Book Release: From Butler MO to Bullock Is

Many of us have stories about how we landed in Washington DC and surrounds. Betty Fuqua’s is one of the more unusual.

The answer lies in the title of an early chapter, How My Birth Mother’s Bad Choice in Maids Changed My Life, in Fuqua’s new memoir.

The short version is that the maid got pregnant, and Betty’s father fessed up. As you might expect in rural Missouri in the 1930s, a scandal ensued. The family broke up. The offended wife Gladys, Betty's non-resident birth mother, upped and moved to the District, Oddly, she took Betty in tow.

“If you ever hire a maid, make sure she is old, fat and ugly,” Fuqua reports as Gladys' advice, in From Butler Mo to Bullock Island: A Nonagenarian's Memoir of Grit and Independence.

The book is published by New Bay Books.

When you’re 92, which Betty Jean Fuller Fuqua turned in March, you’ve hopefully acquired enough memories and sufficient material for a book, Betty certainly has, including how she ended up owning an island in the Potomac and living there for many years.

A basketball star, Frank Fuqua, Betty’s 6’7" late husband, comes off as irritating and erratic in the book. It was his decision to move Betty and three children year round to a summer home on Bullock Island, a half-mile off the shore of St. Catherine Sound in St. Mary’s County.

Betty was pregnant at the time, so Frank and a young hoopster he coached handled it by boat. But, as Betty recalls, left behind bedroom furniture, the den furniture, the washer and dryer and the lawn mower, among other things.

“Sometimes I could have killed that man,” Betty writes. 

Frank Fuqua died in 2016 at age 83. An obit noted his association with famed North Carolina coaches after his playing career, among them Dean Smith, Roy Williams, and John Thompson of Georgetown, where Frank was an assistant coach.

In her book, Betty goes from a fearless child living on a farm south of Kansas City with no electricity to a legal aid commuting to work each day in her personal Chris-Craft — separate from Frank’s big bay-built. 

For two decades, Betty worked at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office. She writes about the challenge, danger and discomfort of setting out for the mainland each day, be it rainy, snowy or stormy. And returning in the evening.

To their animal family, mostly collies, they added a pony, which, of course, meant moving it first by trailer and then by boat. But Princess the pony wasn’t keen on the plan, which was when Missouri-bred Betty’s farm sensibilities kicked in.

“I remembered that if you grabbed her by the ear and by the tail, she would go in. That worked. Then I remembered that technique wasn’t for horses, it was for cows. Oops,” Betty writes.