Betz to Mark 100th Birthday Oct. 13

WILDWOOD CREST – Leona Catanoso Betz will join a rare club Oct. 13, 2018. She will turn 100 years old.
According to the family, Betz was born in Philadelphia to immigrants from southern Italy, Carmelo Catanoso and Caterina Foti. She was the fourth of their nine children and moved with her family to 18th Street and New York Avenue in North Wildwood in the late 1920s.
Her father opened the first Italian-American grocery store on Five Mile Island, and her family lived above the store. She worked there as a girl, as did her siblings.
A lot of history is made in a century, and Betz entered the world at a historic time. In 1918, Germany was surrendering as World War I ended. Woodrow Wilson was president. U.S. women would not get the right to vote for another two years.
Transportation was mostly horse and buggy. But Henry Ford’s Model T was gaining in popularity, even in the Wildwoods, she recalled. The U.S. Postal Service initiated air mail in the year she was born.
She was just 9 years old when Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. The Great Depression took hold of the country and her family in 1929, when she was 11.
Betz suffered through World War II with her mother and sisters Bessie, Elizabeth, and Mary as three of her brothers – Anthony (who was mayor of North Wildwood for 27 years), Charles and Joseph served overseas and returned home safely.
Her brother Leonard, her closest friend until his death at age 94 in 2015, was in officer training in the Southeastern United States as the war ended in 1945. Her youngest brother, Peter, served in the Korean War.
Life in Education
Betz was smart and industrious and dreamed of going to college. But there was no extra money in a modest household of nine children, two parents and two grandparents from Calabria, Italy, who didn’t speak a word of English.
Instead, she graduated from Wildwood High School in 1936 and not long after took a job she would keep more than 40 years, her entire career. She was secretary to the principal at Margaret Mace School in North Wildwood. That is where she and her siblings had also graduated from the ninth grade.
She became an indispensable force for public education in North Wildwood and was always a close confidante and unofficial academic and disciplinary advisor to a string of principals, her favorite being the highly respected J. Elwood Chester.
She helped her brother Leonard get a job as a physical education teacher and athletic coach at Margaret Mace after he finished college at Penn State and completed his military commitment.
Education and history were always passions in her life. While she married relatively late in 1964, she married an educator – George “Buzz” Betz, a Duke University graduate who taught chemistry at Wildwood High School for decades.
He also supervised the lifeguards in Wildwood Crest, where she still lives. The couple didn’t have any children, but she was particularly close to her nearly two dozen nieces and nephews, many of whom passed through the halls of Margaret Mace.
Each one lived in fear of being sent to the office, knowing full well that their parents would soon be getting a call regarding whatever trouble sent them to the second floor administrative suite.
Friends, family and community service
At the school, she developed a lifelong friendship with fifth-grade teacher Katherine McPherson, with whom she often traveled.
Like her, McPherson was a member of the century-old club, living to the age of 101. 
Betz was an active member of the Wildwood Civic Club for many years, and even outfitted a second-floor room in the club’s Atlantic Avenue Victorian house with her husband’s furniture and memorabilia.
She was equally supportive of the Historic Cold Spring Village, and reveled in sharing details about the history of Cape May County.
Betz, always wide open to the world around her, was a frequent traveler and voracious reader of newspapers, magazines, and books.
As she nears a century milestone, which she will mark with her two living siblings, Mary, 95, and Joseph, 93, she can reflect on a remarkable century and an active life well lived, filled with the love of family and friends. 
ED. NOTE: The author is a nephew of Leona Catanoso Betz.