When Betty Ridderhoff and her husband purchased a home in Inman Park in 1990, the neighborhood had no idea what was on the horizon. Those who didn’t know her might have thought she grew up in the community, based solely on her enthusiasm for the area.
“She came into the community and hit the ground running, I’m told” said Kwanza Hall, the City Council member who represents the area. “When I met her, she was definitely part of the fabric of Inman Park. There are very few people who could best Betty Ridderhoff, in terms of her commitment to that community.”
Ridderhoff, who edited the neighborhood’s Advocator for 18 years and who published the homeowners’ association directory longer than that, died March 11 from complications of a blood clot. She was 84. A memorial service was held Sunday at Inman Park United Methodist Church. Her ashes will be scattered at sea this summer. The Cremation Society of Georgia was in charge of arrangements.
Ridderhoff grew up and spent her youth on the west side of Chicago. She married when she was 19, but divorced four years later. After her divorce, she and her 2-year-old son, Allen, moved back in with her mother. It was while living there that she met Bob Ridderhoff, a sewing machine salesman. The couple married in 1953, and they soon added a daughter, and later a son, to their family. They had been married for nearly 50 years when he died in 2002. Their son, David, died in 2004.
Betty and Bob Ridderhoff moved to Atlanta in 1989, after spending several years in Los Angeles. They were in their retirement years, and their L.A. neighborhood had become crime-ridden. The couple found solace in Inman Park, and Betty Ridderhoff seemed to get a second wind.
“She got involved immediately,” said Diane Floyd, who lives in the neighborhood. “She put her stamp on this neighborhood in a way that no one else could.”
Floyd jokingly said, while homeowners’ association members may not have known who the president of the organization was, “everybody knew Betty did the Advocator and the neighborhood directory.”
Ridderhoff was also well known because she often opened her home to the neighborhood for events, said her daughter, Valerie El-Jamil, of Atlanta.
“She believed in living life with forgiveness, generosity and love,” El-Jamil said of her mother. “She so often was a sounding board for people in the neighborhood, on personal and business issues.”
Any odds-and-ends that people in the neighborhood needed, Ridderhoff had. An oddly shaped screw, a piece of something to fit this or that, she could produce it.
“And what was so amazing was how organized it all was,” Hall said. “She had so much organization going on, and in her paper files of clip art, it really was like nothing I’d ever seen.”
Hall said Inman Park will not be the same without Ridderhoff’s “grandmotherly spirit.”
“We will always be indebted to her for what she brought to the community,” he said.
In addition to her daughter, Ridderhoff is survived by son, Allen Ridderhoff of Burbank, Calif.; brother, Robert Mohl of Spring Hill, Fla.; three step-children; one grandson; and seven step-grandchildren.
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