The Beach Lady

In a nearby small town named American Beach lived MaVynee Betsch, a woman of substance. She was a singer, environmentalist, local activist, a historian and a great granddaughter of A. L. Lewis, the founder of American Beach. Betsch was known by locals as "The Beach Lady" and was dedicated to protecting and preserving American Beach from development and destruction. Betsch died Monday, September 5, 2005 from cancer.

Her extraordinary life was featured in Smithsonian by her friend Russ Rymer, author of a book about American Beach.

...MaVynne Betsch was born on January 13, 1935 in Jacksonville, Florida. She was raised in one of the most preeminent black families in the South. Betsch is the daughter of Mary and John Betsch, and the great-granddaughter Abraham Lincoln Lewis, who founded Florida's oldest African-American beach, and Anne Kingsley, the African American wife of plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley. Betsch was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Upon completion of her bachelors' degree in 1955, she moved to Europe where she was an opera singer for ten years.

In spring 2002, MaVynee was diagnosed with cancer, and surgeons removed her stomach. That triggered her family’s insistence that she finally move indoors. In the fall came worse news: her cancer had recurred and spread, and doctors said she might have only months to live. That’s why I was calling. When MaVynee heard my voice, she picked up the phone (MaVynee, already screening her calls!), but she didn’t want to linger on her health. She wanted to discuss her plans. MaVynee intends to start a museum.

The institution MaVynee envisions will contain the history of American Beach, the town where she’s lived many of her 68 years. American Beach is on Amelia Island, nearly 40 miles north of downtown Jacksonville on the Atlantic Coast. It was built in the 1930s by Florida’s first insurance company, the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, at the behest of its president, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida’s first black millionaire. For decades it flourished as an ocean-side paradise for blacks from around the country, who admittedly had little choice. "When we were children, could we go to the beach just anywhere we wanted?" MaVynee asks the college kids who come through town on buses for history tours. "Uh-uh. No...way...José!" Her voice is as cultured, worldly and refined as you’d expect a former opera star’s to be, and her carriage so regal that when she sits on her busted plastic beach chair on the borrowed sundeck of Abraham Lincoln Lewis’ old home (the oldest house on the beach), you would think that she owned the place. Which in a way she does: A. L. Lewis was her great-grandfather...

Until Betsch's hospitalization for her stomach cancer in 2002, she had fingernails a foot and a half long on her left hand. Her hair grew to be seven feet in length and she often wore it in a sling. She was born with more letters in her first name, but removed the "r's" after Ronald Reagan was elected president.

A remarkable woman who had an abundance of moral fiber and was devoted to the sand she lived on has passed on leaving her spirit and soul on American Beach.