Life & Times
RUTH HOLMBERG’S LEGACY IS ALL AROUND US
You had to be alert walking down the street with Ruth Holmberg. She might suddenly cut in front of you and bend down to pick up someone else’s trash — a hamburger wrapper, a beer can or even loose newspaper pages. It is our city, she would say, and we all have to keep it looking good.
That was an underlying philosophy — we are all in this together.
In glowing articles about her since she died last week, much has been made of her contributions to the arts. If you see her name on a structure (like the Holmberg glass bridge near the Hunter Museum) or on an arts program, you can pretty well assume that someone else put it there. Naming rights were not part of her philanthropy. She would tolerate being on a list of donors, but only because it emphasized that we are all in this together.
It is ironic to think of her leadership in that context. She was female, Jewish, liberal (by Chattanooga standards), highly educated, and unbothered by change. In Chattanooga in 1946, when she moved here to the takeoff point
of her grandfather, Adolph Ochs, every one of those were scores against her.
Years later, when she was a trustee of the Hunter Museum, an outsider was introduced to the board and another trustee said, “You’ll find we pretty much think alike — except Ruth, of course.” She loved to tell that story.
So she did not arrive as a natural leader. She evolved into that role. She began, in fact, by writing reviews of the Chattanooga Symphony back when it played in a high school auditorium.
She was a contradiction in styles: tough and gracious, serious and witty, simple and complex, leader and follower, historian and futurist — all at once.
Looking back now, she is revered. It’s important to remember how bitterly she and The
Chattanooga Times were opposed in earlier decades, the crucible of her leadership.
Race relations were so distant that we cringe now. Both papers carried black obituaries separate from white ones, and there were columns like “News of our Colored Neighbors.”
When the Times in essence supported the Supreme Court’s decisions to desegregate public schools in 1954-55, it lost several thousand readers. Chattanooga may have been at the Republican end of Tennessee, but it was still part of the Old South. Roy McDonald, the owner of the News-Free Press, kept defending segregation well into the late 1960s.
In his generation, segregation was often not considered a moral issue. It was a difference of opinion or of “upbringing.” Not to Ruth, it wasn’t.
Likewise, when the Times ran a major headline in 1969 saying “City’s air worst in nation,” some people, especially heavy manufacturers, blamed the bearer of bad news. Similar businesses everywhere were fleeing to Mexico and Asia, but somehow in Chattanooga that was cast as Ruth’s fault.
She took all this with a calm demeanor. A leavening of humor helped. She would often say that in her next life she would come back with a pug nose and
The changing role of women held special interest for her, of course, but it was not a crusade in her mind. It was simply a matter of doing the decent right thing, and she did that with her usual modesty.
size 6 feet. In this life she wore 11-AAAAs.
She was calm, but she was not passive. About 20 years ago she was ticketed twice on the same day for speeding. She blamed it on having too many things on her calendar for that day.
She also simply outlasted many of those who were stuck in the past. Many people now in their 60s or 70s would be embarrassed to admit to the beliefs of their parents 50 years ago. Rightly so. But Ruth had always been there with an alternative example.
She did not have to adjust to changing times in the way she dealt with other people. She treated them with respect, person to person, as equals. After all, she thought that we are all in this together.
So she needed no special new rules for African-Americans in the 1960s, women in the workplace in the 1980s, gay citizens in the 1990s. Many people had to make adjustments in what they said and did, even while grumbling about political correctness. For Ruth, simple human decency had always led to the right approach no matter how the world was changing. She had the resources and the standing to look down on almost anyone, and she chose to look down on no one.
The changing role of women held special interest for her, of course, but it was not a crusade in her mind. It was simply a matter of doing the decent right thing, and she did that with her usual modesty.
A few years ago, a group of women’s clubs in Chattanooga put on a luncheon to honor her. She and I were also the entertainment, with me prompting her with questions, many centered on all of the roles in which she had been the first woman to hold that position, even such as chair of the Chamber of Commerce.
“What shall we call this program?” I said near the end of a planning session.
“How about, ‘Someone Had To Be First,’” she replied.
It was the perfect answer, not because she had asserted herself into those positions but precisely because she had not. She came into them out of respect and the knowledge that she would do what was best for that organization, never what was best for her. More often than not, she had to be talked into the honor of leadership. I never heard anyone say they were sorry for the choice.
Paul Neely is former publisher of The Chattanooga Times.