Betty Honeyman loved flowers, kids, teaching and baseball

Years after having Betty Honeyman as his English teacher at Everett High School, Mark Olson had her as a client.

An attorney and a member of the Everett City Council, Olson said he provided Honeyman with “just a very basic estate planning document I’d used in all my years of practice.”

“She was skimming over the form I asked her to sign and saying, ‘Did you really mean to say this?’ I told her I should put her on the payroll,” said Olson, a 1973 graduate of Everett High.

“She was an absolutely wonderful teacher,” said Olson, who was in Honeyman’s college prep English class his senior year. “That spring, I probably learned more about the English language than in all my other years combined. In her mind, words were not blunt instruments, they were instruments of surgical precision.”

Elizabeth Helen Ryan Honeyman died Feb. 14 in Everett. She was 82.

Honeyman taught more than 40 years in the Everett School District. She officially retired from teaching at 68, but continued as a substitute for another 10 years.

She is survived by her children, Bruce and Jane Honeyman; daughter-in-law Joyce Schroeder; son-in-law Ron Fishback; grandson Alex Honeyman; her younger sister, Jeannine Mory; and many nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents, Catharine Peterson Ryan and James Ryan; her sister Lucille Wheeler; and brothers Jim, Tom and Dick Ryan.

“She was simply the most dedicated, most professional teacher I have ever known,” said Bryant Merrick, a retired Everett High English teacher. Merrick recalled Honeyman as an extraordinary writing instructor.

“She’d get papers back the next day, and it would take me three weeks,” he said. “After she retired, she continued to come back and help the rest of us grade papers.

“She was also a delight, a real lady,” Merrick said. “She was absolutely the North Star in my career.”

Another teaching colleague, Berva Bartlett, remembered when Everett High’s Class of 1983 had a teacher appreciation night. “They gave out little awards,” Bartlett said. “Mine said, ‘EHS Class of 1983 favorite female teacher.’ I was so proud of that.

“Betty was there, too, of course,” Bartlett said. “I asked her, ‘What did yours say?’ She showed it to me. It said ‘To the best teacher.’ And she really was.”

Honeyman was born in Windom, Minn., and graduated from Windom High School in 1939 at 16. In three years, she earned degrees in English and history at Mankato State College.

She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, and became a sergeant in the Army Air Corps. In 1952, she married Donald Honeyman and moved to the Northwest.

Jane and Bruce Honeyman remember a mother who loved the outdoors and learning. Although their parents divorced when they were older, both went on to earn doctoral degrees.

Jane Honeyman attended Pacific Lutheran University and Washington State University and is a childhood clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Her brother went to Stanford University and is an engineering professor at the Colorado School of Mines in Boulder, Colo.

“In the summers, we’d often go back to Minnesota. Mom always paid a lot of attention to the landscape,” Bruce Honeyman said. “She really missed the prairie. It was part of who she was, the expanse of the Midwest.”

Among her favorite books was “Giants in the Earth,” the pioneer prairie saga by Ole Rolvaag, her son said.

Even after retirement, Honeyman would teach summer school to students who had struggled with academics.

“I don’t think she judged kids by what they looked like or anything like that. For some of them, I think it was the first time a teacher had taken them seriously,” Bruce Honeyman said.

Gail Everett, a retired Everett High school psychologist, said Honeyman “met the needs of students to an astonishing degree.”

“I worked with kids with special needs, and she was able to meet the needs of those kids as well as those destined to go to Harvard,” Everett said.

Everett and others said Honeyman was a great friend. “One of the joyful times in my life was her 80th birthday party here at my house,” Everett said. “She looked around and smiled and said, ‘A circle of friends.’ She loved to entertain, and had lovely luncheons at her house, with elegant starched tablecloths.”

She also loved baseball. Pat Jones, head secretary at Everett High, said after Honeyman’s retirement, “I started taking her to Mariners games.”

“She thought Edgar (Martinez) should have retired a year sooner, and that Jay (Buhner) struck out too much. She was a great lady, and we had many great conversations,” Jones said.

Mark Olson knew her as a Boston Red Sox fan, and said she took a train trip to Florida with her sister in her later years to see the Red Sox in Grapefruit League spring training.

Betty Honeyman loved much – baseball, her flower garden, her children and her grandson, her friends, her Agatha Christie mystery novels and the English language.

“Teaching, that was the great love of her life,” Everett said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.