Elizabeth (Betsy) Laundon and Paul Perrone

Betsy is a native Virginian, growing up primarily in Amherst County where she graduated from Amherst County High School.  After graduating from Sweet Briar College with a degree in Government, she worked briefly in a civil service job before marrying her VMI sweetheart Walt in the fall of 1969. His deployment to Viet Nam in 1971 (curtailed quite early with an injury and extensive rehab) rerouted their career plans. They were both able to graduate from Ga. State Univ. with Betsy’s MBA and Walt’s MPA degrees and they stayed in the Atlanta area for most of the next 38 years, raising 2 daughters along the way. Katie and her husband Scott and twin 16 year old daughters Jordan and Taylor currently live just outside of Wilmington, NC where Katie has a travelling job as a regional manager with Dart Industries. Beth and husband Kurt live in Takoma Park, MD with their sons Nate (14) and Erik (10). Beth is Creative Director for AAAS (the Journal of Science) where she manages both the digital and print components.

 With the girls’ emptying the nest for colleges/careers/marriages and Walt’s death in 2005, when an offer to buy the yarn shop she had owned for 20 years came along in 2007, Betsy decided there were other chapters to be written in her life. She sold the shop and proceeded to volunteer and travel. On one such venture to a charity building project in Honduras in 2009, she met Mike Esch from PA and they started another chapter. They moved to Lynchburg to be closer to Betsy’s family, married in 2010 and lived in the Boonsboro area until Mike’s traumatic cardiac arrest in 2014. That relocated him to rehab at Westminster Canterbury. Betsy resided temporarily in Creekside until their Woods Edge unit was available in April 2015 on the very day that Mike was sprung from rehab. As many around here can testify, Mike did very well as a bilateral amputee with prostheses for several years. He ended up back in healthcare in early 2018 where he died in 2020.

 That gets us to the current chapter which finds Betsy married to Paul Perrone whom she had known of and got to know better in this college dorm atmosphere where it is very easy to make new friends. His wife Barbara had died in 2020 also. So, having married in October 2024, Paul and Betsy are going to care for each other in their twilight years with Ernie to help them stay healthy.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Laundon and Paul Perrone