Elizabeth (Betty) Caroline Jordan Hickcox was born on February 14, 1924 to Preston D. Jordan and Helen D. Nelling in Pilesgrove, New Jersey and passed away on March 8, 2021 at The Phoenix at Union Hill where she lived in Canton, Georgia.
Betty grew up in Glassboro, NJ, living with her mother and, later, her grandparents, Harry and Sadie Nelling. She graduated from Glassboro High School in the Class of 1941, and was selected as Most Talkative. After a series of local jobs around the war effort, she enlisted in the US Navy as a WAVE in early 1944. She served until December 1945, as the second shift cook, Navy Commissioned Officers Mess, US Navy Headquarters (Main Navy) in Washington DC, where she prepared and served midnight meals to about 500 Navy personnel, who were in the communications and code breaking sections of Navy Intelligence. She recorded a series of oral history interviews about growing up and serving during the war for a project at Kennesaw State University (https://mediaspace.kennesaw.edu/tag/tagid/elizabeth%20hickcox) and at the Women Veterans Historical Project, University of North Carolina-Greensboro (http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/WVHP/id/4234).
Betty met her future husband, Raymond J. Hickcox, Jr., while stationed in Washington during the war, and they married on December 1, 1945. After Ray was discharged from the Army, they moved to Schenectady, NY area. Here they raised four children.
Betty enjoyed cooking, baking and sewing. She was very active in her church life, volunteering in the altar guild and doing the lion’s share of the work in church suppers. She loved her church family, wherever she lived, and was always there when they needed her. She was a long time member of Farm Bureau, where she taught sewing to other members. She was a life member of WAVES National, and the American Legion. She really enjoyed her WAVE reunions, and she participated in Honor Flight. She also enjoyed playing duplicate bridge and golf. Betty and Ray were very active in their membership at the Edison Club, a golf club near their home in Rexford, New York.
Most notably, Betty was always ready to volunteer. Beside church dinners and rummage sales, she would use her sewing and crafting skills to do for others. In the last two decades she made cards for all the birthdays of her resident friends in her senior living complex. She made fleece lap blankets for military veterans and baby blankets for premie babies.
Betty never met a stranger, she was always quick to make friends and she always greeted the day with a smile and a positive attitude. So, Most Talkative, iwas not a surprise when we found her senior yearbook in her keepsakes.
Betty was preceded in death by her husband Raymond, her close friend, Milton Reuter, Sr., her mother and father, and her sister, Natalie, who died in infancy. She is survived by her sons Raymond (Sandra) Hickcox and Robert Hickcox, her daughters Diane Hickcox and Elizabeth (Fred) Weber, eight grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.
Services will not be held at this time, due to the pandemic. Internment will be in Cedar Green Cemetery, Clayton, NJ at a later date. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to Sixes United Methodist Church, Canton, GA in Betty’s memory.
