Betty Tisdale won't divulge her age. She will in Vietnam, where they revere their elders, but not here. Be assured, however, that this article belongs on this page.
Betty Moul was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., the eldest of five children - all girls except the youngest, a boy who died in infancy. Their father was a dairy manager who arranged the routes of milkmen. Back then, milk was delivered by horse-drawn wagons, and people had iceboxes outside their windows. "In winter," recalls Betty, "the extreme cold caused the cream to rise above the milk."
The girls' mother had tuberculosis and lived in a sanitarium. Their father died when Betty was 9, and they were dispersed among relatives and neighbors. Betty was raised by an aunt and uncle.
After high school, Betty didn't go to college because her aunt and uncle couldn't afford it. "But I've done well in my life without it," she says. She never floundered for something to do. Purposes were all around her.
Her first paying job was shelving books at Carnegie Library. During World War II she was a plane spotter for several eastern states, plotting the progress of planes on a map (no enemy craft was ever sighted).
Evenings and weekends Betty worked as a volunteer, driving a food wagon for Meals on Wheels and an ambulance for the Red Cross. As a "Gray Lady," or nurse's aide, she shaved wounded soldiers, played checkers with them and otherwise kept them company after they'd been returned to stateside hospitals. She attended USO-sponsored dances and danced with "the boys" (she recalls that a popular song was "I'll Be Seeing You," sung by Jo Stafford, known as "G.I. Jo"); Betty taught dance at a Fred Astaire studio.
And for the duration, Betty corresponded with every single boy in her high school class who served.
Clearly, she could discern and meet the needs of others. But she never learned job skills like typing or shorthand. None-theless, Betty was hired by U.S. Steel Corporation, where she learned those skills. (She recently visited the woman who hired her, now 104.)
Betty's first position, still in Pittsburgh, was collating reports. From there she moved up to personnel and public relations, shifting to New York City along the way. Betty worked 21 years for U.S. Steel and did very well.
"But I was taking, not giving," she says.
Then she read a book by Dr. Thomas A. Dooley, "Deliver Us From Evil." It changed her life.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Mo., Tom Dooley entered medical school in 1953. For his internship he rejoined the Navy and was assigned to the USS Montague. Working on the evacuation of Haiphong, he witnessed the suffering of more than 600,000 refugees from North and South Vietnam. After his discharge from the Navy, Dooley returned to Vietnam and Laos, where he set up small clinics and hospitals, striving tirelessly despite his own failing health.
Stricken with malignant melanoma, he was hospitalized in New York City. Betty met him there in late 1959. She persistently left messages for him, saying, "My name is Betty Moul and I want to meet you and I can type" (she knew he was overwhelmed with correspondence). He finally relented, and she took dictation for him every morning before going to work at U.S. Steel.
Dooley died in early 1961, at age 34, and Betty decided to carry on his work, focusing on children. She quit her job and got another as a secretary for Sen. Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.). Javits, too, was concerned about the plight of orphans in war-torn countries and allowed her to use his name for her cause.
She got Heinz to donate baby food, John-son & Johnson to donate diapers, convoys of commercial trucks to transport them (for free) to San Diego and Navy ships to transport them (for free) to Vietnam. "I've never paid for anything, except stamps," Betty says.
In December 1961, she went to Vietnam for the first time. She went every year, focusing her efforts on the An Lac Orphanage in Saigon, until 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the Communists.
Betty has resorted to some unusual tactics to attain her goals. She once posed as a stewardess on a charter plane to get herself to Vietnam, absconding with the untouched food from the flight for the orphans.
Betty had been engaged five times but never married. In 1967 she met Patrick Tis-dale, a pediatrician and Army colonel whose medical corpsmen regularly visited the orphanage, and who sometimes appeared there himself. A widower with five young sons, he proposed "out of the blue," she says. "There really was no romance beforehand." But she accepted, and they were married in 1969.
Over the next three years the couple adopt-ed six Vietnamese girls - four as infants, two somewhat older - all of whom might not have survived otherwise. "The boys really took to the girls," says Betty. Sadly, the youngest died at just three weeks of age, in the Philippines, where she is buried.
After Patrick was discharged from the Army, the family lived in Columbus, Ga. Betty mothered 10 children and continued her humanitarian work.
Then came Operation Baby Lift. On April 12, 1975, thousands of children were evacuated from Saigon with the Viet Cong just 12 miles away. Seven adoption agencies were given clearance by the U.S. government, but that didn't include Betty. Being an individual and not an agency, she had to improvise to participate in the evacuation.
Betty had a mandate to evacuate 400 children from the An Lac Orphanage. At the last minute she was told that no child over 10 would be allowed to leave, and birth certificates were required for the others. No such certificates existed, so she went to a ma-ternity hospital, got blank forms and forged them all, inventing birthdates. Dr. Cao Xuan An signed the birth certificates, and Betty was able to get 219 orphans out of Vietnam.
As truckloads of children pulled away, women ran up to Betty, holding infants in their outstretched arms and crying, "Take my baby! Take my baby!" Betty was doing something monumental, but she couldn't do everything.
Betty appealed to the mother of the Secretary of the Army to get her son to provide a temporary place for the children to stay before they were adopted. He arranged accommodations at a school in Fort Ben-ning, Ga. All 219 children were adopted within a month through the Tressler Adoption Agency in York, Pa.
Betty was assisted in her efforts by the actress Ina Balin, as well as director of the An Lac Orphanage, Mme. Vu Thi Ngai. Not long after Operation Baby Lift, Betty got Mme. Ngai and her two assistants out of Vietnam as well and brought them to live with her and her family in Georgia. Mme. Ngai died there in 1978. (The story of this dramatic rescue was told in a TV movie, "The Children of An Lac," starring Shirley Jones as Betty and Ina Balin as herself.)
After Operation Baby Lift and the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists, Betty did not return to Vietnam for 20 years because she heard she was on a hit list as a "baby stealer."
In 1982, Betty was offered a job at the Pacific Institute in Seattle. She was delighted to move, perceiving the Northwest as more racially diverse and tolerant than the South, and therefore a better place for her daughters. They lived in a large house on Queen Anne, and Betty cooked for 12.
Ten years later, their children grown, she and Patrick divorced. Now Betty lives happily by herself in a smaller house on Queen Anne. She does not enjoy cooking for one. "I don't eat well," she says.
She takes an aerobics class twice a week at the Queen Anne senior center, followed by a late breakfast with a friend at Denny's.
"I have the bad habit of frugality," says Betty. "I save coupons and shop at consignment shops, yard sales and Goodwill, where I can buy clothes by the pound."
Betty resumed her visits to Vietnam in 1995. She found 60 of the children she had to leave behind two decades before, and they had a joyous reunion.
In March of this year, she visited Vietnam for the 25th time.
Over the years Betty has expanded her relief efforts to nine other orphanages and a leper colony in Vietnam; the Casa de Cuna Orphanage in Uruapan, Mexico; the Luz de Vida Orphanage in Bogota, Colombia; and to Afghanistan. She expedites supplies to Afghanistan, to the Aschiana School and the Parsa physical therapy clinic for polio and landmine victims. She wants to improve maternity wards. "Conditions there are terrible," she says. "Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world."
She also is setting her sights on Rwan-da and Iraq.
In 2000 she founded Helping and Loving Orphans, or HALO, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children in Third World countries. That way she can ask for money directly, and not resort to her earlier stopgap methods, effective as they were.
"Donations to HALO have dropped since the tsunami," she says. While the tsunami was a disaster of great magnitude, there are children in need everywhere.
Betty has received many prestigious awards, including the Presidential Commendation from President Nixon, but still she laments, "I'm getting older and older, and there's so much left to do."
A Catholic, she attends St. James Cathedral. She chose a large church because years ago a Vietnamese "life reading" predicted that there will be a lot of people at her funeral. In the 15th-century work "Everyman" it is said that the only things you can take to heaven are your good deeds. For Betty, it will be crowded in the church, and crowded in heaven.[[In-content Ad]]
