Betty created a number of clay ceramic pieces in her home work shops in New Jersey (1940's to 1963), in St. Louis (1963 -1968), and later in Hermann, MO (1973 to maybe 1977). I don't know whether she took classes to learn this skill or whether she was self taught though I suspect a combination of both. To the best of my knowledge she never sold her work but did regularly gave it to friends and family members. She entered her work in shows and in the 1950's won an number of awards. Her homes always had some of her ceramic pieces decorating shelves, tables, cubby holes, porches, and gardens. Some of her work was made by simply purchasing pre-made simple clay objects and then glazing them with color and decoration. Other of her pieces were much more complex and she created them entirely by hand from scratch. Sometimes she would make a mold of her hand made work which allowed her to make multiple copies of the piece. It is my observation that her most complex and original work was produced in the 1950's in her "Coop" work shop. This was clearly her most prolific period and the vast majority of her surviving work was created during this decade. When she moved back to St. Louis in 1963 she set up her kiln in the basement and produced some items which, as near as I can tell, were mostly relatively simple flat ceramic Christmas tree ornaments and colorful Easter Eggs. I don't know if Betty ever set up her kiln in California after her second marriage and I have no examples of any work she may have produced during the time she lived on the west coast. She apparently did set up her kiln in the Hermann, MO farm house sometime after moving there in 1973 but evidentially didn't produce much work there. I have two ashtrays she made in Hermann and gave to me which are dated 1977 but I have seen no other ceramic work from her Hermann years. In 1995 I moved Betty and John Alderson from the farm house to a more suitable residence for their age and medical condition in town. At the time I found Betty's kiln in it's unassembled component pieces in the farm house basement (and moved it to storage as mother was not ready to part with it). The basement would have been the logical place to locate and use the kiln in the farm house as the kiln produced a lot of heat when firing ceramic pieces and the basement location would have minimized any possible fire hazard. The farm basement flooded several times in the years Betty lived there and I suspect that Betty's efforts in working with clay probably came to an end after one of these floods when it became apparent that the basement wasn't going to make a very good ceramic work shop. In her later years Betty started slowly and methodically giving away her art (and other heirloom type items) to family members. Often when I visited in Hermann she would give me an item or two for no specific reason other than to apparently make sure I (and her other two sons) had them and knew what they were in anticipation of the time when she would no longer be around. Each Christmas for a number of years she gave her son's one piece each of her hand made Christmas tree ornaments (she had multiple copies of each ornament design). In the early 1990's she told me a story I hadn't heard before when she gave me her 1953 round ash tray containing her hand-drawn image of a railroad train locomotive with an airplane propeller attached to the front. Her first husband Kirt Hine worked for a large defense contractor in the 1950's designing airplane propellers and everything he worked on was considered "top secret" for national security reasons. He thus never talked to his family about exactly what he was working on at any point in time. Kirt had apparently let slip to Betty at some point that he had spent some time riding in a train locomotive on company time. Betty put two and two together and came up with the ashtray depicting a train being driven by a propeller. Sometime not long after she created this ashtray Kirt's boss at work came by for dinner, drinks, (or for some other reason) and saw the ashtray sitting on a table. The boss immediately became furious and apparently thought that Kirt was a security leak. Nothing ever came of the encounter with the boss, who remained a long term family friend and Kirt's job apparently never was in jeopardy thought I suspect he was given a good talking to at work the next day. The boss's reaction to the ashtray makes it pretty clear that Curtiss-Wright's Propeller Division had in fact done some studies and/or research into the feasibility of using airplane propellers to move trains. The fact that no such train propulsion method ever showed up suggests that the idea didn't go to far. Betty generally identified her work with either her whimsical caricature of herself or her "Betty" signature. Some pieces were dated and "signed" (if there was space) and others weren't. Following are photographs of some of her work. The photos include some from the family photo collection and others that I've recently taken for presentation here of pieces now in the possession of myself and my brother Henry.
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