Betty Grissom was born Betty Lavonne Moore on August 8, 1927 in Mitchell, Indiana. In 1945 she married Virgil I. Grissom, an engineering student at Purdue University. "Gus" Grissom would become one of the seven original NASA Group 1 United States astronauts in 1959. Following the death of her husband in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire she sued North American Rockwell and received a settlement of $350,000 in 1971. She co-founded the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1984. She passed away on October 7, 2018.