Virginia Beach WWII vet, ‘older than sliced bread,’ turns 105 and more headlines
In 1920, prohibition was enacted. The 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified. The country was still on the gold standard. And the First World War had ended just two years earlier.
Sliced bread wasn’t even commercially sold (that didn’t happen until 1928).
On Dec. 1 — a month after Warren G. Harding was elected president — Elizabeth Barrett was born.
“How old are you turning?” one of her eight children playfully asked recently.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Barrett — “Betty” to close friends and family — said with a chuckle.
Barrett served as a flight instructor in World War II. She and her late husband, also a veteran, built a number of homes and later managed a racquetball club in Virginia Beach. Much later in life, she graduated from Rutgers University and went into social services. She has 15 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
For her 90th birthday, she walked nine miles. For her 100th, she walked 10 miles over a month.
“She always stood up for what was right, which is what she taught us too,” said second-youngest daughter, 69-year-old June Barrett-McDaniels, who visits her mother about every other day at the Jones and Cabacoy Veterans Care Center.
Born in Cleveland, Barrett grew up in northeastern New Jersey. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she and husband Raymond Barrett enlisted in the Navy; Betty was 21 and Raymond was 20, Barrett-McDaniels said. They married while stationed in Jacksonville, Florida, at the military base’s church after knowing each other for about two months.
Betty taught fledgling airmen how to fly using an early flight simulator called a link trainer. She was Raymond’s instructor. He was deployed as a Marine Corps fighter pilot to the Pacific Theater. He flew a Corsair in missions over Eniwetok, the Marshall Islands and Okinawa, where he earned multiple Distinguished Flying Cross medals.
After the war, the couple moved to back to New Jersey. Raymond was recalled to active duty for the Korean conflict, in which he served mostly as a flight instructor in Pensacola. Betty moved the family, four children at the time, to the Florida Gulf Coast.
After that war, the Barretts again returned to New Jersey. Betty attended night school at Rutgers, hoping to fulfill a lifelong ambition of earning a college degree. She graduated at 51 with a degree in social service while working full-time and caring for eight children.
The Barretts’ oldest son served in the Navy and was stationed in Virginia Beach at the time of the Vietnam war. By then, Barrett-McDaniels said, her parents were practically pacificists.
Betty worked in Norfolk’s social services department soon after they moved to Hampton Roads. Raymond built a few homes and later on a racquetball club he and Betty would manage. Barrett-McDaniels said it was the pickleball rage of the time.
Barrett-McDaniels said her parents insisted on the family eating together while they grew up. Her parents, she said, taught her and her siblings the value of education and civic engagement.
“Before we could walk, we were taught that democracy is not a right,” she said. “It’s a responsibility.”
Betty and Raymond were passionate aviators well past their military service. They visited their children all around the country and one time, flew to Panama. They celebrated their 64th anniversary in 2008. Raymond died the next year.
Barrett lived independently until 101. Her neighbors and the fire department joined birthday celebrations during the pandemic. After bouts with breast cancer and a ruptured ulcer, she now uses a wheelchair. Though she tires easily, her eyes twinkle when friends and loved ones speak of Raymond. Her quiet, sometimes dry, sense of humor can cause a room to erupt in laughter.
“My parents, they’re true-blue Americans,” Barrett-McDaniels said. “They’ve had a good a good life. My mom has had a really good life.”