Betty Jean Nickle

A Life Story

3 Junior High and High School

On 4 September 1940, Betty Jean turned twelve. In the fall of 1940, she entered the seventh grade at Reed Junior High School, where her classes included English, social studies, math, music, and art. Though these classes were important in contributing to her overall education, the most memorable school event for her during the first year of junior high proved to be a beauty contest.

On 5 November, Home Room 206 sponsored the contest for the seventh-grade girls. Each entrant displayed baby pictures of herself in the Reed Auditorium, and the members of the sponsoring home room selected winners in four categories: “prettiest pictures,” “cutest pictures,” “funniest picture,” and “most improvement in . . . looks since babyhood.” Betty Jean, then of Home Room 210, won the prize for “cutest pictures.” She received a twenty-five cent prize and had her name published, as did the winners in the other three categories.

Like most seventh-graders, Betty Jean enjoyed interacting with her friends. Two girlfriends in particular from this period would stand out in her later memory. One was Dorothy Gallagher, a girl Betty Jean’s own age, and another was Joy Munsell, who was a year older. Over the next few years, the girls would often take walks to the edge of town, where they would sit down in the middle of the street and chat for hours. Betty Jean often took her younger sister Joan with her. “We sang and laughed and were happy,” Betty Jean later recalled. The group also frequented the local park and zoo and enjoyed the rides and roller skating.

Like most seventh-grade girls, Betty Jean developed a heightened interest in boys. “It was the 7th grade when I started dating,” she would write. “All the boys I dated were 16-17 years old as they all drove cars. They were neighbors and friends of our cousin Joyce and lived a mile or 2 from the city.” As one who would later encourage her own children to follow Latter-day Saint counsel not to date before age sixteen, Betty Jean would reflect on her early teen dating, “I can’t believe my parents let me do this, but they were fairly new converts and didn’t know any better.”

Yet she continued to grow spiritually during this period as her family remained highly active in their Latter-day Saint branch. On Sunday, 13 October 1940, her father, Dan, was released as a counselor in the branch Sunday school superintendency and installed as the new Sunday school superintendent, a position he would hold for years.

The next day occurred one of the highlights in the history of the little Springfield Branch as Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, a visiting member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, presided at a special conference held in the branch’s chapel. The conference drew an attendance of fifty of the branch’s members and sixty-eight visitors for a total of one hundred eighteen, a comparatively vast throng. Betty Jean must have been impressed by the several speakers, including Elder Smith and his wife Jessie Evans Smith, as well as by the musical numbers. The music included not only singing and playing by Jessie Evans Smith, a famous vocalist, but also a duet by her husband and her.

This duet perhaps inspired Betty Jean to try yet again to develop her musical talents despite her painful experiences with music during her elementary school years. According to the Springfield branch minutes, on 23 March 1941, during a regular sacrament meeting, “Irene McKeel and Betty Jean Nickle Sang a duet” between speakers.

Later that year, members of Betty Jean’s Latter-day Saint branch became privy to a rumor that all the members of the Church were to gather to the western United States, where the Church’s headquarters were located. The rumor, which was untrue, stirred up enough confusion, however, to require a public squelching. During sacrament meeting on August 31, 1941, Betty Jean’s cousin, “President [James W.] Nickle gave a[n] announcement on the rumor of the Saints going West and [said] it is just a rumor with[out] any foundation of truth.”

The rumor probably stemmed from the Church’s doctrine of “gathering.” In the nineteenth century, Church members gathered by immigrating to designated gathering places in the western United States. In the twentieth century, however, Church members were taught that the time had come to gather wherever they lived by forming permanent congregations in those areas and gathering others into the fold by preaching the gospel to them and converting them to the Church.

By the time she was in seventh grade, Betty Jean had become actively involved in missionary work with other members of her family. “As a young kid,” she later recalled, “I literally have given hundreds of talks at our little branch. And also when my Uncle Clem was given a position going down to Arkansas . . . to give street meetings there. And from the time I was eleven years old till the time I was about sixteen, I’d go many a weekends down to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and hold street meetings. And I’d give talks in our little sacrament meetings the next day.”

Her missionary experiences undoubtedly helped her to interact well with others not of her faith. In fact, when Betty Jean entered the eighth grade in the fall of 1941, most of her closest friends and acquaintances were not Latter-day Saints. She spent lots of time with her two good friends Dorothy and Joy. “Neither were LDS,” she would later write, “but they were good girls. We would take turns about staying at each other[’]s home. We ate and laughed most of the night.”

She also developed good relationships with young men, most of whom were Pentecostals. “They came to our branch and we visited their revivals,” she would write, recalling her reaction to the effusive Pentecostal demeanor. “I remember going to a tent revival and as we came in some woman grabbed my hand and said ‘Praise The Lord.’ I didn’t know what to say so I said ‘Same to you sister.’”

In 1963, Betty Jean wrote that it was in junior high school that she “became of age to really like the boys” and that she was thirteen years old when she began to go out with a group of Pentecostal youth. “We use to date but in groups, and have hay rides, w[ie]ner roasts, parties, etc.,” she explained. “We didn’t go to the show as it was against their religion” and “we didn’t drink cokes because it was against ours.”

She dated several boys during this early period, including Leonard Simpson. She recalled, “It was after one of these hay rides that Leonard brought me home and gave me my first good night kiss. Upon entering the house I found mother and blushingly told her ‘I’m so Mad’ and she said, ‘What is the matter, did he kiss you.’ I asked her how she knew and she said all her kids said the same thing the first time they were kissed. We would be beaming with happiness and yet state we were mad.”

While associating with youth of other faiths and attending other churches with her friends, Betty Jean became all the more active in her own church, including its Mutual Improvement Association, an organization for older youth. The Mutual Improvement Association, or MIA as it was often known, operated under the direction of a local presidency and secretary. Betty Jean turned thirteen on 4 September 1941, and sometime during the ensuing year, she received the first of several callings to serve in the MIA, callings that might have been reserved for older persons in a larger unit of the church. “Living in a little [branch] where there weren’t very many people, we had jobs from the time we were little on,” she would recall. “I remember when I was thirteen, I was put in as the secretary for the MIA.”

Betty Jean’s callings in the MIA would require her to spend more time than ever at church, but like most eighth-graders, she spent most of her weekdays at school, where she faced academic and peer pressures. During her eighth-grade year, her school schedule included English, social studies, math, science, music, and home economics. She was conscious of her appearance and therefore grateful for her mother’s seamstress skills, which kept her and her sisters well dressed.

During this school year, an event occurred that affected her life and the life of most other Americans. She later wrote, “I was 13 and in the 8th grade. One Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 I got up and turned on the radio and I heard that Japan start[ed] the war in Hawaai[.] I yelled for the family and we list[en]ed most of the day.”
Because of the war, the number of Latter-day Saint missionaries serving in the area would diminish. About the same time, the number of Latter-day Saint soldiers stationed at nearby military installations would increase. “We had lots & lots of soldiers from Fort Leonard Wood in M[issouri] and Fort Sill in Kansas coming to church in Springfield,” Betty Jean would recall. “Every Sunday the folks would bring home 10 to 30 Soldiers home for lunch & the afternoon, then we would all go back to church together. We had lots of fun.”

Eventually, the war-time drop in missionaries would mean greater Church responsibilities for her and her sisters. “During the war,” she explained, “Jane, Joan, and I, were asked to take over the district and keep all the records and do any cottage meetings. And we attended many cottage meetings. And I spent hours and hours typing, getting the records in order.”

Betty Jean entered ninth grade in the fall of 1942 and turned fourteen about the same time. By ninth grade, she was “dating a lot of older boys,” and “they were good boys,” she wrote. She liked boys, but she didn’t like the school she had to attend at the beginning of the school year. Her father being a contractor, their family moved frequently. A home into which they moved before Betty Jean’s ninth-grade year was outside the boundaries of Reed Junior High School, where she had attended the earlier grades. Her younger sister Joan entered seventh grade the same year and also did not like the new school.

Referring to the school, Betty Jean would later relate, “We didn’t like it. And we refused to go to school. So the folks had to move back into the Reed school district so we could go there.” During her ninth-grade year at Reed Junior High School, Betty Jean took social studies, English, general math, cooking, speech, general science, and study hall.

As she continued to progress academically, she also grew spiritually and at age fourteen was called to be the second counselor in the Mutual Improvement Association of her Church branch.

In the fall of 1943, Betty Jean entered Springfield High School, where she took classes such as English, social studies, and biology. “I had a lot of fond memories there,” she would recall. “I had quite a few boyfriends while I was going through high school. But I wasn’t involved in school activities too much.”

One school activity in which she did participate as a spectator was football games, which she attended with her two girlfriends, Dorothy and Joy. Decades later as she recalled the games, she could visualize the high school colors, red and black, and remember one of the cheerleading yells:

B-U-L-L-D-O-G
Spells the way to Victory
Rip em—Strip em
Show them how
Springfield Bulldogs—
Bow-wow-wow

The social aspects of her high school days proved even more memorable than the school activities. In 1963, Betty Jean reflected, “When I started High School I really thought I was grown up. The war was on and there were a lot of Service Men in Springfield. Joy, Dorothy, Joan and I then became a quartet. We use to spend many and many hours just walking to a lonely road at the edge of the city and then sat in the middle of the street discussing our problems. We went to shows, basketball games, parties and church together. We even had many of slumber parties. One night at one of these parties we got in a fight as to who had the most of the bed (there were four of us in one bed). Well we got up and found some boards and divided the bed into four sections. It worked great until the next morning when her mother found three old dirty boards in on her clean sheets.”

The cooperative spirit that pervaded the United States during World War II reached into Betty Jean’s tenth-grade life. “10th grade was exciting,” she recalled, “so much going on about the war. Going to School and every Monday taking a quarter to buy saving stamp and when I had saved $18.75 I received a savings bond.”
The war became a family matter when on 12 November 1943, Betty Jean’s older sister Lorene married Lieutenant A. L. Tidlund, an Air Force pilot, in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Shortly after the marriage, Al, as he was known to the family, was ordered overseas, where he flew dozens of missions. Al survived the dangers of the war and eventually returned home safely to his new bride. Together they traveled to the Salt Lake Temple, where they were endowed and sealed together in sacred ceremonies, the second of Betty Jean’s sisters to enjoy this blessing.

While still fifteen years old, Betty Jean became first counselor in the presidency of the Mutual Improvement Association, further evidence of her continuing faithfulness to her church.

Betty Jean turned sixteen on 4 September 1944, about the same time she began the eleventh grade. She later wrote that “Church, School & Lots of dates made 11th grade lots of fun.”

In school, she took not only English and history, but also shorthand and typing. She did particularly well in the secretarial classes, receiving, as she recalled, “all kinds of certificates . . . for being the best typist” in the school. Outside the typing class was a bulletin board on which the best papers typed in the class would be posted. Hers were posted virtually every week. She would later write, “The only thing I remember liking at school was typing.”

To some extent, her ongoing physical ailments continued to limit her school participation. According to her high school transcript, she missed thirteen days and had a doctor’s permit to be excused from physical education during the 1944-1945 school year.

Yet her illnesses did not prevent her from having an active social life. During eleventh grade, she began dating a young man named Jack West. Later she would describe him as “a faithful boy friend (that I didn’t particularly want)” who was always “following me around all the time.” After high school, he entered the Navy, and she wrote to him. Though he was sure she would marry him, she turned him down. He later became a Protestant minister. He would not be the only serviceman ever to notice her.

“The war was on and there were a lot of Service Men in Springfield,” she would reflect two decades later. “It was when I was 16 I met this Service Man who was 18, his name was Bill Johnston, and I was too date him on and off for the next 8 years. One day at Sunday School he asked if he could come over and see me in the afternoon. I was so excited I waited and waited for him to come. Peeking out the window I saw him coming, daddy was sitting on the front porch. When he came up and asked him if the girls were at home he said, ‘No, they are all gone, just the three little girls are here.’ I was humilated daddy telling him that. After all I thought I wasn’t one of the little girls I was a big girl. I met and dated quite a few LDS soldiers during the next few years. It was really nice as there were no LDS men in our Branch.” Over the years that followed, she and Bill would become great friends, and when she was twenty-four, he would propose marriage to her, which she would decline.

Jack and Bill were just two of the many young men attracted to her. “Boys always liked me because I was petite and dressed well and had an outgoing personality,” Betty Jean remembered. “Between Pentacostal boy friends, soldiers and Missionaries who had crushes on me and my sisters, we had lots of boy friends.”

One day, Betty Jean, her older sister Jane, and her younger sister Joan visited a nearby Pentecostal church. “The Minister spent the evening talking about the evil of wearing make-up,” Betty Jean later wrote. “Jane, Jo & I were the only ones in the building wearing make-up. After the meeting he came up and talked to us.” If they felt the minister looked down on them, that feeling may have changed within a short time. “The next day,” Betty Jean’s account continued, “he went into Sears and asked Jane for a date.” She turned him down.

Betty Jean attracted the notice of some Latter-day Saint missionaries. “It was during High School that I really begin to appreciate the Church and to work in it,” she would recall. “Especially did I enjoy MIA and it seems the missionaries, (male ones that is). During high school I was writing to 25 missionary and service men, boy what fun.”

“Two missionaries I remember were Alton James and William Taylor. They both got the idea I was in love with them, at least they thought they were in love with me. They were both released at the same time and both came to our home and I found out that they had brought engag[e]ment rings. I was really dumb to them both but I got out of getting engaged. Another missionary I quite like[d] was a Charles E. Parkin. He was district president and I spent hours and hours with him ty[p]ing and redoing the district records. I was really thrilled.”

Despite her many friends, life was not merely social activities for Betty Jean. During her senior year of high school, she experienced her first months of employment, working at Bottenfield’s, a wholesale beauty supply company in Springfield. She worked part-time after school and earned fifty cents an hour typing, filing, and doing other secretary and receptionist work. “Easy work, good hours,” she wrote just two or three years later. “I gained a lot of experiences.” This job would be the first of many she would hold during her life.

Meanwhile, Betty Jean continued to serve faithfully in her church responsibilities. While just sixteen years of age, she became president of the Mutual Improvement Association. At the time of her calling, ten to twelve people usually attended the organization’s meetings. Under her administration, however, attendance skyrocketed to over a hundred people each week. “And people just loved coming to MIA,” she would reminisce. “We had fun parties, fun dances, and it was exciting.”

“Church played a great part in my life in growing up,” she would write. “I held most of the positions in the MIA including President.” Service in the MIA would continue during many of the following years in her life. Regarding her service in the M.I.A., she would recall in 1992, “I’ve had about every job in the M.I.A. except music director. And in our little old branch, there was a time or two I even led the music.”

[Move to next chapter] In 1963, she recounted one of the highlights of her MIA activity. “One year I was elected Queen from Springfield and I attended the Mission Gold & Green Ball in Kansas City. These yearly conventions were always looked forward to. Mother had made me a beautiful fuschia satin and net formal. My King was Wally Livingston (a service man, who later went on a mission and upon returning home had a cerebally hemmorage and died at the age of 23)[.] Anyway the first dance was to be dances by the King and Queens from the different Cities. We hadn’t dance[d] but a couple of seconds and the king stepped on my formal and ripped it clear to the knee.”

[Move to next chapter] Much of the fun of MIA took place in the church’s recreational hall, the maintenance of which was the duty of the church members. “I spent hours and hours at church, planning parties, decorating the hall, or just plain mopping and cleaning as there was no janitor,” she later wrote. Being president of the MIA, Betty Jean was responsible for preparing the hall for the organization’s activities, despite her health problems. She would remember:

When we were going to have a MIA activity, I would go up there, sick as I was, and would get down on my hands and knees and scrub and wax that big old floor. . . . It was quiet in the church. And I had a lot of time to think about Heavenly Father and Christ. And when I did, there was this special spirit.

Even decades later, she said she longed “to be that close to my Heavenly Father.” She concluded, “It’s so important to be of service, and when you are . . . to be quiet and to listen and communicate with our Heavenly Father.”

In addition to these private moments of meditation, she enjoyed the experiences she gained in her MIA classes. One experience in these classes would stand out above all the others and resulted from strict obedience to what she and her sisters felt were explicit instructions from Church headquarters to follow the approach outlined in the official MIA curriculum. In 1992, she recounted:

I remember one fun class I was in in Springfield. There was just me and my three sisters. And my older sister Jane was teaching the class. And we received instructions from Utah that we were to follow the manual regardless. And so the very first lesson was to get up and to introduce yourself and tell something about your family. And, of course, there was just four sisters in it. So we said, “Okay, you got to follow this manual explicitly.” So we each got up and introduced ourselves to each other and told about our things. And we laughed and enjoyed it, and of all the MIA classes I’ve ever had, that’s the one I remember most.
Although Betty Jean enjoyed a special closeness with her sisters, she also maintained good relationships with various friends who were not members of her family or church, especially her long-time friends Dorothy Gallagher and Joy Munsell.

In a 1948 autobiography written for a college class, Betty Jean would write that she, her sister Joan, Dorothy, and Joy “were together constantly.” Referring to Dorothy and Joy, she continued:

They were very good girls but were not members of the church. They would come to church with us every so often. One girl we could talk to about religion but the other just didn’t care to hear about it. We had hopes that this one girl might join the church but we thought the other never. Well one day I was alone with the one girl and we asked her to come to church & to my surprise she said she would. I took her to church with me the next day. She enjoyed it but I didn’t think about asking her to come again the next week. Well the following week she asked if she could come. Well she continuted coming for over a year. She took part on the programs, gave talks in church and worked in the M. I. A. before she was baptized. After she had been coming to church for awhile I introduced her to a soldier that I knew who was a member of the church. Well, she finally joined the church and about six months after that she married this soldier in the Salt Lake City Temple. This was indeed interesting for we thought that if either of our girls friends joined the church it would be the other one. This girl is now a very good member of the church and has two children. I also introduced my other girl friend to her husband. She married him and has one child and maybe when I go home I can preach to them.

The friend who joined the Church was Joy Munsell. She was baptized 1 July 1945 at the Springfield Branch. Eighteen years later, Betty Jean recorded that Joy was still “a very active member” of the Church. In 1976, she wrote, “Joy joined the Church and has been a member of the Springfield Branch and Ward every since.”
In the fall after Joy’s baptism, Betty Jean began her senior year of high school in an era of renewed hope. On 2 September 1945, just two days before Betty Jean’s seventeenth birthday, much of the world celebrated V-J Day, the end of World War II. The end of the war meant not only greater peace for the world but also greater prosperity for Betty Jean and her family as Dan Nickle, her building contractor father, found himself in the middle of a building boom.

Soldiers returning from the war wanted new houses, and there were not enough to go around. The demand became so great that Dan could sell homes before he had finished them. As one of his daughters later put it, “Daddy would start putting in the foundation and people would come by, see the foundation and buy the house and wait until it was finished.”

As a high school senior in 1945 and 1946, Betty Jean took classes in social studies, civics, general business practice, foods, and shorthand. She would remember her senior year as “lots of fun” because she felt grown up. Her attitude showed in her smile and proved to have a lasting influence on others.

A half century after her senior year, she received a letter from a woman who had been in high school with her. Betty Jean recalled that “she knew I had something special because as I walked down the hall I would be smiling and looked happy. She knew I was L.D.S. Many years later . . . missionaries came to her door and remembering me she let them in and later joined the church.”

At the end of the school year, Betty Jean graduated from high school. She was seventeen years old. The commencement exercises took place on the evening of Friday, 24 May 1946, at the Shrine Mosque. Her graduating class of 510 included 286 young women and 224 young men. The graduation exercises began with the audience and class singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Next, the Senior High School Orchestra played a processional, “Sullivan: March of the Peers.” The orchestra was followed by the Senior Brass Ensemble, made up of two cornets, a French horn, a trombone, a baritone, and a tuba. The ensemble played “McKay: Dramatic Prelude.”

A presentation called “Four Freedoms” followed the music. Four students each presented one of the four freedoms, “Freedom of Speech,” “Freedom of Worship,” “Freedom from Want,” and “Freedom from Fear,” while four different groups of students each depicted one of the freedoms. After the performance, the principal presented the class, and the superintendent of public schools responded. A member of the board of education then presented the diplomas, following which the president of the senior class accepted the diplomas on behalf of the class. The class of 1946 closed the ceremony by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance together.

Although she had fun at graduation, she afterwards nearly made a decision she felt would have been sorely regretted. She and her friend Dorothy went with other friends to a town that allowed marriage of seventeen-year-olds. Betty Jean served as witness while Dorothy married a young man she knew. Betty Jean was with a man who was about five years older than her. “We discussed getting married,” she later wrote. “But he got cold feet and we didn’t. What a blessing. He was a non-member, a farmer and too old for me. The Lord was really watching over me.”

He would continue watching over her in the years to come.

Notes

1.