Far vistas and 1,000 reindeer

Tag : mink furs

She wasn't too sure whether it was 1913, but Betty Williams knewshe was born on a whaleboat near Point Hope, Alaska, during thespring migration, when the women cooked for the men whaling on theships.
She never got beyond the fourth grade in Kivalina, Alaska -- that'sall they had -- but she did learn plenty of survival skills. Shelearned to make fur coats. She learned to drive a team of sleddogs. She learned to shoot. The oldest of four and already thematriarch, she learned to wash diapers by hand, hang them outdoors,and bang frost off them.
Her father was killed on a hunting trip when she was a toddler, andher grandfather Samaruna helped raise her, and gave her 1,000reindeer to herd.
When she was about 12, her mother brought her to Point Barrow tomarry an older man. But Betty wouldn't sign the papers. She alsonearly died of pneumonia, in both cases displaying the stubbornnessthat she exhibited throughout the rest of her life.
Married at 16
Around 16, she married Charles Maxwell, who rode the boxcars andtraveled all over, landing in Kivalina to run a trading store.Baptized Anglican, Betty then converted to her husband's Catholicfaith. They had four children, and they moved to Nome, where Bettyworked as a waitress.
Betty was Inupiaq, her birth name was Ivalu, but she called herselfEskimo. Charles asked her to stop using the Inupiaq language, soBetty did, and thus mostly lost her ability to speak it.
Around 1945, the family left Alaska for good and moved to Salem,where Charles hoped to work as a plumber. The family lived in abarn, and there Betty started to sew, while the family pickedstrawberries. It was a difficult marriage, and after Betty andCharles divorced, Betty supported the children by sewing.
In 1952, she married Chuck Williams, a construction worker ofLebanese descent. Betty got a job at Ed Hamilton Furs in downtownPortland. There for 20 years she made the fur coats, capes, stoles,jackets that were then popular: natural wild and ranch mink, baummarten, Persian lamb, Russian sable, northern muskrat. She thentook a bus to a downtown coat factory and became supervisor --Betty loved to be the boss -- and retired there at age 65.
Though she could read her favorite romance novels and magazinespretty well, she said she didn't "have all the letters" forwriting, and got help with bills, correspondence and paperwork.
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