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From the September 2009 issue of $100 Plus Club News #116
In Memoriam: Ruth S. Spitz
We are deeply saddened to announced the passing of long-time AUD Board member and supporter Ruth Sachere Spitz.
She was 90 years old, and lived near her grandson Leo Macdonald in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Ruth was born in Ottawa and raised in Brooklyn by democratic socialist-minded parents who boasted of hearing Eugene V. Debs speak and of voting for Norman Thomas. She was a Yipsel (member of the Young People's Socialist League) and student at Brooklyn College when she joined the organizing picket at May's Department Store, ending up in jail for several hours. At Brooklyn College, she majored in Labor Economics under the direction of Teresa Wolfson. Then, she attended the University of Wisconsin where she studied under New Dealers who helped write the Wagner and Social Security Acts, and she completed a Master's in Labor Economics.
During WW II, she worked at the US Labor Dept. and joined the new CIO government workers union. She then joined the American Labor Education Service, taught classes for unionists in New York and Kentucky, and did studies for the Labor Department on women and work. Then she spent a year in Italy teaching English and visiting union and management leaders.
Back in NYC she got what she described as her most gratifying job -- as a lecturer in Economics at Empire State College. There, she mentored generations of union members who returned to college later in life. Ruth also served on the Ohio State Commission on the Status of Women; and the Boards of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA),and the Women's Labor Rights Organization.
Ruth took part in many protests. At age 80, she was arrested, placed in a paddy wagon and fingerprinted with her grandson Orion Macdonald for demonstrating against police actions in the Amadou Diallo case in NYC. In 2004 at age 85, she was nicknamed "The Bushwhacker" by local media after confronting a Bush supporter in the lobby of her apartment building who was handing out Bush leaflets; she received hundreds of letters from across the country and a supporter mailed her a stouter cane.
Ruth was a very active AUD supporter, and we will miss her.
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