'Merci Beaucoup, Madame Betty’: Remembering Valley Junction’s Unofficial Matriarch

Friends, former dance students and business associates are remembering Betty Hill-Swander as a tough-as-nails businesswoman, a dance instructor who tutored hem class and grace as she taught them how to pointe, and the unofficial matriarch who made Valley Junction the nationally recognized historic retail district that it is today.

Hill-Swander died Monday at Mercy West Lakes Hospital at the age of 86. Visitation is from 4-8 p.m. Thursday at McLaren’s Resthaven Chapel. The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at West Des Moines Christian Church and burial will follow at Resthaven Cemetery. Memorial conributons may be made to the Historic Valley Junction Foundation or the Animal Rescue League of Iowa.

Related: ‘Our Hearts Ache’: Betty Hill Swander, Pioneer in valley Junction, has Died

Katie Garner wrote: “Funny and tough as nails. She helped make (Valley Junction) what it is today.”

She taught thousands of metro children to dance at the Betty Hill Dance Studios that are still in operation.

“When I think of Betty Hill, I think of  a woman with great class and grace,” wrote Louise DeFazio Frantz.

“Merci beaucoup, Madame Betty,” some of her former students wrote in French. Translated, that mean “thank you very much.”

Wrote Shellie Milne Smaha:  “Merci Beaucoup to a woman I loved and looked up to! Dance magic forever!”

In April 2012 after Historic Valley Junction won its National Main Street Award, The Huffington Post named Hill-Swander its “Greatest Person of the Day” based on this story, reprinted below:

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Valley Junction’s Unofficial Matriarch Is All Business, But All Heart, Too

At one point when she was buying up property, other merchants joked about renaming Valley Junction "Hill-Ville."

By Beth Dalbey (Originally published on April 5, 2012)

Betty Hill-Swander will tell you that as a single mother back in the 1970s, she wasn't trying to change the world, or even her little portion of Iowa. She was just trying to provide for her daughter, and her best idea was to buy up property in Valley Junction, then a downtrodden slice of West Des Moines.

But Hill-Swander is, perhaps, the unwitting matriarch of Valley Junction and more responsible than anyone for its turnaround, which Monday made it a  winner with four other communities.

She owns 13 properties in what is now a quaint, turn-of-the-century, charm-oozing shopping district, a compact, eclectic mix of 120 locally and independently owned art, boutique and specialty businesses. That’s down from 18 buildings she once owned – her idea of slowing down at 85 years old.

At one point, she recalls, folks teased they should rename Valley Junction “Hill-ville.”

“It’s to me a very cozy little town in a big city, just a charming little place where people can come down and walk from one shop to the next and just have a wonderful afternoon shopping and stopping into a restaurant to have a bite to eat,” Hill-Swander says.

Her heart swells at her beloved Valley Junction’s national compliment.

“I fell in love with it,” she says, “and that’s why I started buying property.”

Jim Miller says the title of matriarch is deserved.

“Betty’s cool, one of a kind – all business, but all heart, too,” he says. “I truly do not believe we would be the retail specialty district that we are if not for Betty stepping in 40 years ago.”

Director Clyde Evans says Hill-Swander has been a benevolent landlord whose low rents in side-street buildings gave Valley Junction’s hallmark small businesses breathing room to establish before “graduating” to premier Fifth Street storefronts,

“One of the things Valley Junction has been pretty lucky with is to have good property owners there, and Betty is one of the larger ones,’ Evans says.  “It’s been a good place to start businesses.”

Bawdiness Gives Way to Charm

Hill-Swander says Valley Junction “was a pretty run down little district” in 1970 when she bought after her dance supply business outgrew a studio in a neighboring suburb.

A meat locker slaughtered farm animals in the heart of Valley Junction, a lumber yard’s open bins attracted vermin, and an overall unkempt appearance veiled architectural gems.

“Run down.” That’s one way of putting it. “Bawdy” is another.

Six bars and a liquor store in the same block of Fifth Street contributed to the railroad town’s rough-and-tumble reputation, where anything could happen and often did. There were also rumors that the theater she was buying had in one iteration been a vaudeville house that rented out hotel rooms from the upstairs.

“There was probably a little extra business going on upstairs,” Hill-Swander says, winking behind wireless rose-colored glasses that swallow a third of her face.

When she bought the former theater, West Des Moines city officials wondered what business she was up to.

“At that time, theaters were closing and triple-X theaters were opening up, and I got a call from Elmer True,“ she says with mock sternness, recalling her conversation with the longtime West Des Moines mayor.

“He said, ‘Oh, Betty, I hope you are not planning on putting in an X-rated theater,’” Hill-Swander recalls. “I told him that was not my thing, that I was only interested in teaching little girls to pointe their toes.”

Her MBA Stands for “My Business Aptitude”

Hill-Swander says she began honing her business acumen as a “little dorky kid with red hair and freckles” who loved playing Monopoly more than almost any else. She didn’t go to college, laughs about her MBA – “My Business Aptitude,” she calls it – and credits her success to “a lot of determination and desire to make things happen.”

Unmarried with a daughter to raise at the time, she smiles wryly – coyly, even – and calls her path “unusual.”

She eventually married Jack Swander, who died seven years ago, and they teamed to transform the district one building at a time. The meat locker and slaughterhouse became a sewing shop. The lumber yard is gone. There’s no hint of a red-light district in Valley Junction.

And so it goes.

“At the time we were concentrating on buying all this property, most of it on contract, we were really, really spread thin,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I think I have gone too far.’ But I kept my little nose to the grindstone and it all worked out.”