Good Morning
Thank you all for coming to remember and celebrate Bettie’s life.

1.Bukavu

On the morning of July 5th, 1967 our family awoke suddenly to the sound of bangs and loud cracks.  We stumbled out of bed confused.  We had spent the evening before celebrating Independence Day.   Mom had invited all our “expat” neighbors and we had a joyous celebration,  arranged with all her usual flair complete with fireworks  and flown-in hot dogs and Budweiser beer. We sang  American folks songs, Dad playing the guitar.….  but that was supposed to be over.

I remember stumbling down the hallway on the second floor to my Mom and Dad’s bedroom to find them both up, anxiously getting dressed and equally confused. 

We were in the middle of an invasion.  An attack by rebels, reinforced by Belgian mercenaries, who ultimately captured the city and the surrounding province in one of that region’s periodic civil wars fueled by colonialism and ethnic/tribal rivalries, and corruption.  It was a precursor to the Rwandan genocide that played out 30 years later.

We were living at the time in the Consul’s Residence in Bukavu, in the eastern part of Zaire (now the DRC), where Dad had been posted.  It was a beautiful Swiss Chalet style mansion on the shores of Lake Kivu.  

Dad got dressed and got on the shortwave radio to the U.S. Embassy and headed to Consulate to figure out what to do.  But Mom, along with our security guard, our cook and household servants were left to organize what became “Fox-Trot-Charlie” Base Camp.  

Fortunately many expat friends, diplomats and US missionaries from the area stayed overnight after the 4th of July celebrations.  That crowd of expats grew much larger as mom advertised our “Base Camp” on “social media” (then called shortwave) and the rebels closed in.

The Zairian governor showed up shaking and literally “white” pleading for sanctuary from the rebels.  Mom hid him in the attic.  The Belgian Consul was there, hiding as well.  Inconveniently, he fell through the attic ceiling into a bedroom bellow while visiting the terrified governor.  Our trembling CIA station chief shook so much he couldn’t assemble his rifle and was no help.  And while Dad was busy coordinating our evacuation from the Consulate, mom was busy guarding the door, working the short wave, and caring for, feeding folks and organizing a caravan of dozens of vehicles.

When we finally “moved out” the afternoon of the next day, we were faced with roadblocks at the front between the government and the rebels.  Dad had figured out a route across the border to Rwanda to a makeshift airstrip where a US Air Force C130 could land. Dad, ever the diplomat, somehow managed to talk us through the roadblocks, only to be greeted by machine gunfire from Rwandan military as we crossed over the border.

We kids were in the back seat of the lead Chevy Cary-all, flying the US flag, as those shots pointed at us, rang out. I still remember mom grabbing our heads and forcefully slamming us to the floor.

Needless to say we all made it. Mom and three kids strapped to the floor of that C130.  Dad staying behind to round up more evacuees.

2.Life Adventures

I don’t think Mom was expecting that much excitement when she fell in love with a young awkward music nerd at West Phoenix High School.  

She was born Bettie Alexander in Oklahoma, a long way away from Rwanda.  Her dad John Alexander, having managed to come home safely from WWII, died in a crop dusting airplane crash when she was 10.  Her mom, Gladys, married fellow G.I. Charlie Morris and they moved to Arizona where Bettie enrolled in school.  There she grew up and eventually met and fell in love with her classmate Frank. 

She would tell you, if you asked, and maybe if you didn’t… that she was the more handsome, the better student, and she got the leading parts in the schools plays.  And by the photo’s I’ve seen, I have no doubt she was the “girl to get” if you were an ambitious young man at West Phoenix High. Good work Dad!

Mom had her own plans to go to college and study drama. But as with many women of her era, she put those on hold in order to get married, start a family and support her husband’s career. 

Which of course is what happened.  Dad managed to get into Harvard, and then into the Foreign Service. A whirlwind career as diplomatic wife followed.  They were posted to DC, sent to two tours in Mexico, and then off to Kinshasa and Bukavu, Zaire, Libreville Gabon, back to DC, to Bogota Columbia, again back to Mexico.  Then it was back to Africa as “Mrs. Ambassador” in Kigali Rwanda and Mogadishu Somalia before retiring.  Quite a journey.

3.Friendships and lasting bonds

Moving every couple of years meant having to find and meet new friends.  For us children moving from school to school, was hard.  But for mom, her extroverted nature seemed to recharge with every transfer.  She made many life long friends along the way, some of whom we are lucky to have here today.

I have to mention one of them who isn’t but should be.  Mom’s strong and enduring friendship with Dian Fossey. Their friendship was precious to mom and Dian’s murder at her gorilla research center in 1985 was traumatic.  On many occasions Mom trekked up Mount Visoke to visit and venture out with Dian to greet and observe her extended gorilla family on the mountain.  At Dian’s primitive base camp, lit by a fire, they laughed and played like children, drank like seaman, and had a sisterhood’s perspective on authority figures, men in particular, and what today we would call the “un-woke.”  The hundreds of letters they wrote to each other about their most intimate fears, longing, ambitions and aspirations are a story of a deep friendship.

I think, in hindsight, that part of that friendship involved a mutual admiration and jealousy.  Dian was at the peak of her profession, recognized as a leading primatologists and conservationists along with Goodall and Galdikas.  Dian, unhappily unmarried, had pursued excellence and had achieved it.  Mom, happily the diplomats wife, had pursued mastery, and achieved that.

4.Mastery

Mom was a master at so so many things.  Dian was both admiring and jealous.

Mom had cooked her way through every Julia Child and Diana Kennedy recipe and mastered the art of French and Mexican Cooking.

She could lap anyone in the pool, soundly beat any young peace corp team at volley ball and demolish you in croquette. In her late 70’s she could cycle across North Carolina.  

She would humiliate any opponent at charades.  She loved to win at everything she did.

She was a master seamstress, upholster, jeweler, weaver.  Her ability to craft exquisite artifacts by hand inspired her children to learn our own skills in cabinet making, luthery, and knitting. 

After the government had retaken Bukavu, Dad returned to our ransacked home to find a steamer trunk in the wreckage.  In it was a quilt, started but unfinished by one of Mom’s Lee ancestors.  She finished it, meticulously, and it sits on the bed in Curtis Lee Mansion in Arlington.

Pamela Harriman, the famous diplomatic doyenne had nothing over mom when it came to entertaining and putting on the perfect reception, dinner or soireé.  Her affairs were always social calendar “events”

I don’t think when Mom signed up as “foreign service” wife she was ever bitter.  But the  unfulfilled ambition that she carried contributed to a lifelong desire to explore, experience and be really really good at what she did.  And what she decided to do, she did with passion!

5.Mary and Martha 

Which is why she hated the story of Martha and Mary.  

Not the one we just heard where, true to Martha’s, she basically organizes the resurrection of her brother Lazarus by summoning Jesus.  

No, she hated the earlier story in the Gospel when Jesus and his disciples visited their home in Bethany.  Martha is busy preparing the table and making the meal for the guests, and Mary is chilling with Jesus and disciples in the living room.   Jesus admonishes Martha for complaining that Mary was neglecting her duties.   

Mom had heard a good number of bad sermons on why Martha was wrong for complaining. But the story drove Mom crazy.  Here was Martha, putting on the reception of a lifetime.  The Son of God was going to be there, for pete’s sake.  How could Mary not help? Mom was definitely a Martha not a Mary. I know why it drove her crazy.  
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Bettie was passionate and energetic. She led a life in pursuit of mastery, as a wife and mother; as a diplomat and hostess for the United States; as weaver, jeweler, seamstress and fabric arts designer; as an entrepreneur; and as a passionate civic activist. She lived life with a vengeance. 

Rest In Peace, Mom!  And Rise in Glory.

Bettie Ann Crigler died peacefully in her home in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday, December 27th at the age of 83. She led a life in pursuit of mastery, as a wife and mother; as a diplomat and hostess for the United States; as weaver, jeweler, seamstress and fabric arts designer; as an entrepreneur; and as a passionate civic activist for progressive causes. She is survived by her husband of 65 years, their three children and three grandchildren.   


Bettie was born Bettie Ann Alexander in Oklahoma in 1936 to Gladys Cook and John Alexander. After John Alexander died in a crop dusting crash, Gladys and Bettie moved to Phoenix. Gladys remarried Charlie Morris and Bettie remained in Arizona until she graduated from West Phoenix High School.  She married her high school sweetheart and classmate Trusten “Frank” Crigler and moved to Cambridge Massachusetts while her husband completed his degree at Harvard College. In 1957 the couple had their first son, Jeffrey Charles and her husband Frank graduated. The couple returned to Phoenix and had their daughter, Lauren Elizabeth in 1959.


In 1961 Frank joined the U.S. Foreign Service and Bettie moved her young family to northern Virginia for Frank’s new job at the State Department.  The couple embarked on a diplomatic odyssey, moving first to Mexico where their second son, Jeremy Trusten, was born in 1964. Bettie managed and organized transfers to posts in the US, Africa and Latin America over the next 30 years.  They included Zaire (now The Democratic Republic of the Congo); Libreville, Gabon; Washington DC; Mexico City; and Frank’s Ambassadorship in Rwanda (1976-1979); DCM and Chargé d'Affaires position in Colombia (1979-1981); and Ambassadorship in Somalia (1987-1990). Frank and Bettie left the Foreign Service in 1990 and moved back to Boston where Frank taught at Simmons College before retiring to Durham, North Carolina in 1993.


As the wife of a US foreign service officer, Bettie did not pursue a career of her own. She had plans as a young adult to go to college and study drama, and in fact, fell in love with husbandr during a play they were both in (he, merely a walk-on, she, the star attraction).  However, by falling in love and hitching her wagon to Frank, she set off on more than a career; she became the engine behind his achievements and the cushion absorbing the (few, albeit) falls. She quickly became the master planner, organizer, facilitator, hostess, seamstress, chef, and quintessential Memme l’Ambassadrice. She mentored young wives in the foreign service facing the daunting tasks she had by now mastered. She raised her three children in darkest Africa during its most dangerous and rebellious times, enrolling them in local schools when possible (Belgian missionary schools) so that they would grow to understand the cultures and people where they lived, not in the cloistered anglo and european communities, but amidst the noisy and confusing, but mostly rewarding, cultures around them. She worked with womens’ cooperatives in jewelry making, weaving, clothing design, and wearable art for export to the US, culminating in the smash success of a fashion show in Mogadishu, Somalia, just prior to their departure in 1990.


Bettie’s dearest friend throughout this odyssey was Dian Fossey. Their friendship began in 1967 when my Frank, then in Congo, was asked to help free Dian from Congolese soldiers holding her captive in the Virunga mountains. When Frank became Ambassador in Rwanda, their friendship blossomed and the family spent several Christmases and Thanksgivings on the mountain with Dian, tracking gorillas, learning how to ‘speak’ to them with a low muamba to reassure them as we approached. Bettie and the family got to know the gorilla groups, the silverbacks and the babies, and tracked their movements through the years, their hearts breaking at every horrible attack and death suffered by them, name by name. After departing Rwanda, Bettie and Dian continued their friendship through long and regular letters until Dian’s untimely death in 1985.


Bettie started her own business (BC Designs) after she and Frank retired to Durham NC, designing and manufacturing cushions, pillows, curtains and other interior articles -- hiring staff and opening a workshop in downtown Durham.  Bettie quickly became engaged in the Durham community; she volunteered at voting sites, she joined a mystery book club, she made dishes for the homeless through St. Phillips. Bettie and Frank became avid bikers and would reserve weekend days to bike all over the area. At the age of 72, Bettie and Frank, along with close friends Judy and Curt Eschelman, took part in the North Carolina bike ride from Mountains to Coast, biking more than 450 miles. Several years later, the same foursome biked across France. Travel continued to be a passion, well into her 70s.  She traveled to Turkey, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Venice, Arizona, sometimes with Frank and sometimes with friends. 


Bettie was passionate and energetic. She led a life in pursuit of mastery, as a wife and mother; as a diplomat and hostess for the United States; as weaver, jeweler, seamstress and fabric arts designer; as an entrepreneur; and as a passionate civic activist. She lived life with a vengeance.