So, here's 39-year-old Betty White squeezed into a tiny ticket booth in Manhattan, telling moviegoers they must take a pledge not to reveal the film's surprise ending. Warning others not to remove their shoes. And informing one gentleman that to see the film he was interested in he'd have to walk to Queens. She was delightful.

She went on to have a robust career in sitcoms, notably "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Golden Girls" and "Hot in Cleveland," the last of which ran for six seasons, ending when she was 93. Easily overlooked is that Betty White was also one of the last in a special breed that might be called TV's intelligent game-show panelists.

She appeared frequently on "What's My Line?" and "To Tell the Truth," as well as "Password," where she met and married the host, Allen Ludden. Erudite panelists then were people like Bennett Cerf, a co-founder of Random House, syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and humorist and author Fred Allen—hired to entertain with intellect. Imagine that. Betty White fit with this crowd as smoothly as she fit into a movie-theater box office.

In Carmel, where Betty lived part-time since 1981 in a magnificent house overlooking Point Lobos, she's best remembered as an animal lover. Her house had an entire room filled with stuffed animals, each of which she named and spoke to frequently.

Along with neighbors Doris Day, Clint Eastwood and my father, she was a regular at animal-welfare fundraisers. At one auction she paid $9,000 for the privilege of releasing a great horned owl into the wild, exclaiming, "My accountant will kill me!" But of course he wouldn't. She was Betty White.

(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.