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One day English teacher Bernie Shulman stood in front of the class to read an example of an excellent student essay that began, “I wanted only one ride on this merry-go-round.” Bette, the author, shrank down in her chair, “mortified,” then grateful that he did not read her name. “I was probably born shy,” Bette says. She was one of the quieter members of the class and few knew her well, but those who did respected her intelligence and judgment. The first sign of good judgment came after she graduated from Glenwood Landing school and had to decide between starting 9th grade in Glen Cove, Roslyn or Sea Cliff. She first signed up for Glen Cove, but her good friend Judy Olson had chosen Sea Cliff and Bette has never been sorry that friendship tipped the scale toward the smallest school.
Like many shy people, she found team sports a good way to become part of the larger community. She played softball and soccer but particularly loved basketball, and with family and trusted friends she was far from shy. Sandi Freedman remembers high school pajama parties and says “the ones at Bette's were most memorable. “ Perhaps one of those friends wrote in her bio for the yearbook, “appears reserved, but we know better.” The we may have included the class member who recalls that she learned to play Spin the Bottle at a party at Bette’s. Whether these two observations had any connection in the historian’s mind, the note does not say. Bette says her father was “pretty strict. If I had a party, he was there.”
Her steady boyfriend in school was soccer, basketball, and baseball player Richard “Knox” Norwich. They married in May of 1959, and instead of the secretarial profession she had envisioned she had twins, Judy and Bill in 1960 and son Gerard in 1961, and finally Carol in 1967. They were her full time job while Richard worked for the New York Transit Authority. They lived on Maple Avenue between the firehouse and St. Boniface, and Sea Cliff was changing rapidly. They decided they wanted to get off of Long Island where the kids would have a rural environment, and they moved to Monroe, NY about 70 miles north of the city, and far enough out of town that the kids weren’t on the streets. They found plenty to do at home, the boys “always taking the car apart and putting it together.”
After Richard and Bette divorced in 1985 she went to work for Troll Communications, a children’s book publisher. She was Troll’s production coordinator, making sure all the supplies and processes came together to meet book club and publishing schedules. She worked for them until 2004 when Scholastic bought the company.
Her daughter Judy has become a malpractice attorney on Long Island, Gerard is a cell biology researcher at UC San Diego, and Bill is a mechanical engineer with the Long Island Railroad. Bette has turned her house into a mother-daughter house, with her quarters upstairs and her daughter Carol and son-in-law and their children ages 3-9 downstairs. It’s a noisy house, but she enjoys being with her family. She also still has a bit of Sea Cliff with her—a set of Cutco knives that she bought from John Maloney when he was a kitchenware salesman.
