Betty T. Welsbacher

is honored with a Brick from Dick, Anne, and Rick Welsbacher.

This year, my mother gave me her life's collection of musical instruments. I will spend the rest of my own life sharing them.

A penny whistle to Paul, perhaps, making music in North Carolina. He's been away for decades, but Betty Welsbacher holds firm in his heart, a mentor, mother, fellow musician. I gave a drum and rattle to Trish and her young son Aidan. Mom is part of their lives now, though she has yet to meet them. I'm thinking the ukelele will go to Tessa, who asks about Betty between her Twin Cities visits. A flute to Zoe and the good drums to Ed. I'm keeping the music boxes, for they bind me, and her, to my mother's own mother. I'll keep the zither, too, and I might even learn to play the accordion.

I'm pondering the Unitarian Church. But my mother is embedded there already--in the kitchen where she prepares food for her choir, congregation, family; in the upstairs rooms, her church-school children banging their Betty-made music tools; in the chapel with her choir, at the piano, behind the podium sharing news of cancer and children and cheesecake sales. She's in the grass outside the church, where her children hunted Easter eggs, and in the memos and files inside, helping to forge the values of her church and its community.

She's at Wichita State University, too, where hundreds of students came and played in her classes and left with her implanted in their hearts. She's in a lot of files there, too, her dozens of awards handsome tributes to her skills teaching the nationally unprecedented special music education program that she created.

She's in schools around Wichita, where she taught and helped others teach. She's in classrooms and town halls across the country, too, sharing folk songs with Dick and hundreds of other WW II-era Americans. She is even in places that no longer exist in the air around the old Institute of Logepedics, where Wichita first met my mother, and on the block where her own children went to a grade school that she and other parents helped integrate.

If you believe, as I do, that a person lives inside the people she touches Greta and Lila and Susan and Dee Dee and many dozens more in Wichita, Jane in California, Kate in Oregon and Kate in Boston, Andrea in Wisconsin, Tessa from Uruguay, Euny in Illinois, Gary in Italy, Paul in Durham, Ireland's Trish and Aidan, Connie in New York, Zella in Minneapolis, Judy in Michigan, Rick, Dick, and Annie at home, countless others in Ithaca and Kansas City and Las Vegas and Alaska and Florida and, of course, Kansas and Ohio--then you'd have to call my mother a world traveler, and a time-traveler too.
Submitted by Anne Welsbacher

I had thought to add a few observations of my own to daughter Annie's comments, but there really isn't a whole lot more to say, because her touching parable of the musical instruments brilliantly illuminates what it is that makes Betty so special. Through a long, busy, and varied career, she has touched the lives of an incredible number of disparate people, in the garbled words of the old Sunday school song, "at school, at work, at play." And having been touched by her, they have seldom remained the same. She genuinely cares for them, encourages them, supports them, and they are nurtured and grow under her concern. Indeed, one of the jokes that has affectionately been told of her, is that she is an incorrigible collector of strays. I should know; I'm one of them.

All of this, and so much more, Annie has said far better than I. About the only advantage I have over my daughter is... I've known Betty much longer than she has, and in this often mean and selfish world, that's a real privilege.
Submitted by Dick Welsbacher

September 18, 1998