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83 Chapter 5 “She totally conquered where she came from” At an early age Ruth Hale rebelled against life in Rogersville , Tennessee, the small, racially segregated town in the northeastern corner of the state where she was born on July 5, 1886. She seems to have almost always been at odds with her mother, Annie Riley Hale, even though she adored her father , James Richards Hale, an amicable lawyer who also raised and traded horses. And she was very fond of her two brothers, Shelton, born in early 1891, and Richard , born almost two years later.1 Ruth’s given name (later described by her son as “squashily feminine”) was Lillie Ruth, and in typical southern fashion she was called by both names. She hated the two names together and soon showed how poorly they suited her.2 At first the family lived very comfortably. They could afford to have servants, and a photograph of their house shows a large, gabled, two-story Victorian surrounded by land. But their circumstances abruptly changed in the spring of 1897 when Shelton and Richard were sent to stay with relatives while Ruth and her mother watched over a very ill James Richards Hale, who died in early April.3 Annie Riley Hale was left with no immediate source of income, sons ages four and six, and an unhappy ten-year-old daughter. In addition to missing her father, Ruth chafed at the town’s rural insularity and resented the restrictions of southern “ladylike” behavior, such as being forbidden to sing in her natural contralto voice and forced to read too much by Sir Walter Scott. Still, she found numerous ways to defy the community that she later labeled “a basket of snakes,” such as by being the area’s first female to ride astride, rather than sidesaddle.4 Her mother returned to teaching high school mathematics, as she had done before her marriage, and no doubt was relieved when in late summer 1899 Ruth left for Roanoke, Virginia, to enroll in the Hollins Institute and live with an aunt, who probably paid her tuition.5 Its catalog provides evidence that the school offered a rigorous education, making very plausible its claim that since its founding fifty years earlier it had sent more graduates on to higher educational institutions than any other school for girls in the state.6 Ruth attended for two years, mainly taking basic college preparatory classes, and graduated in the spring of 1901. After initially struggling with Latin, she earned mostly Bs in her first year. Her grades were higher in her second year, when she excelled in French.7 In 1902, at age sixteen, she entered the Drexel Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia to study painting and sculpture, living with cousins in the area while she was there.8 The aunt with whom she had lived while attending the Hollins Insti- 84 Anonymous in Their Own Names tute—imagined by Ruth’s son as “one of those elderly autocrats who wear cameo brooches like medals”—had sent her north with these words: “If you have any trouble up there, Lillie Ruth, you just tell them that you’re the niece of Miss Richards of Culpepper County, Virginia, and everything will be all right.”9 Everything may not have been all right, for she left Drexel after two years. She moved to Washington, D.C., in 1904 and began her journalism career as an eighteen-year-old society reporter for the Hearst Bureau, perhaps later writing for the Washington Star.10 Based on the drawings and small sculptures he saw, her son thought she had real talent as an artist, so her reasons for leaving art school are unclear. It may be that the costs became prohibitive. At the same time, the Hearst Bureau job was an excellent opportunity for someone so young and inexperienced, and its location may have been appealing since her mother had found a teaching position in Washington and was living there with Shelton and Richard.11 Ruth almost certainly lived with and helped support them, as she often would do later. In 1908 she returned to Philadelphia, this time for a better job as a drama critic at the Public Ledger. She occasionally covered sports too, making her one of the country’s first women sports reporters. Richard, who already was earning a tiny income as a singer, remembered that she took him to hear his first operas when he visited her during his...

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