Betty and John McCarthy have been married more than 60 years. Do the math, and you know it was a World War II marriage, but it was not a typical one.
Betty and John raised five children on Magnolia, sent them off to successful careers and marriages, then retired to the Fred Lind Manor retirement home on Capitol Hill two and a half years ago.
Betty and John, who retired as an electrical engineer, moved from their Magnolia home when he began suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Betty, a registered nurse, intends to look after him personally as long as she is able.
"It's not like living in a house," Betty said. "I'm kind of on the German side, I love my house."
She said you have to keep to a regular schedule for meals, but "People are very good to John."
John graduated from college in Fargo, ND, with a degree in electrical engineering. Betty grew up in New Jersey, but was born in the Philippines to an Army family. And that, you see, is why John and Betty met in New Guinea.
Not following?
Betty is dyslexic, so her high school grades were not all that good. After she graduated, her father came home and announced that he had signed her up at the local hospital for nursing school.
"I said, 'You signed me into a Catholic hospital?'" Betty recalled laughing. "He said, "Those blackbirds will straighten you out." They not only turned her into a nurse, she became a Catholic as well.
"When Pearl Harbor came, I had been working about a year," Betty said. "A bunch of us signed up and my three brothers signed up." Betty went into the Army Nursing Corps; two brothers went into the Navy (one in submarines) and one in the Army. All of them were in the Pacific theater and all of them survived the war.
After training and a stateside assignment, Betty was shipped to Australia. She went to three progressively smaller, more isolated bases in Australia. "Each one was more primitive," she said. After a year and a half in Australia (in the bush, she explained, between the outback and civilization) she shipped to New Guinea.
The bay at her last station was so shallow that when a battleship came to pick them up (yes, a real battleship) the nurses had to ride out to the ship on landing craft and climb up a rope ladder to get aboard.
"Aaaack," she said at the memory. "I'm a real chicken!"
New Guinea was "jungles and mud," Betty said, but she was prepared. She and her siblings slept out in tents all summer in New Jersey growing up, so it was not a shock.
"We lived in tents and native huts and tarpaper shacks and it was a great experience," she said. "In those days people didn't get to travel and because of the war all those farm boys were out seeing the world."
Betty has written a book about her experiences in New Guinea. She titled it "Jungle Rot and Khaki Bloomers." It is still in manuscript. She also writes poetry that is very popular among the other residents at Fred Lind Manor.
After a year and a half, and many, many proposals of marriage from the "kids" she was taking care of (they were 17 to 19 years old, and she was an old woman of 23), she met John, who was a colonel and two years older than she.
After a couple of weeks John told her a Liberty ship was loading up patients with traumatic head injuries and taking them back to the States. Would she like to be one of the nurses?
"I said, 'I sure would!'" Betty said. Otherwise she would have been in New Guinea for the duration of the war. In 19 days she was in San Francisco, and shortly afterward she was flying over New Jersey on her way home.
"I was looking down and said, 'What's all that color?'" she recalled. She had been in the tropics so long she had forgotten that trees change color in the fall.
She was reassigned to a convalescent hospital in Georgia and John wrote and sent flowers and gifts regularly. Finally he made his way to Georgia and two weeks later they got married.
"I guess we really didn't know each other very well," she conceded, "but that was war-time marriage. I remember one officer [a patient] saying, 'you can't do anything for me. Take care of the colonel.'"
Then what?
"The war ends, we got married and had five kids," she summarized. "We had four in the first five years and then one came along 10 years later. I just took care of the kids from then on, and I loved it."
One son earned a doctoral degree in education, is principal of St. Bernadette's Catholic school, and will retire next year. He has written several books on education.
One daughter is a nurse practitioner, retired from Group Health and now teaches at Seattle University. Her husband is a retired medical doctor who is now a minister.
Another daughter lived in London, where she and her husband adopted three children.
A second son became a computer trouble-shooter for a large, local corporation, and their youngest daughter was an actress for 10 years in Seattle and New York. Last year she became a secretary.
"It was just wonderful," Betty said about raising children in Magnolia. "It was a wonderful place to grow up. Of course, the times were different, too."
The house was on 28th Avenue West and West Barrett Street.
"That was a happy time," she said with a smile.[[In-content Ad]]
