88-Year-Old Dickinson College Alumna Spearheads Retirement-Community Volunteer Project, Makes 700 Medical-Quality Masks
Betts Middleton Slim '53 finishes up masks, suitable for medical use. Working in her home, she led a team of 50 volunteers to create 700 for distribution to health care workers, homeless vets and other vulnerable populations
'Our motto was: Make it happen,' says Betts Middleton Slim '53
by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson
Betts Middleton Slim '53 finishes up medical-quality masks. Working in her home, she led a team of 50 volunteers to create 700 for distribution to health care workers, homeless vets and other vulnerable populations.
With two family members on the front lines, 88-year-old Betts Middleton Slim ’53 was not about to sit idly by as news broke about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in the U.S. Sheltering at home within her over-55 residential community, Slim rallied 50 of her neighbors and spearheaded an ambitious mask-making project, ultimately providing more than 700 medical-grade masks for some of those most in need.
“This is the biggest calamity of my lifetime—bigger, to me, than World War II, the Vietnam War or 9/11,” she says. “I had to do something to help.”
Slim grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, and attended Dickinson on scholarship. She majored in English and earned a social studies minor and an education certificate, and she also found time to work campus jobs during all four years on campus while getting involved with Wheel and Chain, the Mermaid Players, The Dickinsonian and several sports.
As a sophomore, she became engaged to her future husband, Bill, who interrupted his college education to join the Navy and serve in the Korean War. They married just three months after her graduation and, two years later, began a family of four daughters. Slim resumed her teaching career when their youngest, Bonny, entered first grade.
Slim’s favorite job was her last—at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. As a middle-school English and social studies teacher, she traveled with her students to Mexico, Russia, New Zealand, Australia and the Ecuadoran rainforest as part of an environmental-education program. And after 30 years in the classroom, Slim stayed on as the school’s alumni director, retiring in 2012.
Slim remains active, both through her church and within her 55-plus retirement community in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Her large family now includes nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and she keeps in touch by email and phone.
In March, when she learned about the shortage of personal protective equipment for health care workers treating COVID-19 patients—including a daughter, who is a physician’s assistant, and another daughter's husband, a nursing-home medical director—Slim snapped into action. First, she picked up volunteer-made masks and dropped them off at an area medical center. Then she decided to make 100 or so masks herself.
As word of her plans spread via Facebook throughout her retirement community, roughly 50 volunteers stepped up to help. The oldest was 96.
“A buzz of activity ensued,” says Slim. “The headquarters was my front porch.”
Slim ran a well-oiled, social-distance-compliant machine: While eight volunteers, including Slim, worked the sewing machines, the others cut, pinned, washed and pressed masks. Another volunteer brought the seamstresses supplies and picked up masks for delivery. All wore masks and gloves and maintained a safe distance from one another. In all, roughly 550 masks suitable for medical-grade use were provided to three health care centers and to vulnerable persons in their community and regionally; others were provided to homeless veterans. Roughly 150 masks remain.
The decades-old sewing machines are silent now, and Slim and many of her friends are now hard at work in their gardens. She says those industrious eight weeks provided a deep sense of purpose during a difficult time for the volunteers and also sparked memories of childhood, when her family and community sacrificed and rallied in support of the troops during World War II.
“We’re all old enough to remember the war, so when something like this happens, it’s in our DNA to not just sit back and let this panic overwhelm us,” says Slim, who was 10 years old when America entered World War II, and still recalls learning to knit scarves for the American soldiers. “Our motto for the mask project was ‘make it happen.’ We did. I keep a sign with that motto on my door to remind me.”
Read more stories about how members of the Dickinson community near and far have responded to emerging needs and challenges during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Published June 2, 2020