A Special Section Celebrating Betty White An Oak Park Treasure
#belikebettyop
Fond memories of a golden girl Honoring the life and legacy of Betty White
By MELISSA ELSMO
I
Contributing Reporter
answered the phone on New Year’s Eve in my usual cheerful tone and was greeted with a heavy sigh. “You haven’t heard yet,” said Lourdes Nicholls, my friend, and Growing Community Media colleague. “Betty White just died.” Just two days earlier I had been sitting across from Cindy Fee inside the Boulevard Studio at Crossfunction flexible workspace,
1033 South Blvd. Microphones separated us, but I made direct eye contact with her as she sang, “Thank You for Being a Friend” — the song she recorded in the mid-eighties as a theme for an unknown sitcom. Of course, the song went on to introduce The Golden Girls. The Golden Girls premiered Sept. 14, 1985, when White was just 63 years old. Seven seasons, 180 episodes and now 37 years later, the show remains synonymous with the bonds of friendship between women. Anyone fa-
miliar with The Golden Girls can quickly conjure an image of White as Rose Nylund — the big-hearted, slightly dimwitted, wickedly competitive, herring-loving Minnesotan who was pals with fellow elders: Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia. My mom, Trish, started watching The Golden Girls in the 80s and grew to appreciate the show so much that she watched it almost daily when it went into reruns. In fact, my brother and I used to tease her because she talked about that lanai-lounging
quartet like they were her real friends. She would often comment that Rose Nylund reminded her of her own mother — both in appearance and demeanor. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, was one of my favorite people and I can attest to the fact that she looked and dressed a lot like Rose Nylund and shared all her best traits — she was much more than “terminally naïve.” The show was on a fairly continuous loop in See GOLDEN GIRL on page A3