Testing... testing... testing... testing... - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson

There are certain ideas that refuse to go away, no matter how many reasonable people quietly suggest that perhaps we should talk about something else. The Chaff has one of those ideas. For several months now, we have been making the case that Wingham should eventually have a statue of Betty White because her maternal grandmother, Margaret Hobbs, was born there in 1877. That connection is not a piece of internet folklore assembled from three Facebook posts and a photograph of somebody’s aunt standing beside a sign. Huron County historian David Yates traced the family history through census and birth records and confirmed that Margaret Hobbs was born in Wingham before the family moved to the Chicago area.

 

Fortunately, the Betty White story has another local connection, and this one involves something that has always been very good at connecting people who are otherwise sitting in separate buildings, kitchens, cars and occasionally tractors: radio. Around here, radio has never been merely a machine for telling us that it was going to rain just as we were putting the laundry on the line. Local radio has been one of the great community gathering places, particularly when there was money to be raised and a worthwhile cause involved. Radiothons could turn a radio station into a kind of temporary community headquarters, with pledges coming in, people dropping by, volunteers working the phones and somebody inevitably discovering that they had been on the air for rather longer than originally intended.

 

Betty White herself participated in radiothons in the area, including efforts connected with the Lucknow Kinsmen Club. That is a wonderfully odd little piece of local history because it puts Betty White, Hollywood celebrity and television icon, into the same orbit as the very down-to-earth community fundraising tradition that has been part of life around Huron and Bruce Counties for generations. It also adds another layer to the increasingly difficult-to-ignore argument that Betty White somehow belongs in the local story. Her grandmother gives us the family connection. Radio gives us the community connection. Suddenly, the statue campaign has acquired a little more historical wiring.

 

The Lucknow connection is worth remembering, but it does not need to swallow the whole story. The broader point is that Betty White was no stranger to broadcasting or to using her public profile to support causes. She began her career in broadcasting and became one of the great personalities of the medium, eventually moving from radio into the television career that made her a household name. The National Association of Broadcasters has even described her as a broadcasting pioneer whose career spanned seven decades. So, there is something particularly fitting about discovering that, somewhere along the way, her voice had also reached into this part of Ontario through the world of radiothons and community fundraising.

 

There is something appealing about the idea that a future statue of Betty White in Wingham might acknowledge all of that. It would not simply say, “Betty White had a grandmother who was born here,” although that is certainly the part that gets us into the room. It could also tell the stranger passing through town that this was a woman whose career was rooted in broadcasting, whose voice reached people long before streaming services made it possible to watch 17 seasons of something while simultaneously ordering socks, and who participated in fundraising efforts that connected her with communities not terribly far from the place where her grandmother began her own story.

 

Betty White’s story has plenty of those connections. Wingham has one. Radio provides another. Lucknow provides another. And somewhere in the middle of all of it is Margaret Hobbs, a woman born in Wingham in the 19th century whose granddaughter would eventually become an international star. It is the kind of historical chain that sounds slightly improbable when you put all the pieces together, which is usually a sign that local history is doing its job. The really good stories tend to have at least one moment when you stop and say, “Wait, how did those two things end up connected?”

 

The statue would not have to be a monument to celebrity for celebrity’s sake. It could be a small piece of Wingham history that happens to have an unusually famous person attached to it. Betty White was famous, certainly, but the interesting part for Wingham is not simply that she was on The Golden Girls or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It is that before she became an international star, she was somebody’s granddaughter, and that grandmother came from here. The radiothon connection then adds a second thread, tying White’s public life to the sort of community fundraising that has long been part of this region.