I was born 9:00 in the evening, on November 7, 1923, in St. Louis, Missouri, at home on Arkansas Street. I guess that was prophetic because I ended up in Arkansas. I don't remember much about my life from one to four because at four we moved to a different house. I have some pictures in my mind of me in a high chair when I wasn't even walking yet. I had two older sisters. I was the third daughter. One day my father came home and said, "We have a boy!" And I remember getting out of my chair, and I ran against the wall in the corner and I said: "Now I won't be the baby anymore."
When I went to kindergarten, my two sisters had already preceded me. As it turned out, my kindergarten teacher was the one that my father had. They last forever it seems. I loved kindergarten; I loved all parts of school except I didn't like anything to do with arithmetic or any of that stuff. As a consequence, for years and years and years I never balanced my bankbook. I knew there was something in there. We did such wonderful things in kindergarten. We made butter and we spread it out on crackers. We played with crocheted, different colored balls so we could learn the names of colors. It was a great big sunny room, a good time. I was a little girl who had a lot of those little dresses that had the little pants that matched them. When the black lady who helped my mother do the laundry would do the ironing, everything was still warm from the iron and felt so good. I remember her saying it doesn't matter what color your skin is. We are all the same inside. I never forgot that.
I didn't date in high school. That's because nobody asked. My nickname was "Skinny." I really didn't like high school per se; it seemed Mickey Mouse to me. I couldn't wait to get to college. I thought that was where my life was going to begin, and it did.
I started college in 1941 at Milwaukee-Downer. I went to Milwaukee-Downer because they had a well-known course in occupational therapy. College I loved because it was preparing me for what I wanted to do and be. My oldest sister is also an occupational therapist. She went to Washington University in St. Louis, and they just had a diploma course there. She liked it very much. Because she lived at home, I got in on a lot of what went on. This includes the lectures about the body that you are working with. Her fifth year was clinical practice, and she trained with some girls that went to Milwaukee-Downer. She told me, "Ruth, you better go there because they know a whole lot more than I do." They also had a degree course. Before you go, they come and visit you in your home and see what you are like and what your parents are like. That year in 1941 on a Sunday afternoon in December, we were listening to the radio and Pearl Harbor happened. That was a defining moment in life, even though it didn't affect me directly.
You know from psychology about the animus and the anima, the male and the female. Mother was the male, Daddy was the female: he was much kinder and gentler, not quite as demanding. Mother was the do it this way and no excuses parent. Daddy was the one who played with us; we had lots of fun. He liked to garden, and he would teach us by telling us what he was doing. My father leased some land at a river outside of St. Louis where we had a clubhouse. This clubhouse was up on stilts because the water rose every year, and then your outhouse floated downstream someplace, and you would have to go get it every summer and bring it back. We had a lot of fun out there, but my mother didn't like that. Mother was heavy set, but not big hips— big bust. We didn't have air conditioning or anything; it had a long porch with screening on three sides, a little tiny kitchen, and one little bedroom with two cots and a double bed. Sometimes there would be friends of my parents that lived around them when they were young. They would come out, and we would have a good time together. We were about a half a block from the river, and Daddy would go swim with us and teach us how to swim. We spent a lot of time in the water with Daddy, my two sisters and me; I remember them more out there than in the city. Eventually Mother didn't come anymore, just Daddy and the kids out there. He liked that a lot. The one thing I did with Mother that I liked and she liked was she had long wavy blackish hair, and at night she would be sitting at the kitchen table; I'd be at the kitchen table, and my little brother played underneath. She would be sitting there reading the newspaper and working the crossword puzzle, and I'd be combing her hair and fixing it in all kinds of ways, braids, rolls, that kind of stuff. That was an intimate thing that I did with Mother.
On Sundays Daddy had to take Grandma out for a ride. The reason was Grandma bought the car. You got to pay somehow. Mother never learned to drive. I think probably she thought that she did not want to be the one to put a dent in that car. Father was an only child, figuratively, because a sister of his that was younger died in infancy. Since Grandma only lived half a block away from where we lived, there was a lot more influence there. It was kind of my mother against Daddy and Grandma. Daddy was always at her beck and call. What else can you do? "No, I won't bring you any kindling to start your fire. No, I won't take you for a ride this Sunday." We had to wash that damn car every Sunday, too. And it always seemed like I got my hand scratched on the license or something. One of my first rebellions was not going for a ride on Sunday anymore.
My parents traveled a lot, and that was a big influence on me. My father always belonged to the photogravures' union, and they had conventions all over the United States. They always went. When they had the conference in St. Louis where we lived, they went downtown and stayed at the hotel. They wanted to stay where all the action was. My parents' advice to me was "get an education, travel, and any fool can get married."
When I was in college, my father lost his job at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. During the war, there wasn't enough copper to make the cylinders that you had to etch to press things like Parade magazine, the funny papers. During the war the copper had to go to, I guess, ammunition or whatever they use copper for in war, so he was laid off from the Post Dispatch, but they got him another job in a little town about 90 miles west of Chicago called Mt. Morris. The population was 2,500, and that was quite a comedown from St. Louis. It was an interesting place in that they still had a square in the middle of this town with a bandstand, and they had concerts on Saturday nights. We were still living there when they did our college graduation pictures, the individual ones with the drape on, and it said from Mt. Morris, Illinois. That was terrible. I'm not from Mt. Morris, Illinois. I'm from St. Louis. But they took care of their own, which I had never seen in St. Louis.
There was a young man whose mother was a widow, and he had a couple of sisters. He was tall and skinny, and he played on the high school basketball team. His name was Red. You can guess why, can't you? He had red hair. Red was drafted very early, at the invasion of Anzio in Italy. He got hurt and was sent back to White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, to a big hotel, the Homestead. It was made into a rehab. It wasn't quite a rehab yet because he was still strung up with weights and pulleys and casts and that sort of thing because of broken bones. He would write to the town fathers, and they would write to him, and then they would publish it in the weekly paper. Around Christmas time they wrote to Red and asked him, "What do you want for Christmas?" He said "Send Ruth," so they sent Ruth. I went to White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. I would come see him in the daytime. That was deadly. I mean it might have been nice for him, but it was deadly for me. That was the first time I encountered any difference in who sat where going down on the train from Chicago. When we got to Cincinnati, the conductor came in and slid something in a little slot that said WHITE. I said to myself, "Oh, isn't that nice. He's telling us what his name is." Then the black people that were in that car got up and went someplace else. And I said, "Oh no, Ruth, that's not what that is."
I married in 1947; I used to go to the big YMCA downtown with some of my girlfriends because they had dances on Friday nights. It was during the time of the year that CPAs call the busy season. My husband-to-be was working late at the firm where he worked and came through the door and looked in, and then came in and asked me to dance. He eventually told me I had the best legs in the whole place. He's got to like skinny legs because I did not have good-looking legs in those days. We started dating.
We had a church wedding. Two of my girlfriends and two of my sisters were my bridesmaids. I was not in love with him. I just thought he was a good prospect. He was going to be a CPA and he was professional. I guess it was about time I got married, so I decided I would take a chance. I was older than usual, about 23. I didn't dislike him, but I wasn't crazy in love. He was interesting in that he went to a business college, Chicopee Business College in Missouri. It was the only business college that had a football team. That was strange.
We built a house. It was too hot in that house, so we got air conditioning. It was a Lustron house. I loved that house, and he loved it, too. It was porcelain enamel on steel, looks just like your refrigerator. My father used to worry about it. He said, "It's not going to last." I said, "Yes, it is." There are two of them here in Little Rock that are still lasting. One of them is directly across from St. Vincent's but has been modified some; it's been a doctor's office for a long time. It lasted and lasted. The object was you didn't have to paint it. All the doors were sliding, all the pocket doors; it was just a wonderful house. The plans eventually were it would be weather sensitive; if you had your windows open it would close your windows for you. But no more Lustron houses were built; I think it had something to do with McCarthy, the witch hunts, and the Reds. Maybe one of the guys who was associated with building this kind of house was involved. That was a terrible time for artists and other people, Joseph McCarthy on his witch hunt, and as we all know, J. Edgar Hoover was wearing his dresses to parties.
After the divorce it wasn't a great deal different because he had traveled a lot. I know the actual process of the divorce was "Is that all there is?" You go, you get somebody to come with you, you're supposed to have a witness, irreconcilable differences. You go see the judge. It happened to be a lady judge. I didn't know who I was going to get. She read off the petition and she said "is that true?" and I said "yes," and she asked my friend "is that true?" and she said "yes." Then she said, "All right, your divorce is granted." So we were out of the judge's office in about half an hour. We kind of looked at each other and said, "Is that all there is? Okay, now what do I do?" Well, just carry on. We had made some decisions before we physically separated, and that was that I would stay in our house and he would make the monthly payments until it was sold. I stayed there about a year or so until it finally sold. He got an apartment someplace. We had very little to do with each other afterwards. The only thing I wanted was my maiden name back and no alimony; I thought if I don't want the name I don't need anything else. I had some friends but not very many. Mostly our friends were couples he worked with. Of course, they dropped out immediately. I was looking for friends among people I worked with. At that time I started at the State Hospital.
Then I met a lovely person who became my witness for the divorce from the new job I had at Voc Rehab at the State Hospital, which was the first time there was a vocational rehab for the mentally ill any place in the whole United States. We were pioneering there. I was the head of the Activities Department, and I had to hire my staff, which was about five other people. They became a nucleus of friends. I was there about a year and a half; then I moved over to UAMS because a job was available. It was a marvelous move because I would be making $5,000 a year, which was more than I was making at Voc Rehab. Again I worked alone. There were about seven other physical therapists, so there was interchange.
I bought a sailboat with four other people in the psychiatry department; we sailed out at Lake Maumelle. I loved sailing. I really liked that. It was a wooden sailboat. Eventually it got down to one other person and myself. He claimed that he lost the sail. Well, you can't sail a sailboat without the sail. So we gave it to the Boy Scouts, but eventually they got a better boat than ours. Ours ended up rotting on the beach, literally, someplace out where Lake Maumelle is, with no sail. The only thing slightly like sailing is horseback riding. When you clamp your legs in and lean forward and the horse takes off because he knows what you want him to do, it's like the boat when you get the right wind in your sails. It'll just become animate and move.
I met a girl through a friend's club I joined. We started running around together, and that went on for four or five years. Then she met a guy at this place we usually went to dance, and they started to live together, and she didn't go out with me anymore. At a place called the Officer's Club, I met a guy from the Air Force, and we had a long association. Then he had to go down to Florida to train to go to Vietnam and run around in the swamps. I buried him mentally.
My friend's boyfriend was from Corpus Christi; she called me one time and said he was going down for a reunion. She didn't want to be alone all weekend and asked if I would go to dinner with her. First we went to Steak and Ale, but they did not accept the Dine Around Town ticket that she had on the weekend. She said, "Oh, I know someplace that we can go, and there is a waiter there that you will love." So we went. This man did wait on us, and he was very flirty, very sexy, as far as I was concerned. He was Mexican, Mexican illegal; that I didn't know at the time. He had worked in the States for a long time; he had a good command of English.
He asked me for my phone number. This was Saturday night. On Sunday he called me and asked me if he could come over. We were an item from then on, and eventually I married him. That was the big romance! He had physical problems in circulation, so during the time we went together, he had a carotid endarectomy done. Then the doctor wanted to do a replacement of a leg vein, because his legs, his feet hurt him so much. He had that done. Then I made a really bad move because in his presence I asked the doctor about how long might that last, and he said about five years. I think he took that as his death sentence.
We used to do our laundry together. One time we were doing our laundry, and he asked me if I would marry him. I said yes. I knew why he wanted me to marry him. He wanted to marry a citizen so he could get his green card, which I was very glad to do for him. After we were married, we went down to Dallas to the immigration service and made out the papers, and he did get his green card.
Even though we were married, we never lived together because he worked nights and I worked days. We spent a few weekends together but not a lot. He also agreed that he would get a divorce from me after a year because he knew what his physical condition was. I tried to talk him into letting me put him on my medical plan at the Med Center, but he said no, he didn't want that. He said, "I need to go back to Mexico because they have universal medical care." It may not be the quality that they have in Canada, but they had medical care, so he could get in on that.
That separation was really, really sad for me. I cried a lot about that. I really missed him. I knew what was going to happen to him. I knew he wasn't going to get better, no way. About a year and a half after he left, his son called me and told me that he had died. Then I had to mourn all over again. That was the saddest time in my life ever.
Afterwards I got to thinking. I had bought him a pair of shoes for Christmas, a pair of leather shoes. He wanted leather shoes because he was very frugal; he could have the shoes re-soled. Then I thought after he died, "I wonder who is using his green card and wearing his leather shoes?" Somebody would be.
Life is to be lived, to see the world, have fun, but leave me alone. If I want company, I'll come to you. I have some friends around here that I play cards with a lot. I came here in July of 1985. When I moved out here, I didn't know anybody. I just had to meet people. Going along, you find your level. You find people that have the same interests. The lady that I went to Alaska on a cruise with is the one who asked me to eat dinner one Sunday. We did a lot of cruises together, and she and I went to a lot of elder hostels together. We did several cruises together, and then she complained that she got seasick. That's when we started to go to the elder hostels. I've been just about every place except for China and some of the countries in Africa. I have been to Iceland, Brazil, up the Amazon, Rio, the list goes on.
I plan to give my body to the Med Center. I have a surrogate daughter that is an occupational therapist. She is the first person I hired to work with me at the Med Center. I've had a financial advisor since the 70's, when I inherited money from my parents. After they died, I began to invest, along with putting 10% of my salary back when I was working. I have never been sick with anything for long. I get flu and pneumonia shots because they are known as killers of old people.
I have participated in many things since I have been here. I got them to put more railing on the short end of the swimming pool. The Activities Committee voted to pay for it. I was elected to the Residence Council, and I have done square dancing, line dancing, bowling, writer's workshops, book club, and water aerobics. My life is full. The only regrets are things I didn't do, but there aren't many of those.