Remembering Ruth

"I'm only going to pass through once and I hope when I pass through, I'll leave the world a little better than I found it. There are so many people who need help, and maybe I, in some small way, can provide some of it." -- Ruth Campbell Kistler, 1923-2022

I’ve wanted to find words to pay tribute to my grandmother Ruth Kistler's 99 years of life, but it is not easy. She filled my childhood, a powerful and continuous presence. She was both highly accomplished and plagued by self-doubts. She was warm and generous yet could be quite rigid and critical. She saw radical changes in the world around her between her birth in 1923 and her death this week, but the pillars of her long life were unwavering: family, faith and service. Her passing has left me marveling at her legacy.

Ruth became self-sufficient at an early age, as she told a Centre Daily Times reporter in a 1989 interview: "I had a rather stormy childhood. My parents were divorced after I graduated high school and my mother was ill a good deal of the time…In my senior year my father was transferred — a frequent occurrence. I got a job working for room and board so I could finish my senior year in high school."

Her first date with my grandfather was December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. She courted and married and lived through wartime with all its attendant privations and unknowns. She was a pastor’s daughter and my grandpa a farmer’s son. Neither of them grew up with much and so what they built together they valued, and she believed in her responsibility to be of service to those with less.

She worked as a secretary, as a legal assistant, as a realtor. Despite not having education beyond high school, she outshined college-educated candidates to became Harris Township's first female township manager in 1975. Feeling a need to learn more to fulfill the role, she rode the snowplow alongside township employees in winter storms and went to water main breaks to better understand how the township functioned. She founded the Mid-State Literacy Council, a nonprofit that teaches adults to read and provides English as a second language courses and currently reaches hundreds of students in Pennsylvania each year. She was chair, co-chair and volunteer recruiter of the local CROP walk, raising money to support food and water insecure communities around the globe. She was a tireless volunteer and leader at the women’s club, the hospital auxiliary, the retirement community, the nonprofit thrift shop, the Lutheran church. She was in constant motion. All of this alongside a never-ending stream of homemaking labor: freezing and pickling, cooking and cleaning, sewing and mending clothing for herself, her husband and three children.

She did not seem to see herself as anyone out of the ordinary and yet the list of her charitable works would exhaust any reader (I have not attempted to document it comprehensively here). Her impatience with the less industrious and her strong positions could vex her relations and acquaintances alike, and her insecurities drove her to be overly critical of herself.

In many ways, Ruth’s story is that of any women striving to make her way in a world that resists female leadership. She believed that women in the workforce needed to give more than men do to counteract the preconceived notion that “it’s a man’s job.” Once when I asked her how she did it all, she replied in her typical self-deprecating manner, “I just kept saying yes to things I had no business saying yes to.”

Those words stick with me. Her successes show clearly that she had every business saying yes to opportunities and requests for help that came her way -- and yet she doubted herself. When wrestling with my own worries and self-doubts, I try to remember that, and I strive to bring to my own life the grit and purposefulness that she embodied. And as I too pass through this world, I hope in my own "small way" to help others.