldwin to the big white stucco house on Prospect Avenue with its expansive view over the harbor. With Sue Frost, Caroline Berthoud, Sandi Freedman and other girls Betty became part of a club that met in each other’s homes, enjoyed their mother’s refreshments, and collected weekly dues which they used to help poor people. Mrs. Durbin the school nurse might recommend someone and the girls would go to Glen Cove to buy a present or clothes.
On a bright summer day two years after her arrival in Sea Cliff her father, an executive with Kerr Steamship, shopped in the Nelson and Rhinas hardware store when a fatal heart attack felled him while Betty was at the Yacht Club for a regatta. A few days later she received a sympathy note from a teacher and, “I saw a totally different side of Miss Kittelburger.” She and her sister and mother were already rooted in Sea Cliff and her mother would continue to live in the house for some 50 years and today her sister lives there.
She also participated in that very close group from the Gospel Chapel called Young People that gathered in the home of Ralph and Natalie Howell. In that group she became good friends with Jinny Wood and then with Jinny’s big brother Frank (’55). She and Frank were married in the Gospel Chapel in 1959 with Ducky Frances (’55) singing at their wedding. Frank had graduated from Syracuse School of Forestry and Betty had finished two years at SUNY Buffalo studying the education of exceptional children. Frank would soon begin his obligatory 3 years in the Army, so Betty left school and they began the life of a military couple.
Frank entered flight school in Alabama, then they were posted to Ft. Knox where they found our classmate Tim Klenk, who was also Frank’s cousin and who had received his pilot’s license before leaving high school. Betty gave birth to their first son before Frank’s discharge in 1963. After that Frank used his training in forestry and industrial engineering in a series of jobs in New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and finally in Connecticut where Frank finished his 40 years with US Envelope. They also had two more children and Frank had picked up an MBA.
In 1988, “sick of bosses,” they decided to open their own business and bought a Mailboxes, Etc. store (Later UPS Store). Making boxes, packing, and lifting from early morning till evening was new work for Betty. “I was numb the first year,” she says, but she enjoyed the customer contact and the detective work of tracers and claims. Frank liked engineering new containers. In the holiday season sometimes they found themselves eating supper after midnight, but they were satisfied to be their own bosses and “We both have always loved office supplies and retail stuff.” In 2005, after working together, they sold the store and retired together.
Betty and Frank have moved thirteen times in 50 years (once every 3.8 years), and each time she has carefully packed and moved boxes of notebooks, clippings, programs, and other memorabilia of our class history. For our reunion she became the most important source of personal documents and clippings that inform our new digital and written records. “I guess I realized eventually there would be a reunion and some of it would be of interest.” That’s more than foresight. It reflects how important high school and community were in her life. Throughout their lives she and Frank have often found their common experience in Sea Cliff provided touchstones for their understanding of life.
