Betty Rudnick 1924-2000 Age 76

Betty Rudnick was a woman with a big laugh, a big heart ...and a weakness for women in uniforms. It was 1941. "I was afire to join the Army. And I wasn’t even old enough to give blood to the Red Cross. The Army didn’t have anything for 17-year-old girls," recalled Betty. "Actually, even at that time, what I thought I would like to do was be a lawyer. But, number one, women weren’t being that readily admitted to schools of law. And number two, there wasn’t any money."

Betty learned about a bill in Congress to let nursing students go to school for free, after which they could go into the Army, and she thought, "Aha!" Although she had no interest in nursing "whatsoever," she saw this as a way to get into the Army. So she wrote to the dean of the School of Nursing in Galveston and was ready to go when the bill was passed. And what does she recall of her three years in nursing school? "The Cadet Nurse Corps had a uniform," she laughed. "It had a little Montgomery tam with some piping, a particular cross on it, and an overcoat and a gray suit.... And, I was very fond of the association with all of these other girls."

By the time she graduated in 1946, they were demobilizing the Army Nurse Corps, so she never made it to the Army. But Betty eventually became dean of the School of Nursing for the University of Texas, and at 37 was the youngest dean of a major school in the country.

"And, so, after I graduated–oh, I almost forgot...." Thus begins the tale of her two-year marriage. She had dated a pre-med student at UT. After he went off to war, was wounded, and returned, "we decided to get married, which we did very quickly. And very quickly after that happened, I had the suspicion that it had been a mistake. Living with him was not as much fun as living with the girls in the dormitory." Things came to a head when Betty was summoned out of the operating room for a phone call from her husband, who was in West Texas for a bar mitzvah. He had bought a linen shop there on a whim, and he told her she should quit nursing school and come there to help him with it. "I decided this whole thing was ridiculous. I didn’t like anything about it." So the marriage ended.

After she graduated from nursing school, it was while working at St. Joseph’s in Houston that she met Sammie, who was finishing up her nursing school training. After a while, the two became lovers and went together to Amarillo to work at a hospital there. "I don’t know why we went to Amarillo. Part of it may have been the fact that Sammie’s sister seemed to be on to us and was upset about the relationship and was telling her family about the relationship."

Eventually Betty and Sammie returned to Houston and worked at Hermann Hospital. After they had been together about five years, Sammie fell in love with a patient, a fellow who had been injured in the rodeo. After Sammie married him, Betty went to a psychiatrist. "I decided this was not any kind of life. It was obviously unacceptable. If a person had ambition, they were not going to get anyplace with this lifestyle. The psychiatrist said, ‘What did you plan to do instead?’" She laughs. "I recall that question, and I said, ‘Well, there aren’t too many options, are there?’ You can be celibate, or... So, at that point, for a time, I dated men."

Betty had grown up in Houston, the youngest of four sisters. One of her uncles owned the Heights Theater, and another relative owned Lewis & Coker Grocery. Betty grew up in a household where her mother was quite active. In 1917, when a New York organizer came to Houston to organize the first chapter of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, Betty’s mother became a charter member, and eventually served as president of the whole region.

Betty, however, was the first one in her family to graduate from college. When she decided she wanted to get a master’s degree, she packed up her little Chevrolet and went to New York, since at that time you couldn’t get a master’s in nursing in Texas. She worked at hospitals and attended Columbia, finishing her M.A. in 1956, and going on to ace the admission exam for the doctoral program, doing "better than anybody had practically ever done."

While back in Houston waiting to hear back from the doctoral programs, Betty convinced a woman she’d met to ride along with her to New York, and then "one thing led to another." Betty and Cass were together for the next few years, with both enrolled in graduate programs in New York City. But Cass started drinking excessively, and dropped out and returned to Texas, to Galveston. Betty finished up her doctorate, and moved to Galveston, where she became dean of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s School of Nursing. At the time, 1963, she had the first earned doctorate in nursing in the state of Texas. She and Cass were reunited, but things were rocky; Betty didn’t know how to handle her partner’s alcoholism, and the relationship ultimately ended.

Then, Betty’s nursing and her earlier military aspirations came together in the figure of a new woman. "I met a lieutenant commander in the nurse corps who was a recruiter for Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. She looked marvelous in the uniform!"

Although Betty didn’t need "recruiting," as she was already in the nurse corps, she was delighted to sign up for "extra duty" with the attractive lieutenant commander. Later, she crossed paths with the lieutenant commander (now promoted to captain) in another state. "She was a very interesting woman. Because at the same time she had joined the Navy, she had also joined the Catholic church. She had been a Southern Baptist-type girl from Alice, Texas. And, every time that she had a relationship with a woman, she would then decide that Easter or Christmas was coming on, and that she worried that she might die outside a state of grace. So, she would then go to confession and communion." Betty chuckled, "...until the next woman came along."

Betty, in attempting to strengthen the nursing program in Galveston, ran up against two adversaries. The original School of Nursing went back to 1892, "so they had this big historical deal." The other big deal was the president of UTMB, Truman Blocker, who was a huge fellow about 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds. He wanted control of the nursing program, and there were turf wars, none of which was benefiting the nursing students or the program. "One day I decided it just wasn’t worth it all, and I resigned. And most of the faculty resigned with me." As we will see later in the story, Blocker did not forget Betty.

Betty bided her time in nursing jobs in Houston, then Lafayette, Louisiana. During her graduate work at Columbia, Betty had made good connections nationwide with most of the deans of nursing schools in the U.S. She got a call from the dean at University of Kentucky, and went there to be an assistant dean for medical surgical nursing.

Two Women, a Bank Robbery, and the FBI

While living in Lexington, Kentucky, Betty helped start a women’s group in 1974 that met in people’s houses and went on to start a rape crisis line.

Two of the women who started coming were new in town, having been honor students at Brandeis University in Boston. One became a baker at a health food store near the university; the other one, according to Betty, was "this funny-looking kid." The "funny-looking" one wanted to start a women’s self-defense course. "At my house, okay?! I had a house with a yard, and she would teach people how to fall." Betty also remembers that she showed up at a class Betty was teaching on Women and Alcohol.

"So one day she called and needed $100. Her mother was sick, and could I lend her $100?" The woman said she couldn’t use a check, it needed to be in cash. "I gave her the $100 and went on about my business. And soon one of my friends came into the faculty lunchroom there and said, ‘Have you seen this week’s Time magazine? Doesn’t this look like that funny kid that’s been following you around for the last six months?’ I said, ‘It does seem to resemble her....’"

So there in Time magazine were pictures of these two women from Brandeis, appearing on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list! Betty called up a friend who was in the women’s group and happened to be a top director for the Girl Scouts, and asked her if she’d seen the Time article. "She said, ‘I have, and I think it would be a good idea if we didn’t make contact for a while.’" Betty answered, "Gotcha."

Within a day or so, sure enough, the FBI (the "federal fuzz," as she called them) appeared at her office, wanting to know all about the young women. Although she had researched the law, and knew she wasn’t required to answer, nonetheless, "with great courage and bravery, I told him everything I knew, hoped to know, ever would know."

It came out later that these women wanted to "take back the streets for women." However, they got mixed up with a couple of ex-offenders who had their own ideas of how to achieve social change, recalled Betty. "These fellas met these young women, and they told them, ‘If you are going to take back the streets, you are going to need money. And you are going to need armaments.’ And so the ex-offenders planned these robberies from armories, and then a bank. And, in the robbery of the bank, they killed a guard." The two young women had driven the getaway car. The ex-offenders were caught in short order, but the two young women had gotten away.

The FBI assigned an agent to keep tabs on Betty from that point on, for 11 years. "They would call me and say, ‘Have you heard from so-and-so?’ No, I hadn’t heard. Hadn’t hoped to hear."

Susan Saxe was picked up on the streets of Philadelphia in March 1975. Katherine Powers made her way to Oregon and ran a couple of restaurants. A former winner of the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award for Sewing, Powers eluded the FBI for 23 years before turning herself in.

(Historical note: During this period in 1975, the FBI was intercepting phone calls and mail and generally intimidating leftists and lesbians in Lexington. Unlike Betty, six people refused to testify, and they were arrested, held, and mistreated [as chronicled by Jim Sears in Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South, to be published June 2001 by Rutgers University Press]. Lesbians around the country feared that the FBI could come knocking on their doors at any time during this period, as the FBI used the fugitive situation as a cover to go on a "fishing expedition" in lesbian communities.)

The shadow of the FBI persisted in Betty’s life. In January 1986, when Betty was teaching at Texas Woman’s University in Houston, President Reagan was coming to NASA to make a speech commemorating the crew members who died in the Challenger explosion. The day of the visit, Betty received a call from the FBI asking her what she was planning to do that day. "‘Well,’ I said, ‘I had in mind to go to work and teach a couple of classes.’ And they said, ‘Well, we would like for you to go to work, and for you to stay at the Texas Woman’s University until we call you and tell you that President Reagan has returned to Washington.’" The president could rest assured that he was safe from any threat from Betty Rudnick, thanks to the diligence of the FBI.

That was Betty’s last contact with the FBI. "When I retired, they retired my agent, I think. I have not heard any more from them."

After nine years in Kentucky, Betty came back to Texas to be closer to her mother, spending six years as dean at T.W.U.’s Denton branch and four more years teaching and advising graduate students at their Houston branch, finally retiring after 42 years of nursing in 1987.

During her career, Betty basically never identified herself as a lesbian to any co-workers or supervisors. There was one instance when her old nemesis, Truman Blocker, had told a member of the board of regents that Betty had made physical advances to same-sex students, and therefore should not be appointed dean of the Texas Woman’s University School of Nursing. Betty got advice from friends, and from high-profile Houston attorney Percy Foreman, who referred her to a Dallas attorney. When he asked what kind of evidence they had, Betty said, "They can’t have any evidence because it did not occur." When Betty went to the board meeting, "I approached the [member of] the regents, [asking] ‘What kind of evidence did Dr. Truman Blocker offer you, that this was so?’

"‘None.’

"The president called me at the end of their board meeting that night, when everybody got back to Denton from Dallas and said, ‘It’s over.’ And it was over. And life proceeded from there."

When asked about her view of butch/femme, Betty said she really didn’t see her world divided up that way, and mostly knew about it from reading books. Most of the women she knew were more androgynous. She thought of a couple in LOAF, and said, "Well, I guess if forced to it, then you’d say that J. was the femme ... but not very femme," she said, laughing. "Tell you the truth, I think it’s silly. And I think it’s silly in this way, that people who feel ugly about lesbians always come to this question of who is playing the role of the man and who is playing the role of the woman. And I think that’s silly. But, in the house, I cooked as often as my partner cooked. And I’ve never been all that good with the hammer and the screwdriver." She laughs again. "So it hasn’t really been a part of my life."

During her working life, most of Betty’s activism revolved around taking stands in the field of nursing. But after her retirement in 1987, Betty became an active volunteer for liberal political causes, for the Houston Area Women’s Center Hotline for Battered Women, and for LOAF.

Betty’s health began to fail in 1999. She had a horror of winding up in a nursing home, so for the last months of her life, a support network of friends, along with hospice and 24-hour aides, made it possible for Betty to stay in her home. After her death in January 2000, her friend Arden Eversmeyer recalled that Betty’s family "was going to put her in the ground without any public acknowledgment, not even a prayer. She was an embarrassment to them." Betty had always threatened that she was going to come out at her funeral. So the lesbian community planned the funeral, with support from one of Betty’s sisters. Recalled Arden, "The Jewish community filled up one side of the chapel, and the lesbian community filled up the other. We talked about her activism in the community and her lifelong commitment to women. Annise Parker gave a wonderful talk.... Without using the L word, we did in effect out Betty Rudnick, and honor her years of activism." Her friends still chuckle at their memories of her, and what they call their "Betty stories."