For most of her 91 years, Betty Axelberg constantly extended a helping hand.
After Pearl Harbor, she enlisted in the American Women’s Volunteer Services, donating her skill as a clerk-typist.
With the war over, she volunteered at a succession of hospitals -- Emory, Grady and the VA. She sewed bandages for the Red Cross. She went door to door soliciting donations for the American Cancer Society. She became a tour guide at the High Museum.
By the early 1980s, she wrote in a diary that she had grown weary of the traffic she encountered en route to her various volunteer duties, and she was ready, as she put it, “to reach for my rocking chair.”
Which she did for a year -- until she read a newspaper ad that asked: “Wouldn’t you like to Braille a book for a blind child?”
She thought to herself: “Yes, I’d love to.”
And so, already past 60, she tried something new and challenging, joining the Atlanta Braille Volunteers.
A fellow volunteer, Joanne Baldwin of Tucker, said Mrs. Axelberg and others like her transcribed printed material into Braille, enabling blind children to do school work. It was an arduous job for the volunteers, she said, requiring checking and rechecking to minimize errors.
Learning Braille in itself was difficult, she added, even for those who had a knack for it. Mastering it to do transcription, as Mrs. Axelberg did, took extra dedication, and she kept at it into the mid-1990s.
Elizabeth “Betty” Waldron Axelberg, 91, died Wednesday at her Roswell residence of respiratory failure. A graveside service will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Arlington Memorial Park. A reception will follow at H.M. Patterson & Son, Arlington Chapel. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations in Mrs. Axelberg’s memory be sent to Atlanta Animal Rescue Friends, c/o aarfatlanta.org or to Alley Cat Allies c/o alleycat.org.
Mrs. Axelberg lived in Atlanta and Chicago as a child and attended Oglethorpe University briefly. There, she met Howard Axelberg, a lineman on the school’s last football team. The two of them got on so well that one day in 1939 they took a streetcar down Peachtree Road to Buckhead, where they were married secretly by a justice of the peace.
Both sets of parents, hers and his, were initially skeptical when informed of their love match, said her daughter, Lisa Axelberg, but the couple remained happily married until his death in 2004.
Aside from her volunteer work, Mrs. Axelberg was a devoted mother to her three children; a constant reader of histories, biographies and novels; and a soft touch for stray cats and dogs.
It was the Axelberg family’s custom to take their dogs along on vacations. Lisa Axelberg recalled that on those occasions when the family stayed on St. Simons Island her mother often would improvise “crazy, mixed-up songs” to sing to the dogs.
“You could tell by the look in their eyes that they understood,” she said.
A son, Steve Axelberg of Roswell, said his mother considered it one of the highlights of her life when she was greeted in 1976 by the president of the United States at a reception the White House conducts annually for the Ad Council, of which her husband Howard, an Atlanta advertising executive, was a longtime member.
Two years previously President Richard Nixon had greeted Mr. Axelberg and asked why Ad Council members’ wives didn’t accompany their husbands. Mr. Axelberg replied that wives hadn’t been invited. Mr. Nixon vowed on the spot that wives would be invited thereafter. However, when Mrs. Axelberg did come to the White House two years later, it was Gerald Ford who greeted her.
Also surviving is another son, Jon Axelberg of Woodstock.
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