Elizabeth Janebruni Daggett

Betty was born in Keene Valley, New York, in the Adirondacks, and grew up in rural America during The Great Depression. She was raised in a large family of siblings and cousins by her maternal aunt, Eleanor DeVost, and later placed in foster care with a local hairdresser. With these loving, generous women as role models, she lived her life taking in displaced family and friends and she sat through to the end with those who died in her tender care.

She attended beauty school in Albany, NY, in the late 1940s, after graduating high school, and was, for the rest of her career, very happy with her role in helping women to feel good about looking better. She opened Betty Jane's Beauty Salon on Myrtle Ave in 1949, when independent and self-directing women were rare. She moved the shop to Partridge St. in 1961, until her retirement in 2000. In both locations, she worked from a salon in the basement of the family home, allowing her to multitask the jobs of mother, housewife and hairdresser. She was President of both the local Albany Hairdressers' Association and the NYS Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. She also served as an examiner for the NYS Cosmetologist's licensing exam. The one job closest to her heart, for many of her later years, was being a volunteer cosmetologist for cancer patients in the Look Good Feel Better Program of the American Cancer Society.

Betty survived her first husband, Captain Angelo Bruni, in 1980, her longtime friend Fred Rella in 2002, and her second husband Howard Daggett in 2009. She is survived and remembered by her son Larry M. Bruni of Albany, NY; her daughter Mary Benway Dittmer of Troy, NY; her nieces Elaine Savage of Albany, NY, and Jo-Ann Conklin of Providence, RI; her nephews Robert Savage of Yorktown Heights, NY, and Russell Conklin of Salisbury, CT and his family.
A brief service before burial is scheduled at New Comer Cannon Funeral Home at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2014. Contributions to the Look Good Feel Better campaign are welcomed in Betty's name at http://lookgoodfeelbetter.org/donate