Where have you and your rollerskates gone, Ruthie Miller?
Following a ghost through the archives.
Some days, you’re researching the short-lived fad of Mississippi River ice yachting, or Popeye’s roots in Chester, Illinois, and end up crossing paths with a ghost.
An archive can feel like a long hallway where spirits clamor for a psychopomp, someone to remember them and tell their story. I don’t remember how Ruth Miller’s story distracted me from I was working on. I know the story must’ve been an AP piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, because Ruth — also known as Ruthie or Sissie — lived in Norwalk, a suburb of Los Angeles, a city I never write about.
In January of 1950, Ruth Miller was 13 years old. The prior summer, a friend accidentally kicked her in the shin; the bruise never healed. That’s what led to a diagnosis of bone cancer. The only thing doctors could do in 1950 was to amputate her leg, which gave her a 50/50 chance of recovery. Keeping it gave her less than a 10 percent chance.
“If I can’t live with two legs, I’ll die with them,” she told her parents at first. She thought she’d never rollerskate again if she lost her leg, and life without rollerskating, or soccer, or running, or jumping, felt unbearable.
She changed her mind after seeing a newspaper story about Betty Lou Marbery, 10-year-old girl in Tennessee with the same kind of bone cancer, who’d had her hand amputated. God wanted my hand, she said.
“Ruth thought about her own case for a long time, then one day said to her mother, ‘If God wanted that little girl’s hand, then maybe he wants my leg,’” the Los Angeles Mirror wrote. And she started preparing, mentally and physically, to lose it. She went to the roller rink for hours the night before she checked into the hospital.
“If God wants my leg,” she told her mother, “I’m going to have myself one last good skate.”
Ruth, as the Mirror reported, was a “tomboy” with bright red hair and blue eyes. She was one of six kids, all boys except for her three-year-old sister, Shirley Lee, who’d prayed every night for God not to “take Sissie’s leg.”
Ruth’s cancer diagnosis came on top of multiple crises for her family. Her parents opened a cafe, which failed. Her brother got very sick. Her stepdad, John Marshall, came down with pneumonia, couldn’t work for several months, and was still unemployed. “I’ll take any kind of work,” he told the Mirror. “Truck driving, cooking, construction, painting, anything to help my family.”
Ruth’s story landed in the Mirror after her aunt’s neighbor took a bus down to the newspaper office and pleaded with someone to write a story. They sent crime reporter John Van Der Heide to the Marshall house days before Ruth went to White Memorial Hospital for surgery.
“Johnny is an old hand at at dealing with tough guys, sudden death and life in the raw around the police beat,” the paper wrote. “He came back from Norwalk with a wistful look and said, ‘Gosh boss, you shouldn’t have sent a police reporter on a story like that. It’s too tough on the heart. What a girl!”
Von Der Heide was careful not to make a pitch for money. But his story moved a reader named E.L. Mora to start a Ruth Miller hospital fund at his dress factory. People started sending money to Ruth, care of the paper, in envelopes and in person. “Two boys walked in with $28 they had collected among their neighbors,” the Mirror wrote.
Ruth’s story went the 1950 version of viral. Letters and poured in from all over California, and all over the United States. “I’ll answer every one,” Ruth told Von Der Heide.
At the last minute, Ruth’s doctor decided he could take her leg off just below the knee. “When Ruth awoke from her deep sleep today, she found she will get better much sooner than if her leg had been taken off at the hip, and that she will be far less handicapped than she supposed,” The Mirror wrote on January 11. “Although still under the influence of sedatives, Ruthie was smiling at photographers this morning.
“‘I’m not sorry I went through with it,’ she said, sleepily. ‘I’m glad.’”
Every once in a while, she said, “a sharp pain shoots up through my thigh …. but after all, I expected there would be some pain.”
After her surgery, people called from all over the country — and as far away as India — swamping the hospital’s switchboard. Her room filled with flowers, including the first yellow roses she’d ever seen. Someone sent her a real silk nightgown, yellow like the roses, with a yellow silk dressing gown to match.
Even better than roses, The Mirror wrote, was a visit from Patricia Scott, a mother with two young kids, who’d lost her leg a few years before:
Mrs. Scott walked briskly into the room. She had no limp. she hopped up on a chair just like any nimble young matron might do, to show Ruth how well her legs match.
“I fell clear down a flight of stairs once,” she told Ruth, “because I forgot one of my legs was artificial.”
She explained it was an unusual type stairway to which she was not accustomed and she let herself get off balance. She said a person with two good legs might have taken the same fall.
“You can walk and dance and skate just as well as I can,” Mrs. Scott said to Ruth.
“I’m going to. I’m going to,” said Right. “I’m going to learn and I’m going to do it.”
In February of 1950, Ruth was walking on her new artificial leg, a little clumsily, but a month ahead of schedule.
“Carl Woodall, limb maker, created the limb at his shop at 1253 S. Flower Street,” Von Der Heide wrote. “To help smooth over the first few moments on her new leg was Mrs. Patricia Scott, her ‘twin’ amputee. Mrs. Scott lost her own leg above the knee in a 1943 railroad accident.
“‘She’s making marvelous progress,”’ Mrs. Scott said. “‘I’m sure she’ll recover as well as I did.’”
Mrs. Scott told the Mirror she learned to skate, dance, drive, clean house and run a business with her prosthetic, and she was sure Ruth could do all those things, too. Ruth said she’d be happy with just one thing: “I can’t wait until I can begin skating again.”
Her orthopedist, Marshall Urist, said he was hopeful that the amputation caught the cancer in time, and that Ruth had a long life, and lots of skating time, in her future.
For a long time, I assumed Ruth Miller grew up, married, had kids, and took those kids to the skating rink. I couldn’t find an obituary, but assumed it was because it was obscured by her married name.
Then, while writing this post, I searched for “Ruthie Miller”:
There was no obituary — just this. It shocked me when I saw it pop up. I was also surprised that John Van Der Heide’s byline wasn’t on the story. Maybe the tough guy police reporter couldn’t bear to write it after following Ruth’s story from beginning to end. I couldn’t find a trace of him, aside from this series of articles. I’m sure Ruth’s story haunted him for the rest of his life — every reporter has at least one or two of those.
Ruth Miller was stubborn, thoughful, confident, unsentimental. That comes through in this anecdote from the The Los Angeles Times:
There are so many of us, and so many stories. Inevitably we all go down the memory hole. But sometimes when I meet ghosts in the archives, they tug on my shirt and tell me please remind people I was here. Tell people that I learned to rollerskate again. Tell people I never lost my sense of humor. Tell them thank you. Tell them that they made a difference in my life, just like I made a difference in theirs by being a movie screen for their empathy. Tell them they probably didn’t know it at the time, but that this changed all of us: E.L. Mora at his dress factory; Bill Hardcastle in Bakersfield; Mrs. Knopp in Redondo Beach; all the Anonymouses in Los Angeles, Inglewood and Monrovia. That it mattered that I was here, even though it wasn’t for long.
Perfect story Stef. Compassion is the part of being human that we forget to see. Then we become cynical and hopeless losing our ability to act with joy towards justice and wonder. Great way to start my day.
Thanks to you, and Ruthie, for flushing the pollen out of my eyes this morning.