Longtime Point Loma resident Betty Huber, who ran Chicago-based Coldwell Banker Mortgage’s largest U.S. home-lending office in Mission Valley in the 1980s and early ’90s, celebrated her 100th birthday Wednesday, Sept. 14.
At home near Point Loma High School, surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and friends while the Padres played the Mariners on her television, she blew out her single candle with one well-aimed puff.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, regarding her 100th birthday and the Padres’ 6-1 loss.
While raising her five children with her husband Donald, Huber wrote FHA and VA home loans to help Pardee Construction Co. sell its subdivisions in Mira Mesa. Later, in 1979, she joined Coldwell Banker Mortgage, eventually running the office as executive vice president with 77 employees.
“There were only 2% of all women who made that much money at that time,” she recalled in her 2020 memoir titled “The Book of Betty.”
“My office made the most profit of any in the whole United States. So you’ve got a real live wire here.”
She and her husband Donald, who died in 2010, were among the founders of St. Charles Borromeo Church and Academy. Donald Huber helped establish the fire department, and later served as its chief, at the originally named Marine Corps Air Depot Miramar. In fact, he coined the name of the new Marine base as Miramar rather than a piece of Camp Kearny, she said.
Don Huber is known in aviation firefighting circles as a developer of “A-Triple-F” (AFFF, aqueous film-forming foam) that can smother a fire, fast.
“He became a hero in his own right because he invented a product they use all over the world today,” said Betty Huber. “These pilots who crash-landed would die before they could pull them out… This product has saved thousands of lives.”
Natives of Minnesota, Betty joined Don in San Diego at Christmas-time 1942 during World War II, presuming her Marine enlistee boyfriend would soon be shipped off for duty in the Pacific. Instead, he was one of 100 pulled aside and ordered to start building the air base that would become Miramar. They married in January 1943. “We got married in San Diego but I had only come to kiss him goodbye!”
