Celebration of the Life of Betsy Burr

Obituary —Betsy Blanchard Burr (1941-2025)

Betsy Blanchard Burr passed away on Thursday, February 27. She is survived by her husband Stefan and her daughter Jessica. She was the only child of Francis and Eleanor Blanchard.

Betsy was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Berkeley, where she was exposed from an early age to exceptional people from academia and various other walks of life, as well as various nationalities, who gathered regularly at her parents’ home. She always dated her love of ideas, her intellectual adventuring, from the experience of those gatherings. She had a strong love for the culture of San Francisco, which she saw as diverse, community-oriented, creative and fun-loving. She brought that love with her when she and Stefan moved to Morris County, New Jersey, in 1966, after gaining a B.A. from Pomona College and a Master’s degree in English Literature from Cornell.

The couple soon found the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, where she was very active for over 60 years. She was determined to use her energies to bring to the Fellowship the spirit of San Francisco and Berkeley as she had known them in her growing-up years. She held many different positions at the Fellowship, including a two-year stint as President during a time when there was no minister. She always said she could never imagine her life without the Fellowship.

In 1976, Betsy developed a form of lay-led service called “participatory programming”, which she brought to a wider audience in the publication of a UUA brochure, as well as presenting samples of this style of service at General Assemblies of the Unitarian Universalist Association. In a participatory service, members of the congregation speak personally on a topic of general interest, showing the diversity that characterizes U.U. congregations. It became common in the denomination.

She wrote seven musical comedies which were performed at the Fellowship, including the Wizard of MUF, for which she wrote the music as well as the book and the lyrics. She was also a poet and essayist. She published several volumes of her poetry, including “Dreaming of Bridges,” and “At Play in the Field of Horses.” She also published a book of stories called “Dancing with Whales: A Book of Encounters,” a collection of memoir-essays, and “Adventures with David,” accounts of her outings in the wilds of northern California with her mountain man friend, David Schooley.

Her working life was somewhat spotty, owing to a need to take care of elderly, infirm parents in California over a quarter of a century. She worked as a Legislative Analyst for the state of New Jersey, as a writer for an organizational development firm, and as Religious Education Coordinator at the Fellowship, as well as a vendor of handmade Yi Xing Teapots. But she was most proud of being the founder and director of Earth Camp, a summer camp for children, which was created to teach the importance of their relationship to the planet Earth.