How We Knew: Hoyt & Ruth Anderson’s Love Story

A LOVE STORY

It was a small town and the news had traveled fast. There was a new Junior High School teacher and she was young, beautiful and single. I learned it from my sister Bula, who was one of her students. She said, “Her name is Ruth but we have to call her Miss Spencer and she teaches English, drama, and gym.”

It was the Fall of 1937 and the town was Ephraim located in central Utah. Its main claim to fame is that it is home to an excellent small junior college – Snow College. I was 19 and a second year student there.

I first saw her in her role as gym teacher from my back porch, which overlooked the school playground. To the sound of hup-hup-hup I saw this procession, led by a young woman in black bloomers and a white jersey high stepping around the grounds followed by about twenty students like a gaggle of disciplined ducklings. They were too far away for me to get a good look at the new teacher but what I did see encouraged me to be present at my local church a few days later where she was scheduled to give an interpretive reading. I arrived a bit late and she was already on the podium when I arrived . What I saw was a composed self-confident fair skinned brunet whose natural radiant glow would have only been marred by the use of make up. The reports of her beauty had been way understated. Her voice complimented the image—resonant, modulated, expressive. She wore a simple soft satiny dress that subtly revealed the counters of her shapely body in a shade of blue that matched her eyes. She was reciting Amy Lowell’s “Patterns” and the first words I ever heard her utter were:

I shall go up and down

In my gown gorgeously arrayed

Boned and stayed

And the softness of my body

Will be guarded from embrace

By each button, hook and lace

For the man who should unloose me is dead….

She gave the reading with grace and feeling and during the hush that fell over the audience I looked at this beautiful woman and said to myself: ”That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

I introduced myself as the brother of one of her students and was impressed with the easy confident way she greeted me. The next day I asked her for a date and proposed that we go to the local ice cream parlor for a milkshake but her response was,” You don’t need to spend any money on me. Why don’t we just go for a walk in the foot-hills?”

A walk with her turned out to be a vigorous and adventurous undertaking. She ran up and down the hills like a startled deer, running ahead and then circling back to make sure I was coming. She would climb up a Pinion Pine and wave to me from the top branches, then disappear and re-appear over the next hill. She was simply a dynamo of energy and enthusiasm.

Eventually we sat down together and our conversation flowed easily. When I commented on her abundant energy she said that when she attended University she frequently walked the three mile round trip from home to campus, partly because she found it invigorating and partly to save the dime for the bus fare. She enthused about her participation in a creative dance group that gave expression to her energy and also provided opportunity to perform in public. She spoke of her parents and of her desire to be a parent herself and to live a life of service as her mother, who was a trained nurse, had done. I was thrilled to find that this woman who was entering my life so easily was so sincere and genuine and that we shared so much, both in experience and aspiration.

While walking back we were treated to an awesome sunset display over the west mountains as the sky turned to orange and then morphed to a brilliant gold and finally to a peaceful purple. When I left her that evening we had our first hesitant, tender kiss – a perfect end to a perfect day.

Beginning then we saw each other frequently and the intensity of our relationship soon grew to the point that I considered a day without seeing her a day lost. When I made my daily trips to and from the college campus I passed her school and she frequently waved to me from the window of her classroom. One evening she invited me to sit with her on the school steps and, after a brief conversation, she read to me this excerpt from the famous Roy Croft tribute to love, saying it expressed her own feelings toward me:

I love you

Not only for what you are

But for what I am

When I am with you

I love you because you

Are helping me to make

Of the timber of my life

Not a tavern

But a temple

Needless to say, I was touched and with this encouragement I proposed to her on our next date. She readily accepted and, initially, we developed a plan that would have deferred the wedding for at least a year. Accordingly I proceeded with my usual Summer work as a salesman in the northwest. But in July when I was in Billings Montana she surprised me by arranging to celebrate the fourth with me there. Afterward, instead of returning home, she unexpectedly appeared in Roundup, which was the next town on my sales route. That was where I learned the true meaning of the word. After a brief discussion I was willingly rounded up according to a plan that advanced our wedding to the current month and provided that we would move into the family home in salt Lake when I entered the University in the Fall.

Once those decisions were made events moved rapidly. We were married in Livingston, Montana on July 16th in the home of a Methodist minister with my sales partner as best man. The day of our wedding was a working day but we met briefly on lunch break at a jewelry store in Livingston and bought a small diamond ring, which I presented to her at the counter. That evening, after the wedding, we stopped at a drug store and bought our wedding banquet – two Babe Ruth candy bars. We honeymooned in a rustic cabin in the Lewis and Clark National Forest near Livingston.

That was the beginning of a superb and very happy 68-year marriage which ended when Ruth passed away at age 91. At that time I had been retired for 27 years from a management career at the World Headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. I am sure that there was never any doubt in either of our minds that our decision to marry each other was one of the best decisions of our lives.

We had five children, including one by adoption. Three sons are still living and all have had successful professional careers and are happily married with families.

A boating accident when Ruth was 53 resulted in limited mobility and severe pain for the rest of her life. In spite of this, she continued to have a happy upbeat disposition and to enthusiastically savor the experiences that life served up to her.

I don’t know the origin of these two anonymous statements but I like to believe they were written with Ruth in mind.

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving with a pretty and well-preserved body but rather to skid in broadside thoroughly used up and totally worn out and loudly proclaiming Wow, what a ride!”

and

“A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam. And for a brief moment its glory and beauty belong to our world. But then it flies on again; and, though we wish it could have stayed we feel so lucky to have seen it.”

Written/Submitted by: C. Hoyt Anderson