Biography for

Bette (Cowden) Petrides 

Bette attended the University of Michigan from 1961-65 and graduated with a degree in English and several minors. She met her husband on a panty raid during her freshman year and they married before graduation. They joined the Peace Corps, ending up in Africa because her husband, George, had grown up in East Africa. The program they joined, located at Michigan State University, offered a degree in education, which they received in 1969 after having been evacuated from Nigeria during the Biafran War. They were then sent to Ghana and later to Botswana, where they taught in Molepolole. After graduation from MSU, they moved to Washington, D.C., where George went to work for the Peace Corps headquarters and Bette, for the African Wildlife Foundation. In 1970 they were sent back to Nairobi, Kenya, where their son, George, was born. Bette worked for the National Museum in Nairobi, which was then directed by anthropologist, Richard Leakey. In addition to being a museum docent and training docents, Bette co-founded the museum’s journal, Kenya Past and Present, which is still being published.

After returning to the U.S., Bette worked at the Smithsonian until her husband left the Peace Corps staff and started a business, which they ran until 1986 when George founded Wild Bird Centers of America, Inc., which he runs today. Bette returned to teaching to help pay for starting the business and taught high school English and journalism for ten years before retiring in 1996.

In 1999 she applied for a job at Montgomery College where she currently teaches English, but she also spent many terms teaching speech there. She qualified for a NEH fellowship at the Library of Congress in 2005, completed it in 2006, and published her paper in 2008. She has written a variety of articles and a few short stories as well. In addition to teaching English, she has worked in the past several years with various programs involving honors students at the college as well as with initiatives to support the college’s part-time teachers.

Because of conflicts arising from infill development in the late 1990’s, which particularly affected her neighborhood, Bette became instrumental in saving a piece of community property that was later declared a park; and she has since founded Citizens for a Better Bethesda, has run for county office (and lost), and has been involved with related community and governmental committees. In the process, she has influenced some county and state environmental legislation.

Because her son, daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters live in Bethesda, Bette and her husband see the family frequently; and they have traveled extensively together and separately. 

Bette’s parents continue to live in Brecksville where she visits them and occasionally hears about classmates from 1961.

In 2009 Bette discovered that one of the professors with whom she worked, Roxanne Davidson, married Ollie Davidson (’59), and that they have lived less than a mile from her home in Bethesda for 30 years!