By Neil Earle
Betty (Bates) Michel, wife of Gene Michel, died peacefully at her home in Santa Clarita, California on January 28, 2009.
In an age of hyperbole it is no exaggeration to say that her death marks the end of an era in the history of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). Betty Bates was born in Arkansas on May 19, 1926 and moved with her family to Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was while she worked there in the milliner's section of a department store that she heard the booming voice of Herbert Armstrong on The World Tomorrow program from 1942 to 1945.
"I didn't know much about the church, she told me in an interview on October 21, 2005, "but I was interested in the College Mr. Armstrong was talking about."
As early as 1946, radio evangelist Herbert Armstrong had seen the need to move his Oregon-based operation to Southern California. In 1947 appeals went out in Armstrong's flagship publication The Plain Truth for interested young people to enroll at Ambassador College. In 1947 the college was one building on a tiny acreage in West Pasadena that would grow over the years into the best landscaped and best-maintained campus in America with branches in Bricket Wood, England (1960-1974) and Big Sandy, Texas (1964-2007). The purpose of the College was to staff workers for the expanding outreach of the then Radio Church of God.
Betty Bates had the distinction of being the first co-ed student and in actual fact the first graduate of Ambassador College. She was able to graduate a semester earlier than the other three men so she has that distinction as well, her brother-in-law Bernel Michel told me on February 4. Betty came from solid small-town roots. Her father owned cattle and real estate and owned a motel with certain investments. Herbert and Loma Armstrong were both there to meet her on her arrival as they did most of the early female students experiencing their first taste of life in Los Angeles.
That folksy, friendly atmosphere of Ambassador's early years made Betty a favorite of the small faculty. She taught poise in the early years of the college as the Armstrong philosophy was to educate the whole person, in the words of Glendora Assistant Pastor Emmett Rushing who showed up in 1952. The 1953 College yearbook, the Envoy, showed girls trying to balance books on their heads to learn the art of decorum under Betty's watchful eye – old school and quaint now, perhaps, but a testimony to Ambassador's early gung-ho approach to life and learning and self-improvement. "We did what it took," said Emmett Rushing.
Betty Michel was an employee at the college until 1958.
Shirley (Englebart) Jones, a minister's wife in England, has fond memories of Betty Michel from the late 1950s. "I got to know her because she was a senior advisor on the steering committee for the Ambassador College Women's Clubs. I remember her as a warm and friendly person with a lively approach to life. She was elegant and poised and she brought these qualities to our discussions and deliberations."
Betty married Gene Michel who showed up at Ambassador in 1948. He went on to become the WCG's longest-serving employee, a stalwart of the church's accounting and financial departments across six decades. They had one child, a daughter named Elizabeth. For hundreds of thousands of people associated with the early Worldwide Church of God and the Armstrong ministry, the picture of those first four pioneering students at Ambassador, Pasadena shown here will bring back some warm memories. It took a special kind of person to be the female trail-blazer during Ambassador's early years of struggle, hardship and almost impossible challenges. Betty (Bates) Michel did it and her achievement is now a matter of record.