Luck be a Chaff tonight - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

Friday the 13th has an unfortunate reputation among people who don’t understand how luck works. The Chaff has always considered it a day of considerable promise. After all, something good has to happen eventually, and there is no reason it shouldn’t happen on a Friday. Today is therefore an excellent day to announce what may be the most significant development in the Betty White statue campaign to date. It is also a day on which we must acknowledge that somebody may have been playing a very long game.

 

For most of this year, The Chaff has been making the case for a statue of Betty White in Wingham, honouring her maternal grandmother, Margaret Hobbs, who was born there in 1877. We have discussed the proposal at considerable length. The campaign has been focused, determined and, we believe, entirely justified.

 

There is, however, another grandmother.

 

Betty White’s paternal grandmother was Etta K. Lundy, who was born in Aurora, Ontario, in 1863. This is not new information. It was included in a Jan. 3, 2022, story about Betty White’s Wingham connection, written by Bob Montgomery. In that very article, historian David Yates explained that White’s paternal grandmother was Canadian, belonged to the Lundy family and was buried in Aurora Cemetery.

 

We had the information all along.

 

We simply didn’t really notice it.

 

Now, before anyone begins questioning our research abilities, we would like to point out that the Wingham connection was the focus of the original story, and The Chaff has been operating under the entirely reasonable assumption that when one discovers a famous person’s grandmother was born in your area, one should probably concentrate on that grandmother. We had a mission. We had a statue. We had momentum. There was no time to go wandering around the family tree looking for additional municipalities.

 

But then we noticed something else. Bob Montgomery, who wrote that 2022 story, now writes for The Citizen.

 

We are not suggesting this is suspicious. We are simply saying that a reporter once placed information about a second Canadian grandmother in a story about the first Canadian grandmother, then eventually arrived at the same newspaper where a column has spent an entire year campaigning for a statue honouring the first grandmother. It is probably nothing. Nevertheless, The Chaff has begun reviewing the available evidence.

 

Was the Aurora information deliberately placed in the original article as some sort of long-term test? Did Bob know that one day we would become so absorbed in the Wingham proposal that we would overlook an entire second Ontario connection? Was this a carefully constructed journalistic experiment designed to determine how long it takes a community newspaper column to read the second half of a paragraph?

 

We have contacted nobody about these questions, largely because we are afraid of the answers.

 

What we do know is that Aurora has a legitimate claim to Betty White’s Canadian family history. This creates a situation that could have considerable implications for municipal relations across southern Ontario. Wingham has Margaret Hobbs. Aurora has Etta Lundy. Both connections are real, and both communities have an opportunity to celebrate them.

 

Naturally, the first question is whether Aurora intends to build a statue. We have no evidence that it does. But we didn’t have any evidence that Bob was running a five-year genealogical operation either, and look where that got us.

 

The Chaff recommends that Wingham remain vigilant. We suggest an initial statue height of 20 feet, with Aurora invited to respond with a monument of its own. Should Aurora propose 21 feet, Wingham could reasonably consider 25. If Aurora adds a dog, Wingham should add two. If one community introduces illuminated bronze, the other should investigate rotating platforms. There is no reason to allow a competing municipality to establish a dominant position in the Betty White monument market.
This could become expensive, of course, which is why we suggest a more sensible alternative: co-operation.

 

Wingham could build a statue honouring Margaret Hobbs, while Aurora could recognize Etta Lundy through an appropriate monument or heritage installation. Together, the communities could establish a Betty White Canadian Heritage Trail, encouraging visitors to explore both locations and learn about the family connections that link them to one of radio and television’s most beloved personalities.

 

Perhaps Friday the 13th really is lucky, because The Chaff has finally considered that there’s more to Betty White’s family tree than the branch growing in Wingham. Lucky!