People

* Spotlight on achievers

Betty Phillips

World traveler, Garden Grove

The pink and white scrapbook bulges with photos and clippings. The title reads: “Betty’s Lively Life.”

The lacy cover belies the exploits chronicled within, much as the delicate-looking woman, with her coiffed white hair and ginger-bread-trim house hardly seems likely to have trekked the Himalayas, viewed the fiords of Norway and tooled around Bali on a moped.

“I’d rather travel for adventure than luxury,” said Betty Phillips, a Garden Grove hairstylist who turned 80 last month and is still trimming customers’ locks.

In 35 years she has visited 56 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, forsaking cruises and air-conditioned bus tours for bumpy back roads that would test the endurance of a far younger tourist.

She works three days a week at GiGi’s salon in Anaheim and has kept abreast of current hairstyles with courses in London and Paris.

“I don’t just do little old ladies’ hair,” she said.

Born in Oklahoma, Phillips moved to Los Angeles in 1942 with a young family, an eighth-grade education and a cosmetology license.

Her marriage ended in 1945, leaving Phillips with two small children and a beauty shop to run.

So she learned to juggle cutting hair with cooking meals, balancing her books while helping with homework.

She made time to earn her high school diploma at age 39.

In 1955 she moved to Garden Grove and soon became a prominent figure.

When the women’s division of the Garden Grove Chamber of Commerce opened in 1960, Phillips was elected president.

Two years later she was the first woman on the board of the men’s division.

Around then, with her kids out on their own, Phillips splurged on a two-month tour of Europe.

She figured it would be her last chance to see the world. In fact, it was just the beginning.

Intoxicated with travel, Phillips went on a photo safari in Kenya, then hiked through Yugoslavia to mark her 57th birthday.

The next year, she joined a tour of Norway’s fiords, but her knees locked up on a steep slope and she had to be carried down.

Determined to finish the trip, she hiked paths near the hotel to get back in shape, rejoining the others later for an expedition across the glaciers.

Last year, at age 79, she went on a 100-mile trek through the Himalayas by Jeep, bus and foot.

The tour wended through a lush valley up terraced fields to icy peaks.

“You can only see that part of the country by roughing it,” Phillips said.

Now she’s planning her next trip to the remote islands of Indonesia.

“The thing that gets me is she’s much more energetic than all of us,” her friend and client Suad Kessler said. “She beats any of us for the richness of her life.”