Betty Rice, who had a career as a microbiologist at Southampton Hospital, died on Oct. 1 at Long Island Community Hospital in Patchogue. She was 97. Most recently a resident of East Moriches and the Village Walk Senior Living Center in Patchogue, she had also lived in East Hampton for many years.
After her retirement from the hospital in 1986, Mrs. Rice moved from Wireless Road in East Hampton to a pondfront house on Shelter Island. She became a part-time librarian at the Shelter Island Public Library, where she worked until 2005.
Betty Burnett, whose full first name, which she never used, was Catherine, was born in Bay Shore on June 18, 1926, to Rudolph and Catherine Burnett. She was an only child and grew up with her parents, grandparents, and uncle at their house in Farmingdale and their cottage in the Pocono Mountains. She attended Farmingdale High School, and then Albright College in Reading, Pa., where in 1947 she earned a degree in science.
The next year, she moved to Minnesota with two of her best friends. There she began her career as a medical technologist. She also met her future husband, Robert G. Rice, who happened to be from Long Island as well. They married in 1951. His work as an economist took them to university campuses in western Long Island, upstate New York, Detroit, and Chicago.
Mr. Rice died in 1966, leading Mrs. Rice to move with her children back to Long Island. Re-entering the work force, she took a position in the laboratory at Southampton Hospital and began looking for nearby property. On a Sunday drive to East Hampton, her family said, she found “a perfect vacant lot in the woods” just outside of the village, and East Hampton became her home for the next 20 years.
Mrs. Rice was known as “a wicked tap-dancer” and could play the trumpet, “or at least she said she could,” her family wrote.
“She liked a good set of wheels and owned a 1950s MG TD, a 1967 Mustang fastback, a pickup, a Camaro, and one of only a handful of 1980 Triumph TR8s sent to North America, among others,” her family wrote. “She never flew on a plane, but in her later years managed several cross-continent train journeys, both in Canada and the U.S.”
A lover of animals, Mrs. Rice almost always had a dog at her side, first “mutts and a Boston terrier, and a long succession of English bull terriers,” her family wrote. Her last two pets were a Scottie and a miniature bull terrier. Memorial donations have been suggested to animal rescue organizations.
“She will be missed, but not forgotten,” her family wrote. Mrs. Rice, who was “a very private person,” they said, requested no formal services.
A daughter, Betty W. Rice of Calgary, Canada, and a son, Robert Rice of East Moriches, survive along with her daughter-in-law, Lisa Rice; three grandchildren, Andy Elder, Sarah Misura, and Robert Rice, and two great-granddaughters, Adriana Misura and Mairead Rice.
