E. Betty Deacon was working as former Baltimore City Council President Mary Pat Clarke’s chief of staff about three decades ago when the phone rang.

An elderly woman was on the other end with a concern: People were using a phone on the wall outside of her apartment to deal drugs. She didn’t feel safe. Was there anything Ms. Betty could do to help?

Deacon called the phone company, which declined to remove it. So that night, she drove to the apartment and scoped out the scene. When the coast was clear, she hopped out of her car, cut the receiver off the telephone and threw it in her trunk. Problem solved.

A few days later, the woman called again. The company fixed the phone and the dealers were back. So, once again, Deacon drove over and cut the receiver. She never told her boss about it. But now that she’s passed, and she can’t be criminally charged, her family is OK with sharing the story.

Deacon, a longtime political organizer and progressive activist who also spent nearly a decade in former U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s office, died May 1 of complications related to lymphoma. She was 81.

“What Betty did was not only take on big projects, but she was a builder of community, and she was a builder of people,” Mikulski said. “People who never thought that they had power, working with Betty, learned how to claim their power and began to organize to get the resources they needed for [their] community.”

Deacon was born in Baltimore on April 4, 1944. Her childhood wasn’t always easy as she watched her father cope with alcoholism.

She grew up Catholic, attended Catholic schools and played softball. But her education was a secondary priority to that of her brother, Lenny, because she was a woman. It was a disparity that always irked her. As a teenager, she attended a program that focused primarily on clerical skills, but she didn’t graduate with a high school degree.

Instead, she married young, exchanging vows with Gary Deacon, a nice boy who grew up in the same neighborhood. They had two children, Gus and Brian, and Betty Deacon fell in love with her role as a mother.

When Gus was little, his teacher suggested he might have dyslexia, a learning disorder that wasn’t as well-known in the early 1970s as it is today.

Betty Deacon made it her mission to get help for her son, consulting experts to help improve his reading skills. During this time, she decided she would like to continue her own education, so she earned her GED and later went off to Sojourner-Douglass College at age 37. She didn’t realize until she sat down in her first class that she was the only white person at the school.

While earning her bachelor’s degree, Deacon started working as the director of the Racial Justice Center at the YWCA of Baltimore, where she provided white awareness anti-racism training. In the early ’90s, she earned a master’s degree from the University of Baltimore.

Meanwhile, her personal life had been rapidly changing, too. She and Gary divorced amicably in the early ‘80s, and a few years later Deacon came out as gay.

She later told family and friends that she’d known she was a lesbian all her life, and Gus joked that “if I really looked, I would’ve saw.” Deacon then entered a long-term relationship with a woman. Her career ramped up, and she began working for Clarke in 1988. About a decade later, she joined Mikulski’s staff.

She worked on a number of projects throughout her career, with interest areas including women’s and reproductive rights, union advocacy, racial justice and support for working-class neighborhoods. She helped establish truck routes outside of residential neighborhoods, opposed disruptive expressways that would have upended communities, and procured resources for underserved residents.

At some point, she decided to run for local office, too, and mistakenly thought she had to include her full name on campaign literature. Because everyone knew her as “Betty” and not “Elizabeth,” she legally changed her name to E. Betty Deacon.

“It started out that she just wanted to help folks and try and make things better in the neighborhood for everybody,” Brian Deacon said. “It just kept progressing as she got her bachelor’s degree, and it opened up more doors for her to expand her role in civic life.”

Still, “as her son, I always felt loved,” Gus Deacon said. “I always felt like I was the No. 1 priority in her life, even though she was busy.”

Betty Deacon broke up with her partner after living together for 16 years, in large part because her girlfriend didn’t enjoy children. In the end, it was serendipitous, because she ran into Ptery Iris at Rehoboth Beach in 2001. Deacon later said she knew Iris was also gay because she was wearing a k.d. lang shirt, and the two bonded over their love for their kids.

Deacon was thrilled to show Iris the best parts of Baltimore — an Orioles game on a sunny day, a birthday show at the Hippodrome Theatre, the book festival on the water.

The couple moved to Delaware in 2006, where Deacon helped elect women to local office. She fought to preserve a historic African American elementary school slated to be torn down, helping turn it instead into a community center and museum.

They stayed there until 2022, moving to Bethesda after Deacon broke her hip.

Iris stood in their home this week reminiscing on their years together and the life they created, including the time they spent with their children and grandchildren. Deacon often said that, when it came to the grandkids, “my job is to sugar them up and bring them home,” Gus Deacon said.

The couple’s marriage vows, written in calligraphy, hang on their wall.

“It says, among other things, that we pledge that our home together will be a life-affirming haven open to each other’s family and friends,” Iris said. “We really meant that.”

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