Obituary of Betty Ann McCauley

Betty Ann McCauley, 84 of Sarasota, FL, passed away with her family at her side on July 4th, 2016 at Brookdale Assisted Living in Hillsborough, NJ. Visitation will be at Higgins Funeral Home from 5-8pm Thursday, July 7th. Funeral services will be at 10am, Friday, July 8th at Higgins, followed by internment at Somerset Hills Memorial Park, 95 Mt. Airy Rd., Basking Ridge, NJ. Betty Ann Leonard was born in East Orange, NJ in 1931. She graduated from East Orange High in 1949, and married Richard McCauley in 1953 after he returned from Korea. The newlyweds lived the first 8 years of their married life in Irvington, where Betty worked as an Executive Secretary to, as she said, “a big muckity-muck in Western Electric.” Although Dick was content with the pace of city life, Betty had dreams of moving to the country and starting a family. One Sunday, she convinced Dick to take a drive westward in their Chevy, and they wound up in a small, undeveloped hamlet called Warren Township. Betty and Dick fell in love with a piece of land and the vision of a wonderful life there, and secured an empty lot with a deposit of just $5! Within a year they’d build the small house that would be their family home for almost 25 years. But at first, their dream life was missing the one thing both Betty and Dick wanted most – until God finally blessed them with a beautiful daughter, Bonnie Ann, in 1963. Born two months prematurely, Bonnie arrived weighing just 3 pounds and 12 ounces. Betty always talked about the anxious day they finally took their tiny bundle home, forced to drive through the thick smoke of a massive fire in Plainfield. Through her years watching Bonnie grow up, Betty spent most of her time as a homemaker as Dick worked diligently as a lineman for PSE&G. Their life was shattered when Dick passed away unexpectedly on a November morning in 1985, just a month after Bonnie was engaged and planning a new life with her fiancé Shawn. Suddenly faced with the prospect of living alone, Betty took a bold step that no one anticipated. In late 1987, she left the only life she had ever known and relocated to a new home in Sarasota, Florida, to see what more life had in store for her. It proved to be one of the great decisions of her life. In less than two years she met her second great love, Frank Sepa. A sweet and gentle man on the outside, Frank possessed an inner strength and fierce independence that were immediately attractive to Betty. He’d lived on his own at 16 and hitchhiked around the country, survived the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, and spent many years as a beloved art teacher in Harlem before retiring to Sarasota to focus on his art. Despite his desire to marry Betty, and her love for him, she refused to tie the knot. “I spent 32 years picking up my husband’s socks and doing his laundry, and I didn’t want to do that again” she used to joke. So they lived in their own homes on opposite sides of the town, enjoying frequent dinners, evenings watching TV and vacations together until Frank’s passing in 2014. Though Frank had kids and grandkids of his own, Betty’s grandchildren, Shannon and Logan, always loved him like a second grandfather. Betty’s health quickly deteriorated after Frank’s death, and she moved in with her daughter’s family in New Jersey in 2015, before health issues necessitated her final move to Brookdale Senior Living for the last 14 months of her life. Betty enjoyed the best care and good friends during that year, and was visited often by her loving family. Betty is survived by her beloved daughter, Bonnie Kelly, son-in-law Shawn Kelly, and two grandchildren, Shannon and Logan Kelly of Bridgewater, NJ; a sister, Patricia Van Houten, and nephew, John Van Houten, of Sarasota; a cousin, Philip Bailey of Rockaway, NJ, and many good friends. Donations may be made in her memory to the National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation.