Bette Ogden Boehm

Bette Boehm died last week. She wanted to live into her 90s like her late husband Walt, but was only 85. Still young, still joking, still fighting. Bette’s earliest memory was of a strawberry apple tree outside the dirt-floor farmhouse in Eden where she grew up. She climbed it with her siblings, Eddie, Jesse, Helen, and Verna. Its fruit, she remembered, was the sweetest she ever tasted. When she married Walt in 1963 and moved to Roy, she wanted to plant one in the yard but could only find them for sale Back East. She grew kids instead, six of them: Gary, Gail, Bruce, Kris, Anita, and Paul – kids, and now grandkids and great-grandkids, to whom she was tirelessly devoted and who will miss her very much.

Bette worked a lot of jobs to make ends meet – school lunch lady, cleaning the local bowling alley after midnight, delivering newspapers. Every spring, she charged $1 per page to do people’s taxes, or for free if you needed the help. For a while she was an elementary school playground attendant. One year, a misfit 2nd grader wouldn’t leave her side… or stop hitting and kicking her. After a warning, she hit him back, sending him flying into the snow. He decided not to call his mom and brought her a personalized Christmas card the next week. Fearless (and funny) even of death, she asked that a coal shovel be placed in her casket. The pages of her Bible were undisturbed, but she had an intrepid, frontier-style faith that never wavered – laugh at yourself, don’t give up, do anything for the people you love.

She loved beets, dogs, and FaceTime, and when her body drew its final breath last week, the universe expanded and whispered: everything you know is true.

Bette was born into the world June 21, 1939 and passed through it March 6, 2025. A service to commemorate her life will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, March 11, 2025, at Myers Mortuary, 5865 S. 1900 W. Roy, Utah, 84067. The celebration will be streamed via the following website/link: myers-mortuary.com.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Weber County Animal Shelter at

https://www.webercountyutah.gov/Animal_Shelter/donations.php