Betty White considered it a source of pride to be a native of the village of Oak Park.
And while the famed actress, best known for her work on TV shows like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls,” only lived in the village for a short time as a child, she came back periodically over decades to visit relatives at what she considered to be the family home on 214 N. Taylor Ave.
You’ll be seeing more of White starting March 27, the day the U.S Postal Service will officially release her postage stamp.
Though the stamp will be introduced at a ceremony in Los Angeles that day, it will be available for purchase in Oak Park. A local ceremony after March 27 is also in the works, according to Tim Norman, a strategic communications specialist for USPS in Chicago, who is working with Oak Park Postmaster Kenya Thomas to that end.
“At the program, we will have speakers from USPS and the (village) of Oak Park, and would unveil an enlargement of the stamp,” Norman said.
White, an only child, was born at West Suburban Hospital on Jan. 17, 1922. She lived with her parents in an apartment at 220 Pleasant St. until she was a toddler, when she and her parents moved to California.
But that wasn’t the end of her connection to the area, according to Frank Lipo, executive director of the Oak Park River Forest Museum, 129 Lake St.
White’s father, Horace, had a sister, Ema[GV1] , and she and her husband, Hugh James, purchased the home at 214 N. Taylor Ave. in 1926. After a few years, they were joined by White’s paternal grandparents.
Lipo said a June 1989 letter White herself had written to his predecessor at the museum, Carol Kelm, indicated that she returned to the village as often as she could until her uncle died in 1965.
“She recalled staying with her aunt and uncle and grandparents,” Lipo said. “She had fond memories, and in her mind, it was the family home. She had never lived there herself.”
In that same letter, White included a postscript that said, “I’m always careful to explain I was born in Oak Park, not Chicago.”
That makes her as local as other Oak Park postage stamp subjects, like Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright.
“The definition of a native is the place where you were born, and she was born in Oak Park,” Lipo said. “Betty White was a person who not only was born here physically, she had these deep family ties.
“She’s the sort of figure who was passionate about animal rights. She cared about issues and that’s something we care about.”
As for the stamp itself, it was designed by Greg Breeding, a USPS art director, who has fond memories of watching White on TV in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I vaguely remember ‘Password’ but more vividly remember watching her on ‘Match Game,’” Breeding said. “She stood out as attractive and quirky and downright hilarious. And sometime along the way I learned that she was married to game show host Allen Ludden.”
Breeding said stamp design took about a year.
“After receiving the assignment, I began to dig deeper into Betty White’s career and biography before settling on Dale Stephanos as the artist,” he said. “Even then, we worked through multiple sketches before developing the final painting, and as with all stamps, it took quite a bit of time to go through the proper channels to achieve clearances. But it was still one of the smoothest projects I’ve enjoyed working on.”
