A Remarkable Woman: Betsy Pirie (July 1911-March 2010)

I met her walking in Austin’s Stacy Park, this thin octogenarian who always had a walking stick with her. We soon became good friends and began to time our walks so we could amble along together. 

Nothing about Betsy Pirie was ordinary, as I learned the aspects of her remarkable life. She was born in 1911 and had lived through so much. Betsy even remembered the Spanish Flu of 2018 and being quarantined at her home for several weeks.

Her father was as gifted and unusual as she. He did not finish high school, but somehow took an entrance test for Texas A & M and qualified for admittance on those scores alone. So he sold the family mule for $100 and went there, graduating as Valedictorian with an engineering degree 4 years later.

Betsy recounted one of his long-term jobs surveying a potential railroad site in “the wilds of South Texas,” which she detailed in “My River Home, 1213-1916.” Her mother became the group’s cook and the whole family lived in a tent for 3 years. Her tales of the wild life and the snakes in this area south of San Antonio were hair-raising. (I believe snakes were the only critters she did not love. Betsy used to feed the mice in her backyard, and never got rid of the wasp nest on her porch, saying they never harmed her, and that was true. The wasps and Betsy lived in peace on her front porch, where she kept vigil many a day.)

Wanting to become an engineer like her father, Betsy was frustrated that Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas, did not offer such a degree, so she had to settle for a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Drawing.

That landed her a job at the Texas Highway Department, but when her boss admitted that he thought her work was the best but could not promote her since she was a woman, she got angry and moved to San Antonio. There, like Abraham Lincoln who studied on his own to get a law degree, Betsy did the same with engineering, becoming the second Texas female Registered Professional Engineer, and the first accredited by examination. 

Modest as she was, Betsy shunned recognition, feeling that she never had a degree in engineering and refused to be recognized at a State Capitol ceremony in the late 90s. 

“Anyway,” she told me, “I was the dumb one in the family. My brother and sister passed that test, but I missed by one point. Maybe because I had never used one of those bubble answer sheets before.”

“What test?” I ventured.

“Oh, you know. Mensa,” she replied without missing a beat. 

Betsy loved her cats – the 3 or so she kept in her house, as well as the feral ones she fed on her back porch. In fact, Betsy had a sign on her door that said, “In case of fire, be sure to rescue the 3 cats within.” Forget about the 80 something resident, I guess. That was Betsy. She cared for everyone before herself.

But her real love was horses. She had many through the years, one I think that she kept near her house in Travis heights at one time. It was her final mare that was the reason she always traveled with her walking stick. But according to Betsy, it wasn’t the mare’s fault that she threw her then 75-year-old self. Something had frightened the mare and Betsy almost lost her foot as a result. She had to beg the doctors not to amputate, and after it was saved, that foot had to be elevated when she sat. She even had her car rigged so she would drive with one foot, the other hoisted on the dashboard to keep the blood flowing to it.

Betsy used to come with me to the ranch and helped me work with our horses out there. Those were very special times for both of us, and the horses responded to her love and affection. Betsy is now gone, living to almost 100, and so are the horses she loved at our ranch. In my heart I know that she is looking over them in their greener pastures, and I feel happy knowing they are in her gentle hands.

As well as a small herd of cats, perhaps the mice she used to feed out back, and even a few of those peaceful wasps from her porch.

Betsy Pirie (1911-2010): A truly remarkable woman who will live in my memory forever.