Betty A. Vail loved East Hampton and told her daughter, Marci Vail, that the best day of her life was "the day that she and her parents returned to East Hampton from Baltimore, where her father worked in an airplane factory during World War II."
It was always her favorite place, her daughter said. And even after eloping at 17 with Franklin Sayler and living in South Carolina and Underwood, N.D., Mr. Sayler's hometown, her heart was in East Hampton.
She had met Mr. Sayler during his stint at Montauk with the Air Force. After he died unexpectedly young in 1960, she returned here with their young daughter, Bobbi. Having worked in Riverdale, N.D., in the public information section of the Army Corps of Engineers, once back here, Mrs. Vail became a legal secretary for the lawyers Ray Smith and then Doug Dayton.
Mrs. Vail even bought her own house, on Miller Lane East, at 26, with her father and boss as co-signers, and lived there for the next 58 years.
In 1963, she met Robert Vail at George Greene's luncheonette on North Main Street. He was on his lunch break from the East Hampton Village Police Department and she was there with her former father-in-law, who had come to see her and his granddaughter. There were two seats at the end of the counter, Ms. Vail recalled her saying, and her mother said, "I think I'll sit next to this handsome police officer."
They married in 1967 at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in East Hampton. When Mr. Vail proposed, Ms. Vail said, "he gave her the ring and said that he was tired of going on vacation alone." Every year they would go on vacation and spend a month in Florida.
When the far-flung vacations made her younger daughter miss too much school, they would take a shorter vacation to Maryland or North Carolina. "Mom and Dad bought a house in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia in the late 1980s," Ms. Vail added. "They spent a few summers there, and it was supposed to be their retirement home, but they decided that they preferred East Hampton and would not retire elsewhere."
Mrs. Vail left the work force in 1968 to be a full-time homemaker; in the late 1970s and early 1980s she sold Avon products. Mr. Vail died in 2004.
Betty Ann Vail was born at Southampton Hospital on Sept. 28, 1936, the only child of Doris Ernest Janes and Robert O. Janes, and she grew up on Indian Hill in East Hampton. As a teenager, her family said, she was an assistant to Enez Whipple, the longtime director of Guild Hall, and also clerked at Oscar Brill's Clothing Store on North Main Street. Although she eloped before graduating from East Hampton High School, Mrs. Vail earned a G.E.D. later on.
She enjoyed jigsaw puzzles and reading, Ms. Vail said, especially anything about wolves and nature. She loved animals and used to board dogs at her house for weekend residents. She would take her younger daughter and her friends to the beach almost every day in the summertime, said Ms. Vail, who still lives in East Hampton. "She was beautiful, kind, generous, and wise. She might have been the wisest woman I've ever known."
Mrs. Vail died on Dec. 29 of respiratory failure at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care on Quiogue. She was 84 and had been in declining health since the summer.
In addition to Ms. Vail, she is survived by her daughter Bobbi L. Sayler of East Hampton and a grandson, Ephraim Munoz-Vail, 11, with whom "she really enjoyed time," and who enjoyed his grandmother's company very much. Her cousin Audrey Garbowski of Dover, Pa., who grew up in East Hampton and with whom she was especially close, also survives, as does a close friend, Judy Tilghman of Stockton, Md., whose late husband had met Mr. Vail as he was metal detecting at Main Beach in 1969, after which the couples became fast friends.
Mrs. Vail was cremated. The family is planning a private burial of her ashes later this year at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton, where Mr. Vail is buried.
Memorial donations have been suggested for the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association, 86 Main Street, East Hampton 11937, or the East Hampton Library, 159 Main Street, East Hampton 11937.
