By: Jan Lougeay, MS, CCC-SLP, Publications Chair

It is with great sadness we report the passing of Dr. Elizabeth Carrow Woolfolk, otherwise known as “Betty,” “Betty Jo,” or “Sister Mary Arthur,” Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (TSHA) past president and volunteer, who passed away peacefully at her home in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. She was 94 years of age.

Betty was born in Houston on September 18, 1927, to a Canadian-American father (Arthur Maurice Carrow, né Careaux) and a Mexican-American mother (María de la Concepción Ruiz Erdmann). Upon reaching her teenage years, Betty, in what marked the start of a lifelong relationship, enrolled at Our Lady of the Lake High School in San Antonio, Texas. The camaraderie, unqualified spiritual love, and welcoming sense of “home” Betty encountered at the Lake had a profound impact on her young heart and mind—so much so that, after graduating from Our Lady of the Lake High School in 1944, Betty made the transformative decision to dedicate her life to God and, in conjunction with her subsequent attendance at Our Lady of the Lake College, become a Sister of the Congregation of the Divine Providence.

After completing a BA in philosophy at Our Lady of the Lake College in 1949 and settling into full-time life at the convent, Congregation Mother Superior Angelique Ayres noted that Betty had a gift for working with children. That being the case, Betty was, between 1947 and 1949, tasked with the responsibility of providing primary-level education to 70 children at the St. Francis parochial school in San Diego, Texas. When a need to fill the headmistress position at a newly opened school for deaf children in San Antonio subsequently arose, Mother Superior Ayres immediately thought of Betty. In furtherance of this thought, the Congregation of the Divine Providence sent Betty to the University of Texas at Austin for a Master’s in educational psychology (1950) and then to Northwestern University in Chicago for a PhD in speech correction and audiology (1955). As the position for which she had been originally “recruited” was filled during her years in Austin and Chicago, Mother Superior Ayres asked Betty to start a speech and hearing program at Our Lady of the Lake College. Against this humble backdrop—operating out of the basement of Providence Hall with one student and no budget—Betty fearlessly embarked on what would ultimately become the professional, spiritual, and philanthropical journey of a lifetime.

Betty’s speech and hearing program quickly grew to the point that it was able to attract local- and state-level funding. In 1960, Betty founded and became the director of the Harry Jersig Speech and Hearing Center, the first free-standing speech and language clinic in the nation. By the mid-1960s, the center was serving the stuttering, voice articulation, cleft palette, hearing loss, and communications disorders of thousands of children across south Texas and beyond. The hands-on experience Betty gained in this clinical setting became the first of several layers that would inform the theoretical, assessment, data repository, diagnostic, and treatment work she would go on to do. In 1968, she made the life-changing decision to leave the convent and embrace the lay vocation.

Between 1968 and 1974, Betty entered into a period of extraordinary professional productivity and accomplishment. Moving between the administrative (vice president at Our Lady of the Lake College) and academic (associate professor of otolaryngology, Baylor College of Medicine; professor of speech pathology, University of Texas at Austin) realms of university life, Betty authored multiple college-level textbooks and book chapters, edited various professional journals, published numerous peer-reviewed articles, competed for and won major teaching and programming grants, conducted education-related consultancies, and developed innovative language inventories, test protocols, and assessment instruments. Betty later leveraged the theoretical perspectives and assessment insights gained through these academic experiences when she agreed to take on the challenge of developing speech pathology services at various Houston-area hospitals (Methodist Hospital, Texas Children’s Hospital, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital). At a time when academic investigation, medical research, scientific publishing, and institutional administration was dominated by men, Betty was nothing short of a trailblazer in the movement toward equal rights for women in the workplace.

After her early inventory and assessment work was picked up by major test publishers, Betty proceeded, with their support, to develop and publish an expanded set of assessment instruments, including the CELI, CAVAT, TRAM, TACL, OWLS, CASL, OPUS, and APLS. These assessment tools, either in whole or in part, continue to be revised and used today by speech and language practitioners the world over.

The commercial success attained by these testing products opened the door to Betty becoming more involved in philanthropic endeavors. In an attempt to give back to those who had made her success possible and to support those with whom she shared common cause, Betty generously provided the funds needed to build, develop, and/or support scholarships, lecture series, an endowed faculty chair, and research initiatives. Betty’s generosity reached its maximum expression when she donated the funds to establish the Woolfolk School of Communications Sciences and Disorders at Our Lady of the Lake University and the Woolfolk Endowed Excellence Fund for Research in Language Disorders at the University of Texas in Austin.

Betty’s contributions of money, wisdom, and time were widely recognized in the form of lifetime achievement awards (the Order of St. Lazarus, the Piper Foundation, the University of Texas, Our Lady of the Lake University, amongst others), board or director positions (Texas Children’s Hospital, the Orton Society, United Cerebral Palsy of Texas, the Houston School for the Deaf, the Galveston Island Outdoor Theater, amongst others), trusteeships, advisory committee appointments, honorary listings (Who’s Who in American Women, Who’s Who in Texas, Women in Education, American Men in Science), and leadership roles in professional associations, including being named a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and serving as president of the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association. She was an active leader in TSHA, served on numerous committees and task forces and was a significant player in the development and growth of the organization.