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April 18, 2003/Nisan 16 5763, Vol. 55, No. 34
Brandeis honorees serve community well"In Our Midst"PAULA SOBOL
One of the most engaging things about being with Ruth Cohen is experiencing her energy and excite-ment about life and living. At 80, she appears to be in her prime. Born in Cleveland, Ruth was newly graduated from high school when she went on a seaside vacation and, while swimming in the Atlantic, met her husband, Bill. "We met in the summer of 1940 and decided to marry Dec. 21, 1941," Ruth says. Shortly after setting their wedding date, Ruth contracted polio and no one was sure about the outcome of her illness except for Bill, who knew that they would be married on schedule. Not even Pearl Harbor stopped the wedding and, a year later, the Cohens had a daughter, Ravelle, and Bill found himself at Fort Bragg, N.C. The South was a bit daunting for Ruth, who had never been away from home before. "Some of the Southern people I met had never met a Jew before and one woman wanted me to show her my horns," she remembers. That experience streng-thened Ruth's resolve to see that people around her were educated and exposed to diversity. After the war, Ruth and Bill had two more daughters, Eileen and Laura, and the family decided to move to Los Angeles. But post-war Los Angeles was quite different from what Ruth and Bill ex-pected. Freeways, smog and wall-to-wall people brought them to Phoenix, where Ruth's cousin, Arnold Kane, practiced medicine. Bill went into the ice cream business, making and de-livering Good Humor Ice Cream with several special trucks. But after a year they decided that an old-fashioned ice cream parlor might work better and opened The Peppermint Stick on Central Avenue, which became a natural stopping-off place for Phoenicians. Ruth made ice cream cakes on special order and supplied them to the Arizona Biltmore and John's Green Gables. Soon Ruth was involved in general catering and was busy in the community as well, becoming president of the Oasis Chapter of B'nai B'rith Women. Although she joined the Brandeis group in the mid-'50s, it was not until the mid-'80s that she became active in the organization and she eventually served as president of the Phoenix Chapter. When the Brandeis Book Sale needed to find a per-manent warehouse, Ruth was one of the people who believed that a full bookstore was the answer. Bill, now a realtor, found a former beauty parlor at Seventh Avenue and Osborn Road which Brandeis members reconfigured, using shelves discarded by Walden Books when its Park Central store closed. At this time, Ruth's daughter, Ravelle, was terminally ill and Ruth believes that the bookstore helped her to survive the sadness of those days. She has expanded the store's horizons to include giving books to schools, jails and charitable agencies. The Brandeis Bookstore is one of only four in the United States and brought the Chapter of the Year Award to Phoenix through its fund-raising and creativity. Ruth put the store on the Internet and was asked to be part of a task force formed to determine value of Internet book marketing. In June she will address the value of Internet sales at the group's meeting in Chicago. When asked what message she would like to give her daughters and six grand-children, her answer is, "Be as good as you can, do for others, love life. That's your big role in society."
Paula Sobol is a 52-year Phoenix resident and was the Jewish News theater and movie critic in the 1960s. |
