General information on Betty Nettle is easily available as she has done a number of interviews. This is kind of a comp of info from various sources. Most of the interviews with her are either archived from or reflect on her life in the 1970s and 1980s when she was most active on the crossword circuit and making headlines.
Betty Nettle
Age: 89-90
Grew up on a military base.
No surviving family.
Never married (Though one interview contradicts this and she may have married a man from Libya for immigration purposes.)
Eugene recently celebrated her in their local news. Unfortunately the celebration seems to have been spurred by her recently fracturing her hip. She notes to the paper that she isn't a spry chicken anymore though the paper goes on to say she is as sharp as ever.
Interests:
Puzzles, Word Games, Photography, Reading
Prefers cats to dogs
Favorite music is Psychodelic Jazz..or anything she can dance to and, "I can dance to nearly anything."
Favorite Artist:
Ellis Smith (Early photography pioneer)
Her home is described as a time capsule of memories of her life cluttered with knickknacks and photographs.
Favorite Book:
Agatha Cristie's And Then There Were None
Holds records:
Four time winner of New York Times Crossword
Five national crossword championships
Holds numerous Scrabble, UpWords, and Mastermind titles
Got into the French semi-finals despite not speaking French. And holds one Scrabble championship in Burmese, despite not speaking Burmese. She claims she memorized lots of words and the Burmese victory she downplays for there being a lack of competition.
Though she lost the tournament, she drew media attention by playing only racist words in a game of Scrabble as
a "a form of protest to american societies treatment of 3/4ths the world's population."
She was barred from competing on a national crossword level in the USSR on grounds they thought she was working for the CIA.
She is rather reclusive in her personal life but is described as warm and inviting when visited.
She maintained a Crossword answering machine game on her home phone until about ten years ago when she stopped updating it due to call volume becoming too low and just being more difficult for her to keep up with given her age.
She shuns computers and cellphones and said everything she's ever needed to know she could learn from books or life.
She has said she has extensively studied letter probability.
She has said that unless a crossword is truly randomly generated she can usually begin finding a pattern to answers within the first five questions and has used probabilities to predict answers which aided her in "speed run" competitions where she claims to not have read the questions/clues.
Unsurprisingly she is an avid collector of puzzles, though she has said she doesn't bother solving them all, she just often enjoys looking at them.
She was also a bit politically active in the 80s particularly involving race and also trying to bring awareness of sterilization programs to the surface.
Neighbors and friends seem to look after her now, checking in on her and bringing her meals.
A Few Odd Statements she has made:
She has made a few weird statements in some interviews mostly about her growing up.
In one interview she says, "In many ways I was lucky growing up as I did, living on the base was like a ghetto, I've always been quite comfortable, and never saw color, it was just normal."
An interview from 2014 she seems to ramble and seems to have missed the question entirely and says, "well times were different then, and at 14 there wasn't much to do except play games and sneak off to watch the negros shower. I was quite fond of them, I heard there is a show called Walking Dead, I thought finally someone is telling their story but they could have consulted me but didn't."
"I started working on the base, physiological assessments, I was quite young still but it didn't matter it was all just rubber stamping. I didn't really have to assess them, just paperwork. They are still the bravest people I've ever met."
The interviewer follows up asking if she is referring to nuclear testing to which she answers, "Oh yes that was done wasn't it."
From PoP Magazine in the 80s, which asked her lots of just "80s" things:
About UFOs she said, "I'm not frightened by things in the sky. All those little green men, I don't lose any sleep over that sort of thing."
Asked if she believes in psychic powers: "Well, people have said I must possess some kind of supernatural ability when it comes to letters, but no, no I don't believe these charlatans on tv. In my heart I'm a science girl. I think the good psychics are just studying algorithms, they've done their homework."
Asked if she believes in ghosts: "I grew up with them, metaphorically, on paper. I like to think that...well it makes me giggle when I think about it."
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