Betty Betz

Betty Betz was born and raised in Hammond, Indiana in 1920. She was a fashion copywriter for Harper's Bazaar Magazine, and she wrote monthly features for magazines such as Seventeen and Women's Home Companion. In the late 1940's, and early 1950's, she wrote self-help books with cartoon drawings for young adults, some of them with verse by Anne Clark, which advised sensibility, consideration, and generosity. These include the titles Your Manners Are Showing, The Party Book, The Career Book, Manners for Moppets and The Teen-Age Cookbook. She was also a popular lecturer, and there was merchandise, such as wastebaskets, notebooks, and pencil holders, decorated with her cartoons. During the Korean War, she was a war correspondent for Hearst newspapers. In 1956, she married Frank McMahon, a multimillionaire Canadian oil magnate from Canada, and moved to Calgary, Alberta. She continued to write, and published the Betty Betz Cookbook in 1956. She had a daughter in 1957. After her husband's death in 1986, she currently lives in Bermuda, where she suffers from Alzheimer's Disease but continues to paint occasionally.