2026 - 30 Bingo Betty

Betty Ann Nolen Grigsby

My Maternal Aunt

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 30

Prompt: Free Space

When I saw the prompt, “Free Space,” I immediately thought of Bingo. And when I think of Bingo, I think of my Aunt Betty, my mother’s sister.

Bingo Betty as imagined by ChatGPT. 

Betty didn’t start playing Bingo until later in life. Her daughter Peggy remembers that Betty “hardly ever went anywhere” while Peggy was in school because she was tired from work and wouldn’t drive at night. She started playing after Peggy graduated from high school in 1981. Her regular haunt became the Creek Nation Bingo Hall on Riverside Drive in Tulsa, at the south end of the property where River Spirit Casino is today.

This wasn’t the casual one-card Bingo I remember playing as a kid. Bingo with Betty, her sister Sue—known to her children as MaSue—and Sue’s neighbor Emma was serious business.

My cousin Robbin went with them once and called it “dobber mania.”

“I sat across from all three of them and they were reaching over and dobbing the crap out of my cards upside down plus their own cards. They were like greased lightening, all I could do was get out of the way.”

My cousin Paula tried it a couple of times, too. She went expecting to eat snacks and visit with her mother and aunt. She quickly learned otherwise.

“It was too complicated for me. I went to eat snacks and talk to my mom and aunt but I found out pretty fast there wasn’t ANY peeing or eating with those women lol.”

And then there was the smoke. Robbin remembered another Bingo hall at Crestwood as “smoke city.”

“You could go to bingo at night but could not wear the same clothes the next day because of the smoke in them.”

Betty apparently had both the speed and the luck required for serious Bingo. Paula remembers that she was one of the first big winners at Creek Nation. After Betty died, Paula and Sue found the certificate while going through her house: $8,000, won in the early 1990s. Betty won plenty of other prizes over the years, too, including a huge stuffed Porky Pig when Paula’s son Matthew was a baby.

But there was much more to Aunt Betty than Bingo.

Betty worked for Borg Compressed Steel for 38 years, much of that time weighing the trucks that brought scrap metal in and out. A 1970 newspaper account even identified her as Borg’s secretary when she was present during an armed robbery at the business.

After Borg was sold, Betty found herself described in a 1987 newspaper profile with one particularly harsh word: “expendable.”

Betty apparently disagreed.

Instead of simply retiring after 38 years, she went into business for herself. She took over Tulsa Public Weighing Service at 212 Heavy Traffic Way. Before reopening the business in March 1987, she had the yard regraded, installed the weighing platform, refurbished the building and cleaned up the property.

By August, Betty was weighing 25 to 30 trucks a day and sometimes as many as 40. She even offered 24-hour service.

And Betty meant it when she said, “I can weigh anything.” Besides big and little trucks, the scales handled cattle, hogs, boats and even people. The heaviest person she had weighed tipped the scales at 550 pounds.

Betty also knew how to keep her customers happy.

“We’ve got hot coffee and a refrigerator… And a free phone. The drivers like to be babied.”

That sounds like Aunt Betty. Years later, Peggy would remember her mother as someone who took care of people, especially those others might overlook.

Of course, owning a business could interfere with Bingo.

Paula remembers Betty’s solution:

“She use to have her buddy Bill operate the weigh station and she would go play Bingo all day.”

Apparently there was always a way to make time for Bingo.

But Bingo and work are only pieces of the woman her family remembers. Peggy remembers her mother as the self-appointed social director wherever she lived and as someone who took care of people, especially those others might not consider worthy of attention. She was fairly nonjudgmental, Peggy said, but also a keen judge of character. You didn’t try to pretend to be something you weren’t around Betty.

She cussed like a sailor, loved a good joke, and had a joke ready whenever Peggy called before a doctor’s appointment while she was pregnant with Will.

Peggy also believes Betty felt like the black sheep of the family for much of her life. She wasn’t the oldest girl, she wasn’t the only boy, and she wasn’t the baby. Maybe that was part of what made her so willing to notice and care about people who might otherwise be overlooked.

But of everything Peggy said about her mother, this is the part that means the most to me:

“I know one thing to be true, she adored ALL her nieces and nephews.”

I was one of those nieces.

How lucky I was to be Aunt Betty’s niece.