ELIZABETH ROSE TAYLOR, AGE 82, PASSES AWAY IN DECATUR, GEORGIA
Elizabeth Rose Taylor died peacefully at home, at the age of 82, in Decatur, Georgia, on March 13, 2017. She was surrounded by her husband, Jay Taylor, her four children, and many of her beloved grandchildren.
Mrs. Taylor, known as Betsy, was adored by all who knew her compassionate, nurturing spirit. She was a beautiful woman who saw beauty in everyone. Her life was filled with travel and adventure, but nothing in life was more important to Betsy than family. She and Jay liked to call their close family circle The Golden Horde. To all the members of The Golden Horde, Betsy was known as Nai-Nai, the Chinese word for grandmother. Nai-Nai poured boundless devotion and care into nurturing and uplifting her beloved family, and creating the special closeness of this growing, loving, and fun-loving family group. Her compassionate spirit will live on in their lives and in the lives of so many others whom she touched all around the world.
Betsy raised her four children while traveling the globe for forty-one years with Jay, who served as a pilot for the US Marine Corps and then as a diplomat with the US foreign service. In addition to being a mother, Betsy acted as ambassador for her country in the many different cities in which she lived, graciously hosting government officials, businessmen, journalists, religious leaders, artists and other civil society leaders at her home. People of all nationalities and walks of life were drawn to her warmth, her authentic curiosity about others, and her kindhearted nature. She thought everyone she met was fascinating. She was a natural communicator, equally at ease chatting with VIP dignitaries at state dinners, entertaining a group of Chinese opera singers at her dinner table, or bartering at the fish market for the day’s best catch.
Betsy loved to create beautiful, peaceful homes and gardens for her family and guests to enjoy. She devoted enormous thought, time and energy into renewing and beautifying her family’s living environments in the twenty-four different homes she occupied, not only for her family but also for the foreign service families that would occupy them after. She had a refined sense of aesthetic beauty and filled her home with carefully chosen art objects which she found while exploring the ancient hutongs of Old Beijing or the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul. Betsy learned to speak Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. She did not hesitate to venture out into the streets of all the foreign cities where her family was posted, mastering knowledge of where to find the best quality vegetables, the tailor with the finest seams, and the most trustworthy hairdresser in town.
She also loved the adventure of exotic travel and planned incredible experiences for her family; the Taylors rode camels in the Gobi Desert, crossed Russia and Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, transversed the Pacific on the President Wilson ocean liner, sailed down the Yangtze River on a traditional river steamer, and were the first family in line to sign-up for the first-ever walking safari in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. It was this intrepid spirit, and her boundless curiosity about other people and places, that led her to venture so far from the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, where she was born. But no matter where she was in the world, Betsy remained closely connected to her Tennessee roots, carrying with her always the love and values that she learned from her extended Payne family back home.
Betsy was born on September 14, 1934, in Lone Mountain, Tennessee. Her father, Cawood Rose, died when she was five, and her mother, Sally Payne, brought Betsy and her younger brother David, to live with their grandparents, A. and Byrd Payne, the proprietor of a general store. The household included an extended family of aunts and uncles who treated Betsy like their beloved youngest sister. Her cherished Uncle Roger Payne was an especially important influence in her life, and the two of them remained close all of Roger’s life. As a young girl, Betsy was given a Lester spinet piano by her mother, which was placed in the living room of her grandparent’s home. Her study of piano began a life-long love of music for Betsy. While growing up in Lone Mountain, she played for family sing-alongs and accompanied Sunday services in the Lone Mountain Baptist Church. In later years, the piano traveled with Betsy to many foreign posts, and Betsy’s daughters and even grandchildren took piano lessons on that same Lester spinet from Lone Mountain.
At the age of thirteen, Betsy moved to Kansas City to live with her Aunt Anne and Uncle Maury Kite, and their two daughters Linda and Cynthia, who became like sisters to Betsy. In Kansas, Betsy became president of her sorority at Southwest High School and worked as a department store model. She attended Texas Women’s College for a year, then transferred to Touro Nursing School at Tulane University in New Orleans. It was there that Betsy had a chance fateful encounter at the Café du Monde with a young Naval Aviation Cadet named Jay Taylor. Four months later, Jay and Betsy married. She was nineteen and he was twenty-two, a Vanderbilt University graduate and a Marine Lieutenant helicopter and fixed-wing pilot. They were married for sixty-two years.
The couple moved immediately to Japan, where Jay was assigned to the Marine Airbase at Opama. They lived in Kamakura and Zushi, where Betsy found a traditional Japanese house for them to live in, with tatamis and sliding doors. Nearby was a US Naval hospital where she gave birth to John. Their daughter Laurie arrived when the couple was later stationed at Camp Pendleton in California.
In 1957, Jay fulfilled a dream and was admitted into the US Foreign Service. The family’s first posting was to Accra, Ghana, where Jay and Betsy and their two small children were among the first diplomatic families to serve at the newly-opened Embassy in the newly-independent African country. Among Betsy’s many challenges at this first foreign service post was keeping the neighbor’s monkey from opening the children’s Christmas presents, and learning diplomatic protocols of the time, involving calling cards, hats and gloves. Then off they went to Taichung, Taiwan, where Betsy and Jay both learned Mandarin Chinese. There Amy was born in a missionary hospital in a nearby small town, followed by sister Cynthia, born in the island’s capitol, Taipei, also at a missionary hospital. At the American Embassy, Jay reported on political affairs and he frequently brought his contacts home for lunch. Betsy, taking advantage of her Chinese language skills, was a splendid and gracious hostess.
Betsy and Jay’s next foreign post was in Kuching, in the steaming tropical jungles of Borneo. There, the family lived in a colonial house on stilts with a thatched roof, a parrot in the orchid house, and a scaly anteater scurrying around the rambattan trees. Betsy walked her little girls across the street to the Lodge School each day and attended to her many duties as wife of the Consul General.
From there it was on to Hong Kong and a house on Shoushun Hill with sweeping views of Deepwater Bay, where Betsy volunteered at a home for disabled children and hosted groups of US sailors for holiday meals.
In South Africa they lived in two houses, one in Cape Town and one in Pretoria. Betsy’s many duties as a Foreign Service wife included enrolling two daughters in a local Afrikaaner school and moving households every six months (as the government moved between the two capitols). In Cape Town the family occupied an historic residence known as Tembani, which had once been a hospital for soldiers blinded in World War II. Betsy used her creative and artistic skills to redecorate and renovate the beautiful historic home. Betsy and her two youngest daughters were in the first group of adventurers to go on a walking safari with armed guides in Kruger Park, hiking and camping out for several days and nights under the African sky. The family rode the Blue Train, crossing the Groot Karroo from Johannesburg to Cape Town, and hiked to the top of Table Mountain. Betsy forged lifelong friendships in South Africa, as she did wherever she went.
The couple’s next foreign posting was Beijing, their first post with all the Taylor children at college or having graduated. Betsy worked in the Pan Am Airlines office in Beijing, and traveled frequently with her husband visiting every province in China except Tibet.
Their final foreign post was Havana, Cuba, where Jay served as chief of mission of the US Interests Section – the “unofficial” but in all other respects the working US embassy on the island. Betsy loved her years in Havana, one chief reason being that her family—-now including small grandchildren— could visit frequently, including her mother Sally’s extended stays.
During their years as empty-nesters the adventures continued; Jay and Betsy spent three months traveling by rail through India and served as election observers in Zambia; they white-water rafted on the Zambezi River below Victoria Falls, hot-air ballooned over Cappadocia, and hiked ancient ruins of the Lycians. Betsy was a source of unwavering support for Jay as he researched and wrote his numerous books. She was his editor, consultant, travel director and constant companion throughout their years together.
Throughout her years of overseas living, Betsy remained in close touch with her family back home. She was a faithful writer of letters to her mother, Jay’s parents, and other close family members; weekly letters which described her day-to-day life as she navigated the world of diplomacy and raised her children in far-away cities. It was important to Betsy to stay connected with her extended family too, and she took advantage of every home leave between posts to take her children back to Lone Mountain, to reconnect with her Tennessee heritage. When Jay and Betsy were posted in Washington, D.C., the family never missed the chance to return to Lone Mountain for Thanksgiving reunions; joyful times reconnecting with her beloved Payne family and preparing traditional feasts together with aunts, uncles and cousins. Because of her efforts, her children grew up feeling a close tie to their Payne relatives, and to the family’s homestead in Lone Mountain. Two of Betsy’s daughters married in the Lone Mountain Baptist Church, and her grandchildren also grew up feeling a close connection to their Lone Mountain roots.
After Jay retired, the couple divided their time between Arlington, Virginia and Seagrove, Florida. Betsy devoted much of her time for the next twenty years to her grandchildren. She was present at the birth of all nine of her grandchildren, to whom she was a constant nurturing and guiding presence. She presided over many joyful reunions of the Golden Horde, playing the piano for boisterous family sing-a-longs and leading the preparation of elegant holiday family meals.
She also rejoined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, a congregation which she had first joined in 1959. Six months before she passed away, Betsy and Jay moved in with their daughter Amy Scully and her family in Decatur, Georgia.
Betsy died as she lived, peacefully, quietly, and beautifully, surrounded by her loving and admiring family.
She is survived by all the members of her beloved Golden Horde including her children and their spouses, John Taylor and Jeannette Walls, Laurie and Joel Rice, Amy and Jim Scully, and Cynthia and David Young; her nine grandchildren and their spouses — Jessica Taylor, Taylor and Michelle Peck, Myles and Cali Peck, Emily and Ryan Cummins, Jack, Nate and Ayston Scully, and Savannah and Gabrielle Young; her three great-grandchildren Olivia, Charlotte and Cameron; her brother David Rose and her niece Ann Rose; and Jay’s close nephew Andy Taylor, his wife Laura, and their children Will and Kyle Taylor. Betsy will also be remembered by her large extended family of Payne and Stockwell cousins.
The Memorial Service will be held at 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 14, 2017, at The Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington.
The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Pan Bila, a non-profit organization in Burkina Faso which impacts the lives of hundreds of at-risk children through several projects, including a school, a center for street children, and a home for pregnant and abused girls. Donations may be made at:
https://engageburkina.wufoo.com/forms/donate-pan-bila/
Please indicate that your gift to Pan Bila is in honor of Elizabeth Rose Taylor.