Sheets, Elizabeth Louise

Elizabeth Louise Sheets - age: 91
(June 21, 1920 to May 29, 2012 )
Resident of Ukiah, California

Obituary:
Betty (Elizabeth) Sheets died peacefully on May 29, 2012. She was 92.

Betty was born in 1920 in rural Kansas and grew up during the Great Depression and the storied Kansas dust storms. Her mother ran a small grocery store and her father traveled throughout the county teaching high school math.

She earned her degree from Kansas State University and, in the process, met her future husband Jack Sheets, who was an engineering student from Cozad, Nebraska. Less than a week after war was declared in 1941, they were married just days before Jack, a newly minted Army lieutenant, left for the war overseas.

Betty worked as a payroll accountant in the aircraft factory in Topeka, Kansas until the war’s end when, now with baby Ron, they moved to an apartment in Schenectady, New York where Jack had had an engineering job with General Electric. Their second child Jackie was soon born and the family moved outside of town to West Hill, which was one of the first planned suburban communities in the nation. Jack and Betty built their first home there, which had one of the country’s first all-electric kitchens.

In the late 1950s the family moved to a small farm in central Illinois. While Jack worked at the local GE office Betty presided over Girl Scout cookie sales, high school track meets, tornado relief, numerous chickens, cows, sheep, and a large vegetable garden – along with a new 8-foot GE freezer to hold it all.

In the early 1960s the family moved to Fremont, California to be near Betty’s sister Virginia and Betty’s parents. There she became involved in a variety of Presbyterian women’s organizations and taught English as a second language to Indian, Chinese, and other newly arrived women immigrants in the Bay Area..

After the kids left for college she and Jack hosted a variety of foreign exchange students, helping to improve their English skills and teaching about American culture; they in turn taught Betty about their cultures and expanded her Midwestern meat-and-potatoes diet to include Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and African cuisines.

Her devotion to church activities and working with immigrants earned her The Volunteer of the Year award for the State of California in 1975.

When Jack retired from GE in the early 1980s they moved to Ukiah, California - first to a home-built cabin on Lake Mendocino, then to another Jack-built home in Ukiah proper. There she continued her work in local and state Presbyterian women’s organizations. After Jack died in 1996, Betty lived there independently until 2009, when she moved into a local assisted living and memory care home.

She died at 92 after battling Alzheimer's and, finally, a broken hip from which she never recovered. Betty is survived by her sister Virginia Hansen of Sacramento and her two children, Ron Sheets of Willits and Jackie Meredith of Salt Springs Island in British Columbia. She also had two grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Betty dedicated her long life to showing us all how to live.

A memorial service will be held at the First Presbyterian Church in Ukiah on Friday, June 8, at 11am. Please, no flowers or cards.