Remembering Chuck Betts, a nice man
10/2/2024“When someone asks how you’re doing, they don’t really want to know,” Chuck Betts mentioned over coffee a few weeks before he died at age 93 on Sept. 1. “They don’t want to know any depressing details.”
“So I just say, ‘I’m doing fine,’ ” he said.
He was, and he wasn’t. He was, because he was having a full life with his family, being with and then caring for the wife he cherished until she died in June of last year, spending time with his four children — his three daughters live in town, his son in Minnesota — and getting to know even better his nine grandchildren, now adults themselves. He was active in the activities at Scottish Rite Park, where he and Janet had moved several years ago, and he was regularly seeing old friends and making new ones. He was curious about everything that was going on in town — and in the world.
But he wasn’t doing fine, because he was dying a slow death. In December of 2017, he was diagnosed with amyloidosis. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic gave him a year or two to live, telling him the disease was always fatal.
Amyloidosis is a rare disease. It affects about 14 in a million Americans, men more than women. It’s caused when an abnormal protein — amyloid — travels around your body and lands on organs or tissues. It can attack your kidneys or your liver or your heart or your nerves or, really, almost anything in your body.
With Chuck, the outward manifestation was that he slowly lost his ability to walk, and then to stand. So, for the past several years, he wheeled around Scottish Rite on an electric mobility scooter, stopping to chat with friends, heading to the dining room, or pulling up to a table for his Monday morning coffee with a half-dozen or so pals. If he was hurting, you never knew it.
That scooter had a Cadillac emblem on the front, and if you’re of a certain age you say “of course.” Because for two or three generations in this town, the name Betts was synonymous with Cadillac.
Chuck’s dad, Charles Howard Betts, sr., worked for General Motors in Detroit, but he wanted to own a dealership. In 1947, he bought the Cadillac-Oldsmobile dealership in Des Moines. So the family, including pudgy, 15-year-old Chuck Jr., moved to town, and Betts Cadillac was born.
In time — after graduation from the University of Michigan, after marrying his high-school sweetheart, after a stint in the Army — Chuck went to work for his dad, and some time later — in 1965 — he bought out his dad. (In 2008, Betts Cadillac became Willis Automotive. Rich Willis had gone to work for Chuck as a college student in 1974, later became a partner and, ultimately, the owner.)
Chuck Betts was a fine businessman and a super salesman — not because he was glib (he wasn’t) but because he was caring. He cared about his employees, his customers, and his community — and, of course, about his cars. He was a great listener, to his employees, to his customers, to his community — and even to his cars, pinpointing for you that occasional but annoying rattle you mentioned to him.
He gave this town his time and his money, often quietly, always generously. He loved helping Roosevelt High School, where that pudgy boy started turning into a lanky, trim and athletic man who came to excel in tennis and golf and skiing, and he loved helping others, either through the many social-services boards he sat on or just through encounters with people who were down on their luck.
He knew everything about cars, of course (though early on he turned down a chance to get the Toyota franchise because, he said, he’d barely heard of the car), but he knew a whole lot about a whole lot more. If someone would have a question about something at coffee, he’d pull out his iPhone and look up the answer. If someone made a dubious statement, he’d pull that phone out again and fact-check the person on the spot. He kept folks as honest — and accurate — as he was. And he loved trivia nights at Scottish Rite.
At his packed funeral at Westminster Church on Sept. 9 — where his favorite jazz combo played — a grandson, Sam Susanin, spoke briefly. He had asked the other eight grandchildren to jot down one thing they most remembered about their grandpa. They mentioned many things — his love of music, his love of sports, his advice about solving problems, his good questions and his interest in their lives.
But grandchild number five — the quotes were anonymous — summed him up best.
What was the very best, this grandchild said, “was the way his eyes sparkled when you talked to him.”
