March 27, 1936 - August 3, 2017 Betty died a year ago, in Saint John's hospital, Santa Monica, of 'complications.' Her various parts stopped coordinating – there was no specific cause. At 81 death is no tragedy. All who knew her will miss her, just the same. Betty's roots were in the east – New Britain, Connecticut, where she grew up, and Jackson County in northern Alabama, where her family had a farm for over a hundred years. After graduating from college in 1959 she moved to the Los Angeles area with her husband Tom. Their son, David Budlong of Santa Barbara, was born in 1961. Betty and Tom were married in 1959, and were 'together' for more than sixty years, although 'years married' fell a few months short. Betty and Tom lived in Los Angeles for the remainder of her life. Betty's grade school education was from Mooreland Hill School in New Britain. High school years were at Chatham Hall Academy in Virginia. In 1958 she graduated from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she met her husband, Tom. During the early years in Los Angeles, while son David was growing up, the family owned several horses, one of Betty's continuing passions. Aside from owning, she gave equitation lessons to the local community. Betty was an active real estate broker in the Westside of Los Angeles for over forty years. She was an excellent and ingenious cook, commonly claiming she could do better when eating out at restaurants, and commonly proving it. In her later years cooking was her most passionate hobby. She inherited the 'family farm' in Hollywood, a small Alabama town, when her mother died in 2002. Although she never lived there, the farm was an important part of her life. She had been visiting regularly almost from birth and could recall the early days with tenants living with no internal plumbing and rooms heated only by fireplaces burning high-sulfur coal. Shortly after the inheritance she restored the farm's then-unoccupied, and deteriorating, 'big house,' which was built before the Civil War, and had survived it. The Big House is now fully modern, occupied by the farmer for the property. The interior and exterior character was retained such that the house was accepted to the National Register of Historic Places. More recently she brought back to life an even older building, a one-room historic log cabin, also unoccupied and deteriorating. It now serves as the office for the farmer's wife, the farm's bookkeeper. Betty was a clever girl, and a good companion to husband Tom and son David. She will not be forgotten.