Nadene Goldfoot
Who doesn't remember Betty White, the ding a ling on Golden Girls? Everyone was looking forward to her 100th birthday celebration which would be on TV, on January 16th. Yesterday that was announced and today ABC was interrupted with the announcement that she died today. For all of us hoping to reach ours, and wondering what her secrets were to be as old as 99, we're devastated at her death. She was such a role model of living life and enjoying it.
She was born as Betty Marion White Ludden. Betty Marion White was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922. She stated that Betty was her legal name and not a shortened version of Elizabeth. She was the only child of Christine Tess (née Cachikis; 1899–1985), a homemaker, and Horace Logan White (1899–1963), a lighting company executive.] Her paternal grandfather was Danish and her maternal grandfather was Greek, with her other roots being English and Welsh (both of her grandmothers were Canadians).
White's family moved to Alhambra, California, in 1923 when she was a little over a year old, and later to Los Angeles during the Great Depression. To make extra money, her father would build crystal radios and sell them wherever he could. Since it was the height of the Depression, and hardly anyone had a sizable income, he would trade the radios in exchange for other goods, including dogs on some occasions.
White attended the Beverly Hills Unified School District in Beverly Hills, and Beverly Hills High School, graduating in 1939. Her interest in wildlife was sparked by family vacations to the Sierra Nevada. She initially aspired to a career as a forest ranger, but was unable to accomplish this because women were not allowed to serve as rangers at that time. Instead, White pursued an interest in writing.
She wrote and played the lead in a graduation play at Horace Mann School, and discovered her interest in performing. Inspired by her idols Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy,famous movie singers, she decided to pursue a career as an actress.
Following the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1977, White was offered her own sitcom on CBS, her fourth entitled The Betty White Show (the first a quarter century earlier). She co-starred with John Hillerman and former Mary Tyler Moore co-star Georgia Engel, but it was canceled in 1978, after only one season. From 1983 to 1984, White had a recurring role playing Ellen Harper Jackson on the series Mama's Family, along with future Golden Girls co-star Rue McClanahan. White had originated this character in a series of sketches on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s.
In 1985, White scored her second signature role and the biggest hit of her career as the St. Olaf, Minnesota native Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. The series chronicled the lives of four widowed or divorced women in their "golden years" who shared a home in Miami. The Golden Girls, which also starred Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, and Rue McClanahan, was immensely successful and ran from 1985 through 1992. White won one Emmy Award, for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series, for the first season of The Golden Girls and was nominated in that category every year of the show's run (the only cast member to receive that distinction – Getty was also nominated every year, but in the supporting actress category).
Allen Ludden died from stomach cancer on June 9, 1981, in Los Angeles. While they had no children together, she was a stepmother to three of his children from his first marriage to Margaret McGloin Ludden, who died of cancer in 1961. White decided not to remarry, since Ludden's death. In an interview with Larry King, when asked whether she would remarry, she replied by saying "Once you've had the best, who needs the rest?" When asked by James Lipton on Inside The Actor's Studio that should Heaven exist, what would she like God to say to her when she walked through the Pearly gates, White replied: "Hello Betty. Here's Allen.
White died at her home in the Brentwood on the morning of December 31, 2021, at the age of 99, seventeen days before what would have been her 100th birthday. She didn't die in a hospital. She didn't die in a retirement home. She must have been healthy enough to be able to die at home.
As to her health, In an exclusive statement shared with Fox News Digital on Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021, about how she stays happy and healthy — and what keeps her going — she captured so much in such a succinct couple of lines.
"I've always been a cockeyed optimist," Betty White told Fox News. "I got it from my mom. I'm gonna stick with it."As Betty White prepares to celebrate her birthday very soon, here are a few of her other great one-liners and wise witticisms she's delivered over the years, in a variety of venues (some of these are from her 2011 book, "If You Ask Me (and Of Course You Won't").
—"I don’t have a sweet tooth, but I do have a cocktail before dinner. I also love French fries and hot dogs." —"It’s fun to show appreciation to the ones you love."—"So you may not be as fast on your feet, and the image in your mirror may be a little disappointing, but if you are still functioning and not in pain, gratitude should be the name of the game."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_White
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/betty-whites-secret-long-happy-healthy-life-hint-it-came-mom
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