Coming from a large family, Betty felt right at home with all the different aged children. She was surprised, however, to learn that Miss Andy lived in the dorm with her and the three other girls in tenth grade.
Betty settled in quickly to school life and made friends with the other girls. Some of the students complained privately about the formal requirements of the school: learning how to serve and eat from a well-laid table, the rules of dating (which were practiced every Saturday night with a different date), and the correct way to do everything from tucking in the blankets on your bed to welcoming a guest. But Betty already knew most of this from her upbringing, and she thrived at the school.
Mrs. DuBose, the principal’s wife, took a special interest in Betty and determined to help her overcome her shyness. The two of them spent many hours together sitting and talking on the veranda overlooking the lake. Mrs. DuBose introduced Betty to the writings of Amy Carmichael, a missionary from Northern Ireland who had gone to southern India and started a mission ministering to needy children. Amy had written nearly forty inspirational Christian books, which Betty found herself drawn to. The books were both comforting and challenging. Betty wondered whether she would ever be able to handle the kinds of sacrifices that were required of Amy Carmichael.
Mrs. DuBose urged Betty to join the debate team and put her writing talents to work as an editor of Esse, the school yearbook. Besides keeping up with her academic subjects, Betty soon found herself participating in intense debates and compiling the next edition of the yearbook, like the one she had spent so much of her time dreaming over before coming to the academy.
Chapter 5
Wheaton College
Betty looked out the railway car window as the train pulled away from Church Street Station. After nearly two years, she was leaving Orlando behind for good. It was May 1944, and she had just graduated from the Hampden DuBose Academy. As the train gathered steam, Betty thought back to her first trip to Florida. How timid and worried she had felt then—worried whether she would fit in, worried whether she would miss her family too much, worried whether she would like being in such a hot climate. Now it was all behind her. She had survived and thrived at the school. She was no longer the shy, timid girl she had been. Mrs. DuBose’s tutelage had seen to that. Betty was as comfortable now playing the piano and singing in front of a group as she was standing and speaking to the same group. She had also done well at her academic subjects and had particularly enjoyed English, especially English composition.
Now it was time to look ahead. Betty already knew where she was headed next year. She’d been accepted at Wheaton College, where she hoped to complete her premedical degree. Wheaton College was an evangelical liberal arts college located in Wheaton, Illinois, about twenty-five miles west of Chicago. Betty’s father was now a member of the board of trustees for the institution. This meant that Betty could attend school there for free. The Howard family still had to be careful with their money.
Betty had a wonderful reunion with her family upon her return from Florida and spent the summer with them in Moorestown and at Gale Cottage in New Hampshire. She particularly enjoyed her time at the cottage.
Her brothers and sisters seemed to have grown up while she had been away. Her older brother Phil had just completed a year of study at the National Bible Institute in New York and was engaged to a fellow student, Margaret Funderburk. Betty watched as the two of them planned their wedding and their lives together. Even though she was next in line chronologically to Phil, Betty doubted that she would be the next one to marry. It was difficult for her to imagine, since she had never even been on a serious date.
While her older brother planned his wedding, Betty had fun going fishing with her younger brothers Tom and Jim, who were now nine and five years old. She marveled at the way the young boys loved to fish for hours on end. Betty also took long walks with her sister Ginny, an inquisitive eleven-year-old who wondered, as Betty had, what life had in store for her. Betty was able to pray with her and encouraged her to read systematically through the Bible.
As the summer of 1944 drew to a close, it was time for Betty to once again pack up her things and head back to school. Only this time she would be headed westward to Chicago, a place—like Orlando—she had never even visited before arriving there to attend school.
Once again Betty Howard departed Philadelphia by train. As the train rolled along heading west, Betty got her first taste of the Midwest. She was amazed at how flat, like Florida, the countryside was. The train pulled into the station in Chicago, a bustling and growing city set at the southern end of Lake Michigan. While Orlando had been a sleepy place, Chicago gave the impression that it never slept, that its energy was unbounded. In Chicago Betty switched to a local train that took her the rest of the way to Wheaton.
At the train station in Wheaton, a senior student assigned to help Betty settle in to school life met her, and together they took a taxi to Wheaton College.
The first thing Betty noticed as they drove onto the campus of the college was Blanchard Hall, a large, imposing limestone tower building with an expansive lawn in front of it. Behind Blanchard Hall were a number of other brick and stone buildings clustered around quadrangles. Betty was shown to her room on the fourth floor of one of these buildings, North Hall.
Betty was surprised at how crowded the rooms were. She soon found out why. Fifteen hundred students were enrolled in the college for the semester, but only three hundred of them were men. This was because so many young men of college age had been drafted into the military and were now overseas fighting in the war. As a result of this imbalance in numbers, the girls had to double up in rooms that were ordinarily single rooms. Betty’s room had two beds, but only one dresser, one desk, and one wardrobe. Her roommate’s father owned a department store, and it showed in the number of clothes her roommate had brought with her to Wheaton. Betty did the best she could to fit her few items of clothing into the wardrobe.
A woman named Catherine Cumming was a housemother at North Hall, and she and Betty became instant friends, despite the fact that Catherine was forty years older than Betty. Catherine was a caring person and a good listener who would offer helpful suggestions when Betty went to her with problems. Betty was impressed with Catherine’s dedication to her faith and to the students under her care. In her Southern drawl, Catherine told Betty how she came from a very wealthy family in Georgia. Catherine’s family, however, had disowned her and cut her off from her inheritance (which she said would have been several million dollars) because she had become a Christian. Catherine had found her way to Wheaton College, where she had served as housemother for many years. Betty was impressed by the story. She found herself drawn to people whose faith had cost them something.
One of Betty’s first challenges after arriving at Wheaton was finding a part-time job so that she could earn spending money. She went to the college employment office, where she got a job working for Dr. Edman, the president of Wheaton College. Betty soon found herself cleaning at Westgate, the Edmans’ residence, every other day and doing the ironing for the whole Edman family.
In the classroom, Betty soon learned that her academic training had not been as rigorous as some of the other students. She found note taking and organizing her time between various classes and assignments a challenge. However, Marcia Bell, who lived in the dorm room next to Betty’s in North Hall, was brilliant at such matters. She helped Betty improve her note taking and the managing of her notebook and time. Before Betty knew it, lectures were no longer a drudgery of trying to keep up with the professor and write down everything of importance he or she said.
Eager to be a part of the fabric of campus life, Betty signed up to be a reporter on the college newspaper, The Record. However, when she arrived at the newspaper office, the number of junior and senior students hard at work preparing the next issue overwhelmed her. She wondered what she, as a freshman reporter, might have to offer these people, who seemed so competent at what they were doing. At first she just wanted to turn around and walk out the door. I’ll never be able to do this, she told herself. But somehow she managed to overcome her fears, and soon she was busy contributing to the paper.
Betty always looked forward to visits from her father. He made regular trips to Wheaton College to attend board of trustee meetings, and when he came, he and Betty would eat together in the dining room and talk for hours.
Betty’s first year at Wheaton began to roll by. She passed all her courses, but she realized that she did not want to continue her current course of study in premed. Instead she decided that the following year she would change her major to English.
As the 1944–45 school year drew to a close, Betty participated in a large event held at Soldier Field in Chicago. A new organization called Youth For Christ had just been formed, and the president of the organization was thirty-six-year-old Torrey Johnson, who had been pastor of Chicago’s Midwest Bible Church. The stated mission of Youth For Christ was twofold. The first goal was revitalizing Americans’ spiritual lives, bringing America back to God, the Bible, and the church. The second goal was the evangelization of the world. Even Betty had to admit that the goals were big, but Torrey seemed to be the kind of gifted leader who could make them a reality. To this end, Youth For Christ organized a large evangelistic rally to be held on Memorial Day 1945 at Soldier Field. A feature of the rally was to be a five-thousand-voice choir. When Betty heard an appeal at chapel service one morning for volunteers to be in the choir, she signed up.
Memorial Day 1945 dawned a cold, gray, overcast day. Not the best weather for an outdoor rally, Betty thought as she climbed aboard the bus that would take her and the other choir volunteers from Wheaton College to Soldier Field in downtown Chicago. At Soldier Field Betty took her place with the other choir members and waited for the audience to arrive. As she waited, Betty was amazed at the steady stream of people who filed into the stadium.
By the time the event started, seventy thousand people had packed into Soldier Field for the Youth For Christ rally. When it came the choir’s turn to sing, Betty stood with the others and sang her heart out. Their voices blended together in a crescendo that filled and reverberated around the massive stadium. As the rally drew to a close, Torrey stood to preach to the crowd. He proved to be a more dynamic speaker than Betty could have imagined, and the large crowd sat motionless and spellbound as they listened to his words.
“Young folks, is He yours? Have you really been born again? Or are you hiding a heart full of sin behind the cloak of a lot of Scripture verses and other things? I wonder, if God took you right now, are you sure that you would go to heaven? If you are not, make sure tonight,” Torrey challenged the crowd as the rally came to a close.
As the bus traveled back to Wheaton College, Betty reflected on what a wonderful experience the rally had been, especially when so many young people had come forward to accept Christ at the appeal Torrey had given at the end of his sermon.
Betty returned home to Moorestown for the summer. She had long talks with her brother Dave, who planned to join her at Wheaton College for the 1945–46 school year. Just as the two of them were preparing to leave for Illinois, World War II came to a close with the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. The whole of the United States exuberantly celebrated the victory.
