A good woman passed away last week. Ruth Eggenburger was 93 years-old when she departed this world from a Texarkana hospice. Right until the end, she never let anyone tell her what she couldn’t do — especially if their reason was that she was a woman. In fact, they’d be lucky to live long after such a suggestion. 

She was my grandmother, and she was the first liberal I ever knew. 

Liberalism isn’t in the water where my Mama Ruth is from. It wasn’t in vogue in Arkansas in 1931 when she was born, or in the small Texas town of New Boston, where she spent most of her life. She likely never cast a ballot for the candidate who won Bowie County in any given race, other than the two times native son Ross Perot screwed things up for the Republicans. She was often one of the only Democrats at First Baptist, the most outspoken “women’s libber” in her slice of the country, and she’d tell you you were wrong right to your face, if she had occasion to. 

For years, she drove around that small, conservative town with a bumper sticker which read, “A woman’s place is in the House…and the Senate,” or some similarly themed witticism. No one had questions about where my Mama Ruth stood, even as very few of them stood there with her. Despite those decades of political differences — which roiled the comments under her Facebook posts until about a month ago — she was a pillar of her community. She was known and she was loved. 

Mama Ruth was not a liberal Democrat because it was the thing to be, in other words. It decidedly was not. She was a liberal Democrat because of the life she lived, and the lives she hoped others would have the freedom to live after her. 

Ruth Corbell — soon to be Ruth Addington, and later Ruth Eggenburger — started her journey to the left in 1947, though she might not have known it then. That was when she was married for the first time. She was 15 years-old. 

It’s probably not difficult to guess the outline of how a young woman goes from being married at 15 to being a dedicated feminist for the rest of her life, but I’ll spell it out for you anyway. 

Her husband, the biological grandfather I never knew, was trouble. That much made itself known pretty quickly. In the 1950s, though, divorce wasn’t an option, if it even occurred to her then. No-fault divorce would not begin the long process of becoming legal in the United States until 1970. But Ruth wasn’t the quitting sort. Married at 15, she remained determined to live a life. And she did. 

Her first crusade against a system which would have preferred to see her held down came the next year, when she forced her way back into high school. The high school in Hooks, Texas did not admit married students at that time. Somehow, Ruth convinced the principal to change that rule and was admitted to school. By the time she graduated a couple years later, there were six other married girls enrolled in the school, each of whom had followed in her footsteps.

Despite being married at 15, Ruth managed to hold off having a baby until 21. In 1952 and 1953, she gave birth to my uncles, Raymond and Paul. 

Her marriage was difficult. She left her husband once in 1958, but came back – a reunion which is responsible for my existence, since it yielded my mother. By 1965, though, Ruth was not in a coming-back mood. She left and stayed gone, securing a formal divorce at a time when that was all but unthinkable. 

So there she was. Younger than I am now, having been married for 18 years, a mother to three, divorced, with nothing but a high school diploma. So she did what anyone would do: she looked for opportunities. By the time of her divorce, she had already been working at the Red River Army Depot outside of New Boston, and it kept her and the kids afloat. But she wanted more, and so, against the odds, she applied and was accepted to the Logistics Intern Training Course offered by the Army at the depot, an opportunity which normally required a college degree.

Ruth was one of two women among the 30-plus members of her training class, a 35 year-old divorcee surrounded by young college graduates – and she excelled. I’m not sure if she knew that she was a natural leader before that, but she sure knew it afterwards. 

Within a couple years, in 1967, she met and married Bill Eggenburger, the man I knew as my grandfather, and took her third and final last name. 22 years after that first marriage at age 15, she found the love of her life. He was a union bricklayer, something of a war hero, and even more of a local hero. His senior football season was recounted to me by no less than a dozen people at his funeral in 2010. 

Ruth spent 37 years working at the Red River Army Depot before “retiring” and then working for another quarter century as the co-owner and operator of a daycare center in New Boston. She also spent decades participating in and often leading the local Business and Professional Women’s Club.

Through it all, she remained a vocal, unrelenting liberal and a dedicated feminist. She was fond of commenting that the Moral Majority “was neither,” and she worked for the passage and ratification of the ERA for years. 

“She was all about the Equal Rights Amendment,” my mom told me. “She also made sure I thought Phyllis Schlafly was a loser.” 

Even as a kid, my mom knew that her mom was a liberal, even if she didn’t know the term. “I didn’t hear the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ as a kid in Bowie County,” she told me. “I just knew that on Election Day, mom’s vote would often cancel-out Bill’s, whatever that meant.”

Unlike so many, my grandmother’s liberalism did not sour with age. She did not confine herself to being “liberal for the 60s” or “liberal for the 80s.” She never employed the excuse that she was from a different time. She stayed with the times in a way so few aging progressives do, and was engaged and active until the day she died. When the sibling we had always thought was my little sister came out as my little brother, my grandmother didn’t bat an eye. She did not balk. She was, as my mother put it, “totally on board.”

Somehow, through it all, she remained an active member of the Southern Baptist church. I was surprised that the hyper-conservative denomination never ran my grandmother’s liberal tail out of the church, I told my mother the other day. 

“They were too scared of her,” she said. 

Through her 93-year life, she was a reminder that our values don’t have to be dependent on the people around us. She never convinced most of the good people of New Boston to become tax-and-spend liberals, or committed feminists, but she never shut up about it either. She wouldn’t dare.

My Mama Ruth’s politics, and the steel spine with which she carried them for decades, are an inspiration to me. They have been ever since I started questioning the conservative orthodoxy of my own slice of the South as a young man, and will continue to be as long as my memory holds.

But Mama Ruth was more than her politics. She was a protector and a provider. She was a friend, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother to many. She was an expert crocheter and a virtuoso pianist. She was a good poker player. And she was truly, genuinely funny. They don’t make enough like her.

She was my grandmother, and I loved her.