Betty Mae Kerman Kramer
By Patricia Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer  Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Betty Mae Kramer dies; founder
of Montgomery County
Executive's Ball

Betty Mae Kramer, 80, founder of the Montgomery County
Executive's Ball while her husband served as the top county
official, died March 12, 2010 of Parkinson's disease at her
daughter's home in Glenelg. She lived in north Bethesda.

Mrs. Kramer organized a team of volunteers in 1986 to create
the ball, which has raised more than $1 million over the past 24
years to support nonprofit arts and humanities organizations in
Montgomery County. She was honored by the county with a special lifetime achievement award
in 2007 for her work on the ball.

She also testified at county hearings to advocate for stricter anti-smoking laws, and she raised
money and helped plan the Strathmore arts center. Mrs. Kramer led voluntarism efforts in
Montgomery County in the late 1980s, organizing the county's part in a National Day of Service
and doing her own part by singing "Red Sails in the Sunset" to residents of the National
Lutheran Home.

"As we've become more urbanized, we've had a tendency to lose some of our sense of
community," she said in 1988. "But Montgomery County has very strong volunteer groups. And I
think part of it is, being the best-educated county in the country, the citizens know how to pull
strings and get things done. And we care."

Her singing was also a customary part of election night, at least until her husband, Sidney
Kramer, lost his reelection bid in the 1990 Democratic primary to Neal Potter. It had been a
hard-fought campaign in which the opposition questioned the propriety of county workers
driving Mrs. Kramer to meet her husband at the receptions, ceremonies and functions that are
the lifeblood of public life.

Mrs. Kramer, known as a stylish and dedicated partisan who wore clothes incorporating her
husband's yellow-and-black campaign colors during the race, was so upset at his loss that she
lambasted Potter for his campaign's attacks on her husband, herself and their family. "For that, I
will never forgive you," she said at a traditional post-primary party unity meeting.

She encouraged her husband to launch a write-in campaign for the general election, telling
reporters, "I had my arm twisted by people saying, 'You can't let the county go down the drain,"
but he lost that election as well.

Two of their children now represent Montgomery County as Democrats in the General Assembly.

Betty Mae Kerman was a native Washingtonian and graduated from
McKinley Tech High
School in 1947.
She married in 1950, and graduated from the old Wilson Teachers College in
1953. She and her husband moved to Silver Spring in 1960, and they remained Montgomery
County residents for the rest of her life.

She was a Democratic precinct chair and active in the Jewish Council for the Aging, performing
show tunes, Hebrew folk music, Yiddish ballads and 1940s love songs on the "Jewish seniors
circuit," her family said.

In addition to her husband of 60 years, survivors include three children, Miriam Dubin of Glenelg,
state Sen. Rona E. Kramer of Olney and state Del. Benjamin F. Kramer of Derwood; a brother,
Edward Kerman of Potomac; a sister, Iris Kerman of Lusby; and eight grandchildren.
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