In Loving Memory of Betty Jane ElsieOdeWoolfson
April 7, 1933-April 7, 2017
In loving memory of Betty Jane Elsie Ode Woolfson Wednesday, April 12th, 2017 Schedule of Events: Gather at the Chapel Doors open at 10:30 a.m Memorial service begins at 11:00 a.m in the Chapel Graveside gathering begins at 1:30 p.m with prayer and Amazing Grace sung by Diane Iversen Reception to follow at the home of Lloyd and Shawn Iversen • Santa Rosa Memorial Park 1900 Franklin Ave Santa Rosa, CA 95402 (707) 542-1580 • Lloyd and Shawn Iversen 4230 Hargrave Ave Santa Rosa, CA 95407 (707) 585-2160
Speakers Diane Virdee Portia Iversen Lenore Iversen Sarah A. Jones Lloyd Iversen Aaron Woolfson
Betty Jane was very close with her paternal grandmother Filipina, who lived one block away on the same street, in a big house where she always kept a big garden. She loved taking care of Betty Jane and teaching her things, she was very kind and loving to Betty Jane as a child and it meant so very much to her. Her Grandmother passed away about the time her sister Diane was born.
In Memory of the Life of Betty Jane Woolfson Betty Jane Krupp was born on April 7th, 1933, at Belmont Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, to Wilhelmina (Franz) Krupp and Adolph Krupp, who immigrated from Germany as young adults, with their respective families. Betty Jane joined older sister Dorothy, then age five. She was baptized with the name Betty Jane Elsie Ode Krupp on December 31st, 1933 at St. John’s Lutheran Church, in Chicago.
Betty Jane as a girl
As a child, Betty Jane’s father had a business on the northwest side of Chicago, (Cicero Avenue), manufacturing pianos and later ukuleles and her mother also ran a small gift shop in the same building. Musical talent ran throughout the family; her sister Dorothy excelled at playing the violin, while her father Adolph taught classes in nearly every instrument ranging from violin and accordion to piano and guitar. As a young child, Betty Jane learned to play many of the musical instruments that were taught by her father. But Betty Jane’s greatest musical talent was her beautiful singing voice. When she was 13, her father sold the musical instrument factory and opened a Krupp Music Store on Irving Park Road. Betty worked alongside her parents in the store, where sheet music and records were sold as well as musical instruments of all kinds. Her father also wrote musical arrangements, many of which were copyrighted. Later he would open another music store on Kedzie Avenue. The family lived three blocks away from the store, in a house on Cicero Avenue where eight years after Betty Jane’s arrival, her younger sister Diane joined the family. The family rented out the upstairs flat of their house to another family who lived there for many years and whose daughter Kitchie (Kathleen) was like a family member. Betty Jane took care of her sister Diane from the beginning and was truly a second mother to her younger sister, bringing her along wherever she went and the Betty Jane with two sisters remained very close sister Dorothy through the years. and baby Diane
Dorothy, Grandmother, Betty
As a teenager, Betty Jane attended Schurz High School and worked in her parents store and continued to care for her younger sister Diane. Betty’s older sister Dorothy went off to attend the University of Illinois and later married and moved to California. After graduating from high school, Betty Jane enrolled at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she joined the music department with a major in voice and a minor in piano and harp. There, she met her future husband, Lloyd Iversen, during her first year of college and soon left school to marry him. Her husband-to-be graduated from the University with a BA in mathematics; his parents were immigrants, like her own, but from Norway. Betty Jane was 19 years old when they were married at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Chicago, on June 8, 1952. As photographs still attest, Betty Jane was an extraordinarily beautiful bride and the wedding was a large, lavish celebration with her whole extended family in attendance. Together Betty Jane and Lloyd went on to have four children, Portia, Lenore, Audrey and Lloyd. Early in their married life, Betty Jane and Lloyd lived in a small flat near her parent’s store where she continued to work and Lloyd worked at his father’s service station.
continued after photo pages...
Betty Jane as a young woman
Betty, as a baby, with Mother, Wilhelmina, and sister, Dorothy
Betty Jane with her younger sister Diane
Father Adolph, Sister Dorothy, and Betty (R)
“To my wonderful Betty Jane, with thoughts of the happiness yet to come. Your Lloyd Dec. ‘51”
Betty with sister baby Diane
Betty, Dorothy, and Father Krupp with accordians
Father with Baby Betty Jane
Betty Jane as a young woman
Betty Jane, with Lloyd Iversen
Betty Jane, sweet seventeen
1
2
5
3
1
4
3
4
2
1. Betty at Woolfson’s Natural Foods with children Portia, Lenore, Sarah, Lloyd, Aaron and grandson Billy 2. Betty with son, Aaron 3. Betty Camping in the 1970s 4. Betty with husband, Jacob, and daughter, Portia
1. Betty in 1970s 2. Betty and son, Aaron 3. Betty at her 80th Birthday with 8 of her 13 grandchildren 4. Betty with the Belly Dancer at her 80th Birthday Celebration 5. Betty Jane March, 2017
In a very sad turn of events, only two weeks before their first child Portia was born, Betty’s mother died suddenly of a stroke, at the age of fifty. Betty and Lloyd moved in with her widowed father and her sister Diane. Portia was born that year and they all lived together until her father Adolph remarried. Subsequently Betty Jane’s relationship with her stepmother became strained and eventually caused Betty and her father to become estranged. When Lloyd was offered a job teaching at a public school in the remote northern woods of Michigan, they set out on an adventurous journey, renting a beach cabin on Lake Superior. The isolation and harsh winter proved too much for the young family and within a year they returned to Illinois, where they rented a flat on Irving Park Road, about a mile from Lloyd’s parents, where their second child, Lenore, was born. When Lloyd got a job at International Harvester, they bought a small house on Babcock Road, in Addison, Illinois, a then remote suburb of Chicago. Audrey, their third child, (later known as Sarah), was born in Addison, followed by the birth of their son Lloyd. Ahead of her time, Betty Jane chose to have a home birth for her fourth child and to breastfeed all her children, a practice that was discouraged at that time, and in keeping with her forward-thinking beliefs about early child rearing, she was an early member of the La Leche League. During the years on Babcock Road, Betty Jane stayed home with the four young children and tried to do her best at child rearing and her domestic responsibilities. She became an accomplished cook and especially excellent pie-maker, causing her offspring to seek out the perfect pie for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile Lloyd continued to work at International Harvester and was studying for his master’s degree in electrical engineering at night. As a young housewife with four children under the age of six, Betty Jane had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Irene Meade, an older woman who became a mother figure to her. This nurturing relationship continued for several decades and Betty Jane always knew that Dr. Meade was there for her. Many years later, after she passed away, Dr. Meade’s children found a bundle of handwritten letters from Betty Jane, bound in a piece of ribbon and they sent these to her.
Betty Jane’s children at Lloyd’s 1st Birthday, 1960. From left: Lenore, Lloyd, Audrey (Sarah), and Portia
On March 8th, 1961, a life altering tragedy struck the young family when husband and father Lloyd, just before his 31st birthday, died suddenly of a cerebral aneurism, leaving Betty Jane and their four young children to face the world alone. The summer of that year, Betty Jane, then 28, with the help of her sister Diane, moved back to Urbana, Illinois where she had gone to college. There she bought a large house with a big front porch and a yard, at 409 West California Street, one block from a good school, where she could raise her children whose ages ranged from two to seven years old. The two older sisters, Portia and Lenore, enrolled in Leal School and the younger children, Audrey and Lloyd, were still too young for school. Betty’s sister Diane was enrolled at the University of Illinois. To say that this was a huge adjustment or that life had taken an unexpected turn does not fully capture the degree to which Betty Jane and her children’s lives were changed. That year, Betty took her children on a trip to Escondido California to visit her older sister Dorothy and her husband and their four children who were similar in age to her own children. They lived on a chicken ranch and Betty Jane’s children were greatly distracted and amused by the wild west, riding their cousins’ pony and helping collect the chicken eggs, not to mention the beaches and palm trees at the hotels they stayed at along the way.
Back in Urbana again, Betty became interested in the Foreign Students Association where she met Siam Kaptan who would become the love of her life. Siam and Betty were dating when Diane began dating Siam’s best friend, whom she eventually married, moving away to Sacramento and having two children of her own. Betty was interested in writing and continued to try her hand at it during these early days in Urbana. She generated some interest from The Ladies Home Journal, with a query to write an article about Turkish housewives. In the fall of 1962 Betty Jane drove with her four children, then ages three to nine, to New York, to embark upon a steamship bound for Naples Italy, with connections to Athens, Greece and then on to Turkey. Betty and the family lived in Turkey for about two years where she worked on her writing and taught English briefly at Haccettepe University, until political unrest caused the family to abruptly return to the U.S. The next few years that followed were a difficult time for Betty Jane, finances were a major problem along with depression. But the big white house on California Avenue provided some income through renting out the second floor to students, and the neighborhood proved to be an ideal place to raise kids along with an excellent education provided by the public schools. In 1969 Betty met and married Jake Woolfson. Once again, ahead of her time, inspired by Adele Davis’s book ‘Let’s get Well’, they opened Woolfson Natural Foods and a second smaller store on the University campus. Betty and Jake were pioneers in the world of natural foods and alternative medicine, bringing supplements and dietary interventions to the community, they were among the first to open such a business in Urbana.
Over time, Betty and Jake grew apart and they were divorced when Aaron was ten years old. By then, most of the other children had gone off to boarding school or college. A few years later a tragic crime occurred at the Woolfson Natural Foods causing the store to be closed down for good, and Betty Jane moved to California in 1988 to live temporarily with her daughter Lenore in Alameda while Aaron continued his high school education at Scattergood, a Quaker boarding school in Iowa which some of the other children had attended. Later Betty moved to Santa Rosa to work with her son Lloyd in his business and then to Stockton where Aaron eventually started up his own company called TelSwitch. Betty worked alongside Aaron at TelSwitch for twenty five years, as his mentor and business partner and she was still doing the books until just a few weeks before she passed away. Betty Jane will be remembered for many things, among them her incredible cooking, her extraordinary story telling ability, her beautiful voice and love of music and her great interest in flowers and gardening. Betty was also a very spiritual person and took great interest in many religions ranging from Baha’i to Quakerism. She imparted her spiritual values to her children and many who encountered her benefitted from them.
On May 24th, 1971 they had a daughter whom they named Esther Irene. A beautiful baby girl with the sweetest smile and temperament, she was deeply loved by the whole family and delighted everyone who came into her presence. Less than a year later, Esther died suddenly of a rare condition, leaving the family devastated and bereft. Betty Jane never got over this death and carried her sorrow with her for the rest of her years. A year and a half later, on Dec. 8th, 1972, Betty Jane and Jake were blessed with the birth of a baby boy they named Aaron. All the older children were so delighted with this adorable new addition to the family and loved to care for him and play with him and drag him along wherever they went. During this time Betty and Jake also welcomed a foster brother into the family named Larry, who was a teenager and stayed only a short time. Betty Jane and her children. From left: Portia, Aaron, Audrey (Sarah), Lloyd, and Lenore
Over her lifetime Betty Jane was an avid reader and writer, always curious and interested in new ideas and eager to learn. She never stopped trying to gain more knowledge and she constantly sought to better herself and to understand who she was. She generously shared her knowledge and taught both by example and directly, all who knew her and were interested, how to become a more self-aware person; how to rise above the situation, how to conceptualize life so that it has more meaning and less randomness, how to decide your own narrative instead of just reacting to things. During her life, she evolved tremendously as a person facing daunting personal and emotional obstacles and many tragic events, to grow and blossom far beyond the limitations that were imposed upon her. She believed in her children, each and every one of them, and tried to be a good parent and to impart to them the wisdom she gathered in herself over the years. She was a person to be admired for her strength, compassion and tenacity as well as her intelligence and creativity. Among her favorite books were: ‘Rapid Relief From Emotional Distress’ by James Campbell, ‘What to Say When You Talk to Yourself ’ by Shad Helmstetter and earlier in life, ‘The Natural Superiority of Women’ by Ashley Montagu. Betty Jane leaves behind five adult children, Portia Iversen, Lenore Iversen, Sarah Jones, Lloyd Iversen, and Aaron Woolfson, all of whom are grateful for all that she has taught them and given to them and who will miss her dearly forever. She also leaves behind thirteen grandchildren, Billy Rich, Stephanie Iversen, Chirstina Quarles, Dov Shestack, Miriam Shestack, Klara Viktorynova, Gabriel Shestack, Diane Iversen, Carly Iversen, Jordan Iversen, William Iversen, Daniel Iversen, and Tia Woolfson.
“Think broke, not poor.” “Feeling bad today? This will Change. Feeling great today? This will change, too.”
“Don’t explain so much.” “The trick is to focus on what you want until it happens. By holding the vision you increase your awareness of what specific actions to take to create it.”
“It is better to smile and say no, than to frown and say yes.”
Quotes and Wisdom
Betty Jane ElsieOdeWoolfson April 7, 1933-April 7, 2017