Meet Betty Blunt - the High Desert’s newest centenarian

BETTY BLUNT IS ONE OF THE HIGH DESERT’S newest centenarians celebrating her milestone birthday on March 5 with 130 loved ones from Southern California and across the U.S.Blunt’s birthday at the Percy Bakker Center in Hesperia included food, friends, family and the sharing of cherished memories, according to Blunt’s daughter, Becky Otwell.

Otwell was proud to say that the first thing people noticed about her mother was “the twinkle in her eyes, her shoulder-length silver thick hair and her big happy smile.” Blunt, who uses a walker for balance, still lives an active and independent life and resides in a home behind her daughter and son-in-law in Hesperia. Blunt said she’s in perfectly good health, but admits she is hard of hearing. As for her secret to longevity, Blunt admits she’s been blessed all her life

“I do not know why since I haven’t been that good of a person,” Blunt said. “Some say it is because of my occasional vodka straight up martinis, but I think it is because my grandmother taught me about Bible verses.” Blunt said the biggest change she’s seen over the last century is how individuals communicate with each other. She recalls early radio, rotary phones and television sets.

“We also had a plastic cover that we put on the front of our black and white TV,” said Blunt, who joked about having a color set because the TV cover was “blue at the top, green at the bottom, with a pale red in the middle.”

She grew up on a farm in Ransom, Kansas, with an estimated population of less than 400 in the mid-1920s, Blunt said, “For our fun, we used to run to catch a cow and pull its tail.”

“Betty’s grandparents had a wheat farm, so it comes as no surprise that they had 11 children,” Otwell said. “Betty had ten aunts and uncles, one brother, Gene, and one sister, Vera.”

While attending Ransom High School, Blunt was a drum majorette with the school band. She stood 5-feet tall when she played center on the girl’s basketball team. She also sang in the high school choir, which earned a trip to the state championship.

Blunt recalled how her blacksmith father built the family’s first flushing toilet and RV, which they used to travel for work.

“I’ve been working since I was 10-years-old,” Blunt said. “When times were hard and no jobs to be found, my family became what was then called fruit tramps, which meant we traveled to wherever there was work, picking and harvesting.” After graduating from high school, Blunt’s family traveled to Arizona, where they picked lettuce. There, she met her husband, Milliard, she said with a twinkle in her eye. After a few short dates, the couple eloped and were married on Christmas Eve 1939.

When the couple’s son, Douglas, was born, Blunt stayed in the hospital for 27 days. Her daughter, Becky, was born 18 months later. In the mid to late forties Milliard’s parents, Gilbert and Marie, moved from San Diego to Victorville due to her asthma. Joining them on their westward move were Milliard and Betty, and his brother bud. Also, his sister, Kay, and her husband Herman Schlosser, who both worked for Harris Transportation, Millard’s other sister, Patsy, came to Apple Valley when family member Louie Switzer got out of the Navy.

Around 1951, Millard and Betty Blunt moved to Victorville, where she worked at the Nu-way Cleaners & Laundry on the corner of Eighth and C Streets. Betty and Millard also worked at the Brunch House on the corner of Seventh Street and C Street in downtown Victorville.

The couple moved to Barstow and opened “Blunt’s Spa” restaurant in Barstow, which was open around the clock and catered to truckers. Milliard and Betty moved back to Victorville and opened Blunt Realty in 1963 on the corner of I Avenue and Main Street in Hesperia.

“Back then, there were only four real estate offices in Hesperia,” Blunt said. “Houses were around $10,000 and lots were less than $500.” Millard served as president of the company while Betty played the role of vice president, secretary, notary, treasurer “and the gofer,” she said. “In those days, we had to travel down the hill into San Bernardino to close an escrow,” said Blunt, about the couple who were active with the Hesperia Chamber of Commerce, Elks Lodge and Kiwanis Club. During a Victor Valley Board of Realtors dinner in 1967, Blunt joined the lineup of entertainers when she sang “Maria Elena,” a 1932 song dedicated to María Elena Peralta, the wife of the late Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil. Millard also joined a community of investors who opened High Desert Community Bank on Main Street. Blunt also shared her time with her Red Hat Society, who she joined with for many trips abroad. Even though Betty and Millard only had two children, their family grew to 10 grandchildren, including Douglas, Timothy, Milliard and Rebecca Blunt; David, Debi, Kelly and Robin Adams. Danny and Michael Otwell. She now has 17 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren, who she enjoys spending time with.

Photos Courtesy Of Becky Otwell

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH was with the residents and staff of Solstice Senior Living in Apple Valley as they were treated to a fun St Patty’s Day celebration full of green, goodies and great entertainment on St Patty’s Day this year.

WE WILL GROW YOUR BUSINESS

THEPULSE

OF THE HIGH DESERT Let THE PULSE be the voice and the door knocker for your business!!

The Pulse Of The High Desert is a locally owned monthly publication featuring High Desert hometown events, local resources, and articles of interest for all ages covering the greater High Desert and surrounding areas. This publication is complementary and available in both print and online versions, the digital format can be viewed from any location making readership potentially unlimited. The 12,000 print copies of this publication are mailed to every resident of the Jess Ranch and Del Webb communities as well as all mailboxes in the Spring Valley Lake and Silver Lakes communities. Additionally, it is distributed in waiting rooms, restaurants, medical facilities, car washes and reception areas in businesses from Newberry Springs/Yermo across the whole HD up to and including the mountain areas of Big Bear and Wrightwood and The TriCommunities. For rates and advertising information call:

Donna Drover

909-331-2644

This is a guest post by Maria Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications. by Neely Tucker

BLACK MEN WERE AMONG THE FIRST COWBOYS IN THE U.S. They roped, branded and saddled up for cattle drives. Some gained fame, such as Bill Pickett and Nat Love.

“I eventually brought up at Dodge City, Kansas, which at that time was a typical frontier city, with a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else,” wrote Love, who was born enslaved in Tennessee, in his 1907 autobiography, “The Live and Adventures of Nat Love.”

Nat Love, one of the most famous Black cowboys of the Old West. Photo: Unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

A cowboy competing in the Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American Heritage Rodeo in Colorado in 2016. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Pickett, credited with creating the bulldogging technique of bringing a young steer to the ground in a rodeo, was featured in a silent film, “The Bull-Dogger” in 1921.

But mostly, as time passed, pop culture erased Black cowboys from the Western milieu, creating a misleading image of the Old West as peopled by white men on horseback, riding the lonely grasslands. The Library’s collections help document a more accurate picture of what cowboy culture, and life in the Western U.S., actually looked like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the cowboy heyday. They include resource guides, newspaper archives, an American Folklife resource project, a 2020 concert of old Black cowboy songs, books, magazines, photographs and posters that document the role African Americans played, particularly in the 1870s, when many newly freed Black people headed west.

“The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our view of the West in the late 19th century,” reads the Library’s introduction to “The American West, 1865-1900” resource timeline. “The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however.”

One quick example: The origins of “Home on the Range,” the unofficial anthem of the West, are famously muddled, but it’s not disputed that the first recording was by a Black saloon keeper and former cowboy in San Antonio, who performed it for folklorist John Lomax in 1908.

In fact, Lomax’s influential publication of 1910, “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,” traced several standards to Black cowboys, including “Git Along Little Dogies.” (The Lomax Family Collection is housed at the Library as John and his son, Alan, worked directly with the Library for more than a decade in recording and archiving American folk songs.)

But, as much as film stars John Wayne, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry come to mind when “cowboy” is mentioned, the first actual cowboys in the Americas were Spanish vaqueros who introduced cattle to Mexico in the 1500s. Early Spanish missionaries played a major role in establishing cattle country in the West and training Native Americans as cattle herders.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 sent White settlers west of the Mississippi, driven by a sense of “continentalism,” later known as “manifest destiny,” the belief that white Americans should control a vast section of North America from coast to coast. The War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War in the 1840s were fueled by this belief, with settlers marching further west, warring with Native Americans. In these vast swathes of open terrain, where law enforcement was most often nonexistent, cattle were a source of wealth. There was no adequate fencing to pen them in, however. This left cowhands to fend for themselves in open country, keep up with their cattle by horseback and protect themselves from rustlers and bandits. Thus, the romantic legend of the cowboy was born: A quiet man, capable, tough, honest, respectful of ladies and possessed of a poetic respect for the land (and his horse). In the hugely popular Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill in the late 19th century, the cowboy novels of Zane Grey in the early 20th century, then the Western films and television shows in the midcentury, those cowboys were almost always white. It was only part of the picture, though. No history of cowboy culture would be complete without contextualized narratives about the role that Native Americans, African Americans and Mexicans played. No one knows exactly how many cowboys there were (or exactly how that title was defined). But a number of estimates by historians, including Kenneth Porter, estimate that of the 35,000 or so cowboys of the era, about 6,000 to 9,000 were Black. They worked as ropers, trail cooks, wranglers and bronco busters. Some hunted game, sang, played an instrument on the trail or performed other duties for white cattlemen. In Texas, where enslaved Black people had been more than a quarter of the population before the Civil War, as many as one in four cowhands was Black.

For Black cowboys, it wasn’t paradise, but it was often better than the harsh racism east of the Mississippi. Eleise Clark, a volunteer with the Black American West Museum & Heritage Center in Denver, said in a recent interview that the West was so vast and difficult that “racism took a backseat to survival sometimes. It’s hard to be prejudiced when you’re hungry and you’re thirsty.”

Even in film history, Black cowboys were around, if behind the scenes. James Arthur Walker invented the “Hollywood Hop,” where a rider jumps off to the side of a walking or running horse, lands on the ground and bounces back into the saddle. Today, younger African Americans have been leading efforts to promote and protect the legacy of early Black cowboys in the American West by forming riding groups in many states, organizing parades or competing in national rodeos. The Black Cowboy Parade has been a popular annual event in Oakland, California, for the last 74 years. New York Times reporter Walter Thompson-Hernandez wrote a book about cowboys in Los Angeles County last year, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland.” The Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, which celebrates African American men and women who are keeping the cowboy tradition alive, has entertained over 5, 5 million people since its launch in 1984.

Black cowboys, it would appear, didn’t disappear with the Old West.