Thankfully a small cottage was on the property, and the Greene family crammed into it for the time being. Friends and neighbors brought clothes and kitchen items, and before long, life felt almost normal again. However, an even bigger disaster was brewing across America. October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, was a tragic day for many people, who on that day discovered that the stocks and bonds they’d invested in had lost their value. The Wall Street crash had begun. Financial panic gripped the nation. The wheels of industry ground to a halt as the price of everything from produce to machinery collapsed. Unemployment spread throughout the country as rapidly as fire had through the Greenes’ home.
America was in shock. Most people had thought the good years following World War I would go on forever. Now they were suddenly plunged into what became known as the Great Depression.
Betty Greene was nine years old at the time, and although she didn’t understand much about stocks and bonds, she knew for certain that some things had changed. Her father now came home from work with a worried look on his face. Albert Greene owned a small business called Greene Electric Furnace Company. He had developed a special design for making arc furnaces for steel mills, which he sold to the biggest steel manufacturers in the country. When the economy collapsed, people stopped buying new cars and other items made of steel. This meant that there was no demand for steel, and so the manufacturers had no reason to buy Mr. Greene’s new furnaces for their mills.
The Great Depression also meant that Josephine, the family maid, had to be dismissed. In her place, Betty’s mother did all the housework herself. As well, the new seven-passenger V-8 Lincoln touring car Mr. Greene had just purchased was put up on wooden blocks in the garage. The family could no longer afford to buy gasoline for it.
Both Betty and Bill got summer jobs to help their mother pay for groceries. One summer they picked cherries for several weeks. The pay wasn’t great—just seventy-five cents a week—but they got to eat as many cherries as they could, and then some! Betty, who loved animals, found a small black-and-white dog in the cherry orchard. The dog attached itself to her, and soon Betty had a new friend, which she named Shep.
Mr. Greene had been wise with his money, and the Greene family were better off than many others. Betty and Bill continued to go to school, and even though their clothes were no longer new, they always looked well cared for.
In sixth grade, the twins had a teacher from Germany. The teacher loved to read to the class, especially books about air warfare during World War I, and how German and English pilots in their flimsy biplanes had engaged in dogfights. Betty loved to listen to these stories, not so much the bits about the shooting and bombings, but about the planes soaring high in the air, looping and doing daring acrobatics. As she sat listening to the teacher read, she had no idea that one day she would be a pilot in another war.
Shep, the stray dog, followed Betty and Bill everywhere, and it made Betty yearn for more pets. In particular she had her sights set on a horse. The family’s two-acre property, which sloped down to Lake Washington, had plenty of room for a horse, but was there enough money for one? Eventually, Betty won out, and her parents agreed to buy her a horse if she promised to take good care of it. Dixie cost eight dollars, and Betty faithfully shoveled out the barn and spread hay for her every day. She also loved to ride Dixie, especially since her mother allowed her to wear jodhpurs instead of the skirts and dresses she had to wear the rest of the time. Betty would gallop Dixie down the dusty back roads, stopping along the way to talk to friends from the Sunday school her parents oversaw. She also loaned Dixie to Bill so that he could deliver the Saturday Evening Post to about fifty families on a five-mile route around the neighborhood.
When she wasn’t riding, Betty spent her time reading or going to the movies. So many interesting things were happening in the world. In 1928 Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean (as a passenger, but it was still considered a daring feat), and she had followed that up with several adventurous solo flights in the United States. In 1929 Richard Byrd and Bernt Balchen had become the first two people to fly to the South Pole.
Of course, reading about all these aviators’ accomplishments just made Betty yearn to fly even more. On her sixteenth birthday, Betty finally got her wish. Her father arranged for her and Bill to take an airplane ride. Flying was all Betty had imagined it would be—and more. She was hooked! That same birthday her uncle gave the twins one hundred dollars each. That was a lot of money, and the two of them agonized over what to do with it. Bill eventually decided to save his for college, but Betty knew she wanted to take flying lessons more than anything else. Her parents agreed to let her use most of the money for that purpose, as long as she used a portion of it to buy herself some new clothes.
Within days, Betty was bumping down the runway with her instructor, Elliot Merrill, at the controls. She watched everything he did, from the way he worked the rudder with his feet to how he set the flaps for takeoff and landing.
Two weeks later, Betty was flying solo and enjoying every moment of it, although she never got as far as earning her private pilot’s license before her money ran out.
Now that they were sixteen years old, school was coming to an end for the Greene twins. It was time for them to make some serious career choices. Bill had always planned to attend California Institute of Technology to earn an engineering degree as his father had, but even with a partial scholarship, there simply wasn’t enough money in the family budget. Instead Bill settled for studying mining engineering at the nearby University of Washington. Betty, who had hoped to attend a women’s college, was also forced to choose the University of Washington, which she could attend while still living at home.
The question was, what should she study? Mrs. Greene had very definite ideas about what her daughter should pursue. She believed nursing was a suitable career for a young woman. It was useful and socially acceptable. Betty wasn’t so convinced. She loved animals and airplanes and dreamed of having a career involving either or both of these. But what kind of job? Eventually Betty gave in and let her mother have her way. She entered the University of Washington to study for a bachelor’s degree in science with a nursing major. It was the winter of 1937, and it looked to seventeen-year-old Betty as if a predictable future had been neatly laid out for her. Little did she know what adventures lay just around the corner!
Chapter 3
Avenger Field
It was winter 1937, and life had fallen into a pattern for the Greene twins, Betty and Bill. In the morning they would eat breakfast with their parents and then pack their satchels for a day at the university. As Betty made her bed, she would keep an ear open for the sound of the steam whistle. “Come on, Bill,” she would yell when she heard it. The two of them would grab their bags and head for the door. Outside they would race each other to the dock. Usually it was a tie. Betty was very fit, and at five feet, ten inches tall, she had the build of a professional runner. But Bill, who was three inches taller, was a good match for her. When they got to the dock, they would stand panting while they waited for the passenger ferry to dock so they could climb aboard for the two-mile trip to the western shore of Lake Washington. From the dock on the other side of the lake, it was a five-mile walk to the University of Washington campus.
Betty loved traveling on the old steam ferry. The ride, along with the walk to and from the university, was the highlight of her day. The time she actually spent in class was not at all exciting. Her courses were a blur of studying anatomy and physiology, dissecting cadavers (dead bodies), and learning about infectious diseases. Betty tried her best to find something about her nursing training that she liked. It was no use; the truth was, she hated the training. And things only got worse. In her second year, she started training at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. Life became a round of changing bandages, checking patients’ vital signs, emptying bedpans, and making an endless number of beds, each with the hospital stripe on the blanket stretched perfectly straight down the center. As the days dragged on, Betty knew she had to find some way to get out of her predicament.
Betty pleaded with her mother to be allowed to drop out of the course, but dropping out was not in the Greene family’s vocabulary. Still, Mrs. Greene must have seen how unhappy her daughter was, because she discussed the situation with her husband. Together they decided that Betty should stick to her nursing training for one more quarter. If at the end of that time she still did not like nursing, she would be allowed to drop out of the course. Betty accepted her parents’ conditions, and to her great relief, she withdrew from the nursing program in the spring of 1939.
Although she had left nursing, Betty had no idea what she was going to do next. All she knew was that something was missing in her life. She needed some sense of adventure, some reason for which to jump out of bed each morning.
While she searched for this adventure, Betty helped her father in his office and assisted with the youth group at the First Presbyterian Church of Seattle, which she attended each Sunday. She also listened to the radio and read the newspaper every morning. The Great Depression had finally ended, but it was being replaced with something worse: war. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and when the German government refused requests to withdraw its troops, England and France declared war. The United States had not officially taken sides in the war, but in October 1940, men were conscripted into the armed forces in the first peacetime call-up for compulsory military service in the history of the country.
In 1940 Betty also said farewell to her older brother Albert and his wife, Thelma, who were headed to China as missionaries. It was a tense time to be traveling anywhere in the world. From a safety standpoint, China was a particularly bad choice of places to go. It had been at war with Japan for several years, and two weeks after Al and Thelma Greene arrived in Shanghai, all foreigners were ordered to leave. The two of them were determined to stay and help the Chinese people. They moved inland to “Free China,” the area where the Japanese had not yet penetrated, and began their missionary work there.
With all this going on around her, Betty began to feel she should be doing something more than just filing papers and typing letters for her father. She went to discuss the matter with an old friend of the family, Mrs. Bowman. She knocked on the painted wooden door, and a minute later Mrs. Bowman opened it. Her twinkling blue eyes lit up when she saw Betty. “Come in, my dear,” she said, beaming. “I was just having a cup of coffee. Won’t you join me?”
“Thank you very much,” Betty replied, kissing the seventy-year-old woman on the cheek.
Over coffee all of Betty’s frustrations poured out. Betty knew what she didn’t want to do for a job, but she couldn’t work out what it was she wanted to do.
“I always think God plants His desires in our hearts so we will act on them,” Mrs. Bowman said, placing her coffee cup on the end table between the two of them. “What is it you love to do the most?”
Betty hesitated for a moment. “I like to fly,” she said, then added hastily, “but I know that on my income that’s a frivolous waste.”
“Umm,” Mrs. Bowman replied, her bushy white eyebrows rising. “And what else do you like?”
Betty thought again. “Well, I love helping to run the youth group at church,” she said.
“Do you think God might have given you both of these interests for a reason? Perhaps you should think of combining them and using flying for some Christian missions work.”
