My mom, RuthAnn, finished her career as a university professor. She’s a published author. She had a TV show on PBS for 14 years. She’s an accomplished person, but she came from a tiny little rural community in southern Indiana and spent her growing up years, with her family, as tenant farmers. They moved almost every year of her young life.
And so how does a girl like that end up at Purdue University? I thought it would be fun to talk with her as a guest on my show, to hear some of her stories and take the time to “withdraw” from the bank of her memory.
My mom has an incredible heritage— her story is one of resilience and perseverance, grace and generosity. And, as you will see, she also has an astounding legacy. I am who I am because of her.
I hope you enjoy this special conversation with my amazing mother on her 87th birthday!
This is an edited transcript of Carmen’s interview with her mom RuthAnn on The Reconnect with Carmen. Listen to the entire interview on MyFaithRadio.com or wherever you get podcasts. (Interview begins at 28:00 mark)
Carmen: “You are who you were when.” This is one of your phrases. I have lots of things that we could talk about that are like your go-to statements. I have a can-do spirit because of you. I land on the runway ahead because of you. I don’t pay attention to the Hoovers out there who are just trying to suck up all the dirt. There are things that you have said over the course of my life that still rattle around in my mind. So you’re 87 years old today. I thought it would be fun to talk about maybe what your mom Robina was experiencing on this day 87 years ago, right? She was 30 years old, welcoming a brand new baby. And so maybe tell us who you were, where you came from, who your people are.
RuthAnn: Well, my parents were Rhobenia Ringwald and James Holland Benefiel. They were 30 when I was born. They already had one child. My older brother, Jim, is 18 months older and we lived out in nowhere in southern Indiana. And I was born in Madison, Indiana. And my mother was so resourceful and so resilient to everything. When she graduated from high school, she actually went to Cincinnati and then on to Santa Monica, California, driving at Model T to work for well-to-do families and be a governess for their children.
She grew up without a mother. Her mother died when she was two. So she learned from them how to be a parent and how to dress your children and how to have a beautiful table and all those wonderful things that I grew up with because of what she learned. But that’s why every picture of us, my brother and I, we would be dressed in total white and white shoes even out running in the mud because that’s what she learned from them. So it’s interesting. She was wonderful, they were wonderful parents.
Carmen: So that might lead people to imagine when you say we were always dressed in little starched white outfits and your mom drove a car across the country, and what would that have been? What year would that have been that she did that?
RuthAnn: Well, she graduated from high school, of course when she was 18, and she went out there when she was like 19 and went to Cincinnati and then worked for people there. And then, I dunno how she got to California other than she had a cousin out there who said, I have a car that you can drive out here. And back then there were no interstates. I mean, this is the 1920s.
Carmen: Alright, trying to get my mind around that for just a moment. I’m Carmen LaBerge listening to the Reconnect and I am here today with my mom, RuthAnn Benefiel. We’re talking about RuthAnn Benefiel right now, but she then became RuthAnn Fowler and later in her life, RuthAnn Melzer.
And so that’s how many of you know her today? So mom, you’ve had such an extraordinary and rich life, but I want to spend a little more time talking about your childhood because you are who you were when you were a little kid. And I think that the way you’ve begun to describe it, people might imagine that your family had some resources, but the only resources your family had were the ones that your mom cobbled together. So talk a little bit about moving nearly every year when you were a kid because your dad was a tenant farmer. They didn’t own a home, they didn’t own anything. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about that and maybe take us into the experience of one particular move. So how many times did you move when you were a kid and then take us into one of those experiences of moving.
RuthAnn: Well, I went to five different schools when I was little. We moved about every year and then I went to five different schools. But mother and daddy would never, ever, I don’t remember ever any regret, anybody upset, no sadness. It was a cheerful morning. But the night before, they would say, we’re moving tomorrow. And you knew that, okay, you take everything you own, put it on your bed, take your sheets, tie them up in the middle, and you get that stuff on the truck. And then when you get there, of course you take it off the truck and take it to wherever your bed’s going to be and get ready for the day. And mother would say, okay, okay, now we got to get dressed. Lay out all your clothes for church. We got to go to church in the morning, get everything ready for school.
We got to go out, get to school, and we’re going to sign up for everything we can. We’ll probably only be here a year. So we got to get involved. And that’s how I learned the can-do spirit and how to be resilient and happy and cheerful about every day. No matter what it is, you just take it as it comes and move on. And so that was always kind of a fun time actually. We met lots and lots of different neighbors, lots and lots of different people, lots of different communities, lots of different churches, lots of different schools. But we learned from that and it was all good.
Carmen: One of the things that sticks with me and you have done throughout the course of my life, and now I do as well, you grew up, there were people who, I mean even though you guys didn’t have anything, but there were people who didn’t have as much as you had. And you talk about sometimes your mom preparing a meal and feeding somebody who was off a train. Could you just talk about you did learn this spirit of generosity, even if there wasn’t much, she always made it be enough for not only you guys, but others,
RuthAnn: Right. It was during you remember, well, you don’t remember of course, but during the war, and there were what we called hobos then. And they would walk the roads and they would walk up the lane and they always needed food and they needed a place to rest. And so even though our houses were very small, and you may not have a room of your own, there was always someplace a person could lay and rest. And there’s always another place at the table, no matter how many people are there. And mother, we would take people in and they would stay for a while and they of course would help daddy on the farm, whatever. And then they would take off and they would walk off and go to the next place, whatever. I guess they figured they’d had all the mother’s good food, they were going to go check the next people out.
But I never was afraid of that with other people in the house. I don’t ever remember it being afraid or fearful or why aren’t they here? It was just part of the way we grew up that if somebody needed help, mother would take them in. And it was interesting because we of course always had a big garden and we had dairy cows and chickens and mother always paid the doctors. The doctors then came to your house and mother paid all of them with garden vegetables and eggs. She pasteurized all the milk there at the house. And just, I never thought about it being so different from anybody else. It was just what we did. We canned and froze all of our food that we ever had. Mother baked bread every Monday for the week and all those things back then, which you don’t even remember Carmen, but we’d hang clothes on the line, all that stuff. Well, we don’t thank goodness we don’t do that anymore. I mean, we have all these appliance “maids” in our houses that we just kind of push a button and they do their job. It’s just absolutely wonderful.
Carmen: Yeah, you have been alive during the entirety of the technological revolution. So I mean, when you were born, the telephone was a fancy new swanky thing and there wasn’t one in your house. I mean, all those kinds of things, right? And you’re shaking your head.I mean you guys, just for a moment, think about all of the things that you rely on that are electronic or automated or automatic, and none of that existed when you were a kid.
And so mom, tell us about the first time you bought a dress in a store and then back up to making feed sack dresses. Because I just think that there’s a lot of people who just can’t even imagine what it was like to grow up in rural America in the 1930s and forties.
RuthAnn: Well, the first time I ever bought a dress was after I graduated from college. And your daddy, Larry and I were newly married and I saw it in a window and he went in and bought it for me. First time I ever had. Other than that, my mother went to design pattern design school in Cincinnati and she could design and make anything, I mean anything.
Carmen: So when we buy those patterns or designs for people out there that are those things that are folded up and they’re on that thin paper, your mom actually knew how to make the designs?
RuthAnn: Yes. The only time we ever bought a pattern was when for 4 H, I had to have a pattern. And so we would go and buy a pattern and I would make a dress. But before that, I mean she could design everything.
Carmen: So when you were little and you’re growing and so you need the next size up, let’s say your dad would take you and your brothers. Where and how would you shop for material?
RuthAnn: Well, that was during the war. And of course a lot of people don’t realize that, but back then you could not get fabric. And so they did feed sacks in fabric and we would go with daddy to get the feed for the cattle and we would pick out the feed sacks that we wanted our clothes made out of and mother would make my dress and the boys—I also had a younger brother— shirts and daddy made his shirts and we wore those all the time. And the only bad thing about it was you wash them a couple, three times and all the ink comes out. So it wasn’t like wonderful fabrics now that last forever.
Carmen: That’s how you ended up with all those white clothes though, right?
RuthAnn: I guess so. I guess so!
Carmen: You thought those were white outfits. They were just feed sacks that had lost all their color. So how does a little girl like that whose parents have nothing? I mean really when we think about rural poverty, you guys were an example of that. How does a little girl like that end up at Purdue University? How is that even possible?
RuthAnn: First of all, I want to say that I never, never thought about us having nothing. We always had everything we needed and mother and daddy made sure we had everything we really needed. And we always had lots of friends and people at church and school. So I never really thought about us not having anything. We never knew people that had a lot. I don’t think we knew those kind of things.
But anyway, my mother and dad from as long as I can remember— the only thing I ever remember being preached about— was you will go to college and in order to go to college, you will get a scholarship. I knew that that’s the only way I could go. Nowadays, everybody lives within driving distance of a school back then. That’s not true. And so that was everyday ritual. Okay, you’re going to work, work, work. You’re going to compete, compete, compete. You’re going to get involved in 4H, you’re going to get involved in FHA. And so with cooking, sewing, singing, let’s see, speaking and really media stuff—I worked with the newspapers all the time and I was editor of our school paper. I loved all of that. And so I competed enough and won enough awards and had good grades and so I got a full scholarship to Purdue University. That basically saved my life.
Carmen: Well, it definitely made you who you became professionally. It’s also where you met Daddy. So alright, we have two minutes to do the rest. I know. How are you going to talk about heritage and legacy in two minutes? I’m just going to let you talk about that because you do have a good and godly heritage, but you also have a pretty extraordinary legacy. So I’ll just let you wrap this up.
RuthAnn: Well, I would say that because my mother learned how the greatness, really in her terminology, of a beautiful table, a beautiful house, you make it the best you possibly can. Even if you have to paint rugs on the floor and you’re going to serve meals properly, you’re going to sit at the table, have a napkin, a centerpiece, and you have people in your house all as much as you can.
And so I think celebrating life with your home and your family and your friends— that definitely is what I love growing up. I love, love, love entertaining. I love having people in the house. I love a beautiful home and both of my girls, you Carmen and Tiana both love the same things. You both make the most of everything. And so I just think resilience and resourcefulness, that can-do spirit or my phrase after your daddy died every time you said, “well, what if?” And I’d say, “well, we’ll figure it out.”
So that can-do spirit and being intuitive and creative and very positive all the time. Mother was very, very cheerful, happy. She sang hymns all the time, and I just hum all the time. But anyway, I just think that those things, can we say, rub off. Those are learned behaviors. And I see myself in you girls in just about everything that you do. You’re both very, very, very resourceful and intuitive and tenacious. You don’t give up. You just think, “Yeah, we could do that. We figure it out.” And so I think that’s maybe our signal for life. What do you think?
Carmen: So almost 50 years ago, my mom helped start the Strawberry Festival. If you’re in central Florida and the Tampa Bay area and you’ve enjoyed the Strawberry Festival over the years, that is something that the Neighborhood Village, something that she started. She had a 14 year run on PBS in a show called Can Do Clinic. So if you’ve ever heard me say you can do it, and I’m counting on you, that’s because that’s what I was raised to believe.
And so mom, as we conclude this time, I just want to say thank you to you for a good and godly heritage. I am who I am because of who you are and how you raised me, and the resilience that you demonstrated not just in choosing to continue working, that was a choice that you made that was different than other women were making when Tiana was born. And so some of those choices along the way then created a different pathway forward for you. And then certainly when Daddy died and you were so young and I wasn’t old enough to really recognize all of that. But I just want to say thank you for your resilience and your faith and your faithfulness and helping me become who I am. So happy birthday.
RuthAnn: Well, thank you. I’m so proud of you, Carmen. Love you honey. I see myself when I look at you.
Carmen: I know. I love you too.
