Richardson Family Papers: Volume II | Introduction

By Madge Richardson Walsh, 1991

Ruth Catherine Richardson 1910 

Northfield High School graduation portrait

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A MEMORY BOOK

Ruth in the family parlor of the
D.F Richardson home, Northfield, Minnesota

In Volume I of these annals, Florence Richardson Street reminisced about her parents, D.F. and Clemmie Richardson, and her brothers and sisters. She looked back to the time they lived in Northfield, Minnesota before the turn of the century, up to 1908. By then, Florence had married Claude Street and had her only child, Paul. Ella, the oldest sister, married Claude's brother Bernard (it was a double wedding) and had Harold, the first of her five children.

In Volume II, we have a diary and a series of articles by Ruth Richardson Smith, third child and youngest sister (these are being shared courtesy of her children). In her Private Diary, Ruth gives us a con­temporary account of the period 1907 - 1909, written during her teenage years at North­field High School, and illustrated with her own charming drawings.

Some of the gaps in the Diary I have been able to bridge with clippings from the Northfield News. For these, I shall forever bless the unnamed souls who indexed the newspaper. I also owe thanks to local Northfield teenager Reenie Martin, who spent a good part of her 1983 summer vacation in the library, reading microfilm to find the articles on my want list and making copies of them.

As her sisters did, Ruth went to Carleton College (Class of 1914, though she did not graduate). She worked as a nurse at St. Luke's in St. Paul for a year until moving to Suther­lin, Oregon in September, 1913 with her parents. On April 29, 1916, at Suther­lin, she married Arthur Gerald Smith, rancher.

Their first child was not born until 1921, and her early years on the ranch were lonely and often demanding. During this time she wrote an account of her experiences; later, during the Depres­sion when cash was hard to come by, she offered her writings to the editor of the Roseburg News-Review. The news­paper published her articles anonymously as Letters of an Oregon Bride. Though the incidents were true, the names were fictional (but she used quite a few family names and some individuals were composites).

The first series of 12 letters appeared daily from January 17 to 30, 1934 (six days a week - there was no paper on Sunday). These were so popular that she was "persuaded" to continue the series for an addi­tion­al 15 letters. These ran from April 17 to May 3, 1934. The letters covered an apparent time period of two years. The newspaper was in the habit of run­ning such serials - romances, mysteries, or adventure stories - by then-popular authors never heard of since (except for one, perhaps - Ben Ames Williams). But they were fictional, and the Letters were unusual in being true.

Ruth told no one that she was doing this, though Art must have known. Florence thought he might have considered it a reflec­tion on him that she had so rugged a life. Her children say they watched for the articles eagerly, never suspecting their own mother had written them.

Many years later, she got permission from the news­paper to publish the Letters as a book. Early in 1963 she sent a big envelope of them in manuscript to her sister Florence, asking her to type them. "Hurry!" Florence was astounded at the hidden talent of her sister; "I've never appreciated Ruth before."

Florence did have the letters typed before she died in July, 1963; but nothing more was done, and Ruth her­self died the following year.

The only "editing" of the Letters I found necessary was to correct the typist's obvious mistakes, and to add occasional clarifying remarks or illustrations.

The text of the remembrance read at her Memorial Service con­cludes this volume.

Ruth Richardson Smith has left us a true "Memory Book" to pour over, evoking times past in a style that is refresh­ingly ingenuous, often humorous, sometimes poignant: truly a gift of herself.

Madge Richardson Walsh 

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Ruth Richardson Memorial

MEMORIAL

RUTH RICHARDSON SMITH

1892 – 1964

Ruth died October 6, 1964 at Monmouth, Oregon. The Memorial Service was held at Wesley Methodist Church, Monmouth, on October 8, 1964, Wayne L. Hill, Minister. The words of the Memorial were composed and read by her daughter Genevieve Smith Hansen.

Ruth and Art

MEMORIAL

On the wall of their ranch house in Southern Oregon, Ruth and Art Smith hung a simple motto. It read:

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.

It was a homely poem, but it tells much about the people who hung it there - for they were good people, kind people, and above all, they were completely unjudging. Indeed, Ruth Richardson Smith's entire life was a passion­ate protest against injustice of every kind, and a constant reiteration of her belief in the essential dignity of every human being. So fair, so just, so honest was she, that the battle was often unequal - but her spirit endured if not always pre­vailed.

Her home was full of books and music and laughter. She was a raconteur of the highest order, and from the storehouse of memories of her girlhood in the little college town of Northfield, Minnesota, she recon­structed for her children, and later her grand­children, the story of her growing up in that late Victorian era - a sort of never­-never land and time when ladies in sweeping gowns and large plumed hats still made formal calls, where little girls wearing long white stockings and enormous bows in their hair still planned elaborate tea parties for their dolls, where lawn parties, and sleigh rides and hot cocoa after church parties and cold lemonade following croquet all were a part of the good life.

To her, the Methodist Church, the Republican Party, and Carleton College, her alma mater, were not mere institutions, but a way of life. She was an absolute authority on snow - and many a wet and dripping afternoon under Oregon skies was enlivened with her talk of bob­sleds, and ice skates, and great bon-fires. She excelled at telling stories and puns and jokes - she was a perfect mimic - and the conversation around her dinner table was always sparkling, occasionally spirited, and never dull. It was here that the family shared their ideas - no two alike - and books and politics and religion and current events all mingled with the day's happenings as standard fare; and it was here, too, that she encouraged her children to stand up and speak out - to follow the truth wherever it might lead them, no matter how unpopular or unorthodox it might be, for to her, Shakespeare's admoni­tion "To thine own self be true, thou cans't not then be false to any man" was a rule of life.

She was an accomplished musician; her piano gave her many hours of great pleasure. She taught her chil­dren to sing and play, and she and Art joined with them. For many years, she was the pianist at the little Methodist Church in Sutherlin. This, and her efforts on behalf of the Children's Farm Home in Corvallis, and the book study club to which she belonged were food for her heart and mind.

Her love of books and good reading she shared with her family. Each evening after dinner, she would read aloud from whatever she might be reading, and with her lovely voice she made the characters from Mark Twain and the Uncle Remus stories, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene Field and Edgar Guest and John Steinbeck and John Gunther and Sinclair Lewis and, of course, the Bible, come alive and join them in their living room. Both she and Art were pretty good Biblical scholars and the verses flavored their speech as well as their conduct. They came closer to practising what they preached than many of us ever will.

She liked games of any kind - Monopoly, Authors, Rook, Anagrams - and so did Art - and the checker tournament which they conducted daily throughout their marriage became almost legendary. It was two games out of three - and the winner had to defend the title of Smith Family World Checker Champion at any challenge. Her idea of perfect enter­tain­ment would have been a triple feature bill starring Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. She could become convulsed with laughter at the mere mention of any of them.

Her life was not always either easy or happy. As a child, she had been sickly and unwell. Her mother was fiercely protective - and she sometimes felt she was but a spectator, not an actor, of life's drama. She was a deeply sensitive person, often hurt, frequently misunderstood and misunderstanding. She had a quick tongue, and an equally quick apology. She never let the sun set on her anger and she greeted each day with a verse she learned to love from Art's beloved mother. "This is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it."

The care and concern for her aging parents were a reality for much of her middle years - and the Great Depression left a scar on her spirit it took long to heal. Her sense of independence, her personal pride, her very security were placed in jeopardy, and it was only her indomi­table will - an euphemism for sheer stubbornness - that sustained her. Her family cherishes the memory of a time she announced that her cook book contained a hundred and one different ways to pre­pare potatoes, and she thought it would be fun to try them all. For some two months she served potatoes in a dif­ferent way every night - potato soup, potatoes au gratin, Delmonico potatoes, hash brown potatoes, Golden Glow potatoes - potatoes and potatoes and potatoes. Her chil­dren loved them. It was not for many years that they learned that potatoes were all there was to serve, and what had seemed to them an exciting culinary adventure, was in reality, a neces­sity. This anecdote was characteristic of her life - she did the best with what she had, and enjoyed it.

The ten years in which the Smiths maintained a real estate brokerage in Redmond were perhaps the best and happiest of all their lives. They loved it there, the climate, the community, the people, the hunting and fish­ing, the picnicking. For the first time ever they had no family responsibilities, they experienced a degree of eco­nomic freedom they had never before known, they were rich in dear friends, and they were both doing the things they loved best. Art was showing and selling ranches and farm lands, and fishing and hunting at every opportunity. If the opportunity failed to present itself, he created it, and while scouting a real estate deal, he managed to keep his eye on every buck deer, every flock of geese, every China rooster, and every big trout in Central Oregon - so that on the opening day of any given season, he and his little black dog, Bugs, could go and help themselves.

Ruth delighted in being a business woman, and going off to the office every day. Like her merchant father before her, she was a good sales woman, and she found deep satisfaction in it. She enjoyed wearing pretty clothes, sharing coffee­-breaks with other working women, being a part of a vital community. Her lovely voice, experienced from years of reading to her family, lent itself to a daily radio program. She was active in the affairs of the community - the Com­munity Church, the Eastern Star, the Chamber of Com­merce, and the Toastmistress Club. The Smiths had a love affair with all of Central Oregon, Deschutes County, the city of Redmond, and the block where they lived. It was reciprocal.

Eight years ago this week, on a gold and blue October afternoon, on just the kind of a day that any right­-thinking hunting man would order for opening day of duck season, her beloved Art died - and with him, a part of her died too. His kind of death [of a massive heart attack while hunting] seemed almost a special benediction to a fine life, nobly and generously and lov­ingly lived - but for her it was an enormous injustice from which she never truly recovered.

Complicated by the problems of her own failing health, she began to die a little. The merriness of her laugh, her quick wit and high humor, her spirit and her will died too - and bit by bit she drifted away. The tired little woman who died this week was not the bright and handsome woman with a gay laugh, a spring in her step, a twinkle in her eye; not the good friend, devoted mother, proud grand­parent, and delightful human being we once knew and whose memory we love. That person died long ago - only her shadow lingered.

We celebrate the life of Ruth Smith. We celebrate it because it was a good life, a decent life, and a kind life. We celebrate it because it touched on all of ours. We celebrate it for its devotion to all those she loved, for its dedication to the prin­ciples and stan­dards she held high, for the sense of dignity and propriety and en­thu­siasm it instilled in others. We cele­brate it for its courage, for its loyalty, for its perseverance. We celebrate it for its love.

Death came as a friend to awaken her from what had become a nightmare. We rejoice in her deliverance. Now she becomes immortal in the shrine of our hearts. We can say of her, as she always said of herself - she only did her best.

The End

 

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