In 1920, prohibition was enacted. The 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified. The country was still on the gold standard. And the First World War had ended just two years earlier.
Sliced bread wasn’t commercially sold until 1928.
On Dec. 1 of 1920 — a month after Warren G. Harding was elected president of the United States — Elizabeth Barrett was born.
“How old are you turning?” one of her eight children playfully asked recently.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Barrett, who to close friends and family goes by “Betty,” said with a chuckle.
Barrett served as a flight instructor in World War II. She and her late husband, also a veteran of that war as well as Korea and was in the reserves in Vietnam, built a number of homes and later managed a racquetball club in Virginia Beach. Much later in life, she graduated from Rutgers University and went into social services. She has 15 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
June Barrett-McDaniels shows a group photo where her mother Elizabeth “Betty” Barrett, a U.S. Navy World War II veteran, can be seen on the bottom row, third in from the left, during an interview at the Jones & Cabacoy Veterans Health Care Center in Virginia Beach on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. Barrett, who is turning 105 on Dec. 1, served as a Link Trainer Operator teaching WWII pilots in instrument flying. (Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot)
For her 90th birthday, she walked nine miles. For her 100th, she walked over 10 miles in the course of the month.
“She always stood up for what was right, which is what she taught us too,” said the second-youngest daughter, 69-year-old June Barrett-McDaniels, who visits her mother about every other day at the Jones and Cabacoy Veterans Care Center.
Born in Cleveland, Barrett grew up in northeastern New Jersey. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she and husband Raymond Barrett enlisted in the Navy; Betty was 21 and Raymond was 20, Barrett-McDaniels said. They married while stationed in Jacksonville at the military base’s church after knowing each other for about two months.
Betty was a flight instructor who taught fledgling airmen how to fly using an early flight simulator called a link trainer. She was Raymond’s instructor. He was deployed as a Marine Corps fighter pilot to the Pacific Theater. He flew a Corsair in missions over Eniwetok, the Marshall Islands and Okinawa, where he earned multiple Distinguished Flying Cross medals.
After the war, they moved to back to New Jersey. Raymond was recalled to active duty for the Korean conflict, in which he served mostly as a flight instructor in Pensacola. Betty moved the family, four children at the time, to the Florida Gulf Coast.
After the war, the Barretts returned to New Jersey. Betty attended night school at Rutgers University, hoping to fulfill a lifelong ambition of earning a college degree. She graduated at age 51 with a degree in social service while working full-time and caring for eight children.
The Barretts’ oldest son served in the Navy and was stationed in Virginia Beach at the time of the Vietnam war. After a few visits, they moved the family to Neptune City. By then, Barrett-McDaniels said, her parents were practically pacificists.
Betty worked in Norfolk’s social services department soon after they moved to Hampton Roads. Now in civilian life, Raymond built a few homes and later on a racquetball club he and Betty would manage. Barrett-McDaniels said it was the pickleball rage of the time.
Barrett-McDaniels said her parents insisted on the family gathering and eating all together while they grew up. Her parents, she said, taught her and her siblings the value of education and civic engagement.
“Before we could walk, we were taught that democracy is not a right,” she said. “It’s a responsibility.”
Barrett and her husband were passionate aviators well past their time in the military. They visited their children all around the country and on one occasion independently flew to Panama. They celebrated their 64th anniversary in 2008. Raymond died the next year.
Barrett lived independently until age 101. Her neighbors and the fire department joined in the celebrations of her birthday during the pandemic. After bouts with breast cancer and a ruptured ulcer, she now uses a wheelchair. Though she tires easily, her eyes twinkle when friends and loved ones speak of Raymond. Her quiet, sometimes dry, sense of humor can cause a room to erupt in laughter.
“My parents, they’re true-blue Americans,” Barrett-McDaniels said. “They’ve had a good a good life. My mom has had a really good life.”
John Buzbee, 757-879-7421, john.buzbee@virginiamedia.com
