Ruth Hunter was one of our first Raging Grannies, and is the undisputed champion of all the raging grannies in the hemisphere! She has the longest rap sheet, the most countries where she has protested, and is the fiercest defender of freedom and justice of anybody we know.

RUTHIE’S LIFE
(Golden Wedding Day)

She wears an old straw bonnet with peace buttons on it
and she goes wherever there’s a need.
“Let the cops come and bust us, we’ll stand up for justice!”
This is Ruthie Hunter’s creed!

If you’re a corporation that’s polluting our nation,
She’ll be there to shut you down today.
At your gates detested, she will get arrested–
That is Ruthie Hunter’s way!

She’ll be comin’ on the highway by the sea or in the flyway
Cause she’s there whenever there is strife.
She’ll demonstrate in Cuba, Nicaragua or Aruba–
That is Ruthie Hunter’s life!

Now, if you hear her yoo-hoo, She’s a-comin’ to interview you,
and she’ll write your life up for the Dove.
Though just five-feet or shorter, she’s a fearless girl-reporter;
That is Ruthie Hunter’s love.

Just in case you’re a-passin’ by the School of the Assassins,
you will see one determined little soul;
She is a mighty WILPFer, (and like Sandy Silver),
Peace and freedom is her goal!

Now, when young Ruth was thirty she was very cute and flirty
and the men flocked round her for a kiss
Now at ninety-three, they still line up to see her
That is Ruthie Hunter’s bliss.

Put on your green mascara and be sure that you wear a
sexy dress, ‘cause we’ve come all this way,
Just to love and fete you, celebrate and pet you
On your 93rd Birthday!

AND MANY MORE!!!!!!

RUTH HUNTER; RADICAL MOVES
(Interview by Ruth Gunn Mota, 1997)

My first radical move was to defy my father. It was 1931 and a dangerous move for a girl of fifteen. My father was bigger than life, a fire-breathing Communist. With his Torah and his Marxist philosophy clutched to his chest, he had fled Russia and emigrated to the United States during the Russo-Japanese War. I sat in front of him in our kitchen in Minneapolis surrounded by my four brothers and sisters while he pounded his fist on the table and ranted about the terrible things going on in this country.
“We have to have things like in Russia!” he shouted. I suspected things weren’t going so great in Russia, but he was enchanted with them, so I had to listen up. He demanded so much. He demanded we attend Jewish labor school. But he prohibited us from going to Hebrew school or synagogue, since religion was the opiate of the people. We had to obey every little thing. Don’t chew gum. Don’t wear makeup. Definitely don’t go out with boys!
So what did I do? I made a dummy in my bed, climbed out the window, and went out with boys. These dates were really wild. It was during prohibition and we’d sneak into speakeasies. I was sure that my father would have killed me if he’d found out where I’d been, though a glimmer in his eye often told me I was his favorite kid even when I acted out. Once he heard me sneaking up the stairs and stopped me.
“You smell like smoke,” he said. I blinked. “Smoke? Who me? I’ve just been roasting potatoes,” I said. But of course I’d been smoking like crazy, stealing cigarettes, and stealing money to buy cigarettes. It was my first rebellion. I just wanted to belong, to be like the other kids in the neighborhood who could go to synagogue, dress up for holidays, and kiss boys.
Despite my rebellion, I admired my father, who gave me a moral code and pride in being Jewish. My father was brilliant. He spoke six languages and should have been a professor instead of working in a haberdashery. In Russia he’d studied to become a rabbi and loved being Jewish. I love being Jewish. Being Jewish has helped make me what I am today. It gives me a sense of justice and a moral code. Oh boy, did my father have a moral code, and that code he gave me is still with me. It’s what has motivated me to protest injustice these past decades, what fires my outrage at my government that has lost its moral code. The leadership of our beautiful country is so corrupt. We have so much money, and really so many people who care, but there are no heroes today, no one in power I can look up to.
My next radical move was to run away to Chicago to be with my boyfriend, whom I had met the year before. By then I had graduated from high school and my best girlfriend had moved to Chicago. Her family let me sleep on their couch. It was a terrible thing I did, because these people were Trotskyites and we were Stalinists. All that politics was so intense. They lived like crazy people. Her father went off to a meeting every night, while her mother tried to make ends meet. Papa Shier never made much money and left his wife only two quarters a day to feed the family. So I had to get a job fast. I’d had one semester of bookkeeping, and I’m a good faker, so I got a job as a bookkeeper. The two dollars a week I contributed to the family were really needed. My boss at work scared me though, tried to touch me. I put up with it for as long as I could because I needed my six dollars a week salary. Of course, after work, I hung out with my boyfriend, much to his mother’s dismay. She was very skeptical of this wild woman who partied regularly in basement clubs with her son.
My father soon came after me, determined to take me away from the gangster city and these Trotskyites, but I refused to go home. Eventually I married my sweetheart. When we married, we did return to Minneapolis where my husband worked with my father in his furnishing store.
My next move was prompted by my first-born daughter. Sue was born with a bad heart. She had an abnormal opening between her aorta and her pulmonary artery, patent ductus arteriosus. It created a trill that was hard to detect. I listened to many prognoses before I finally had the courage to put my precious little girl under a surgeon’s knife. Before that, when she was five, we moved to California because the harsh winters of Minnesota were too hard on her. We settled in the San Fernando Valley and my first social protest was related to her schooling.
I knew that I had a brilliant child with a bad heart, so I inquired about the schools in our neighborhood. Our house was in a recently built neighborhood and everything was brand new. The established neighbors sent their kids to the Van Nuys School located across the busy freeway. When I suggested taking Sue to the local school, they said, “You can’t take her to that school! The Mexican kids go there.” I, of course, put her into the Mexican school and then went around the neighborhood getting other Anglo parents to place their kids there too. Some of them did. Although The People’s World visited our school and published a story about the success of our racial integration, in the end I did not do the Mexican neighborhood any favors. When white people move in, they push out black and brown. Many of the Mexicans moved away. The culture of the school changed. No more tortillas at the PTA meetings. I felt sick about it. So my first social action taught me a big lesson about good intentions and unexpected consequences.
Soon after that, I got involved in another integration project. Sue was seven years old by that time. A young woman moved into the apartment behind me, and we decided to form a Brownie Troop. When I went to the Los Angeles Headquarters of the Girl Scouts, I discovered that the troops then had no Mexican kids in them. “Why not?” I asked. “It won’t work out,” they said. “You want to bet?” I countered. So we invited the Mexican kids and did all kinds of crazy wonderful things with them: crafts, skits, and songs. Unfortunately though, I couldn’t carry a tune even then. I’m in the Raging Grannies now and they make me mouth the words because I sing off key. I don’t want to mouth the words. I want to belt them out: “Bushie, Bushie, Bushie, get off your tushie!” Back then it was just “Livin’ in tents and cabins,” but luckily my co-leader could sing in tune.
Everything in life has a season: marriage, divorce, diapers to change, bills to pay. All these things cut into the time I had for social justice. For many years I raised my two daughters and ran our arts and crafts business from our home in Watsonville. I was busy all the time working. We cut and polished rock, and made wind-chimes, bookends, pendants, and lots of money. It wasn’t until 1982, when I was in my sixties, that I had enough time to get fully involved in political action. My first arrest was in Santa Cruz in front of the IRS office. We were protesting that our tax dollars were used to build and purchase weapons. Only two of us protesting were arrested, me and a teacher from Mt. Madonna School. The decision to get arrested that day was one of the hardest things I ever did. I was a nice middle-class woman, but I just had to do it. I had to carry out what I believed in. I spent four days in the brig, sleeping on the floor. They didn’t want non-violent protesters there. They didn’t have room for us.
I also feel passionate about Latin America. The developed countries, especially the United States and Canada, have exploited Latin America. I think Hugo Chavez is a hero, and I was impressed with the community projects I visited in Venezuela when I attended the Social Forum there. My main contribution to Latin America is my writing. I’m an educator with a Masters in Counseling and Guidance, and my work has been in education. So I visit Latin America and write articles for various publications: local newspapers, the United Nations Association, and The Undaunted Dove, the Santa Cruz newsletter for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). I’m also co-editor of Three Americas North. My daughter and her husband John Leonard have been editors for The Nation, so I got a story published there. Recently I learned that Persimmon Tree is going to publish my story Circles of Hope, a series of interviews with incredibly courageous women from Honduras, Cuba, and other countries in Africa and Latin America.
I have been to Cuba about ten times. The goal of our visits is to stop the embargo. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba went into a period called Special Times. They were really in need of so many commodities. With supplies cut off, many children became malnourished. To help the Cuban children who had been deprived of milk, we worked on a soybean project. Under the auspices of the Global Exchange, we sponsored numerous house parties in our neighborhoods and sold $5 shares in soy. We slipped soy seeds to Cuban farmers through the blockade. The soy provided a protein drink for the children that came in six flavors. The Cubans also used the soy to make ice cream, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise.
We were moved to help Cubans through this crisis because the Cubans did the same for others, serving as health workers in many African nations. I witnessed a Cuban project that brought children from Chernobyl to the island. The kids had come to escape the radioactive fallout that covered their city. It was so delightful to see these round-faced, smiling children running along the beach. Later, during a visit with other WILPF members in 2003, we created a sister city project between Guamá and Santa Cruz.
Nuclear fallout and weaponry really motivates me to action. As a member of WILPF, I went to a conference in Australia that focused on nuclear weapons. We listened to women from the Marshall Islands. They talked to us about the nuclear explosions and the missiles that came across the Pacific from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The women said to us, “Why haven’t you known what you have done to us? We’ve had babies without heads, or two heads, without arms or covered in fur.” We cried with them and I wrote a story about it. I kept thinking, why are we experimenting with these weapons? Why do we need them? There is only one reason. To kill. It’s so evil. So when I went to protest at Vandenberg Air Force Base, it wasn’t my intention to get arrested. I just thought we need bodies. We need voices. It’s one thing to sit back and write your check to Amnesty International and let somebody else speak out. But when I was protesting at Vandenberg I kept hearing the voices of those women from the Marshall Islands and I couldn’t stop myself from crossing their line in the sand.
Because of my strong feelings about nuclear weapons, I’ve been arrested multiple times at the Lawrence Livermore Lab and the Nevada Test Site. The first year I went to the Nevada Test Site the guards weren’t expecting us. We heard them say, “You can’t cross this cattle guard.” We stepped over the grating and broke the law. We made a magic circle and sang songs in forbidden territory. Since this was our first protest, the guards didn’t know what to do with us. So they did nothing.
The second time, the guards were ready for us. Unfortunately, we weren’t ready for them. Since we were protesting in the desert under the hot sun, we wore thin cotton clothing. When the guards arrested us they took us up a mountain and dumped us off at Tonapa, ninety miles away. It took a long time for our support group to find us. By nightfall it was freezing up there. We were on the verge of hypothermia.
The most beautiful protest at the Nevada Test Site was a Mother’s Day event that I helped organize along with Rabbi Marcus from Temple Beth El. It was to acknowledge mothers, children, and the terrible consequences that the testing and use of nuclear weapons can have on them. It was a wonderful opportunity to be surrounded by people who cared as much as I did, and to make a statement with my presence, when everything hurt inside and I had no other way to express my grief.
The first time I had formal preparation for a major civil disobedience protest was when we planned our action for the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) held on November 30th, 1999 in Seattle. The WTO protest involved a wide variety of groups: peace activists, environmentalists, unionists, AIDS activists, to name a few. The local organizational meetings of our support group began in my living room and continued in a Seattle church where we planned the actions.
Established in 1995, the stated goal of the WTO was to bring “the rule of law to international commerce.” Only this “law” took away the sovereignty of nations and their ability to make decisions that affected the well-being of their citizens. It was specifically designed to benefit advanced industrialized countries, which received 70% of the benefits. The economies of developing countries were severely hurt by the trade agreements made in secret by a select, unnamed group. For example, farmers in developing nations saw their crops threatened by U.S. subsidies of corn and cotton. The TRIP’s agreement made by the WTO, which governed intellectual property rights, prohibited developing nations from producing and selling low-cost generic AIDS drugs to African countries overwhelmed by the epidemic. Since the implementation of WTO “law, ”economic inequality and unemployment had increased everywhere in the world except the United States, the European Union and South Asia. It even affected factory workers in the United States whose jobs were threatened by Chinese trade agreements.
The protest of the WTO in ’99 was very exciting, very impressive. Thousands of us marched down the streets of Seattle in groups. It was raining and we were wearing yellow slickers that said No WTO on them. Our group was on the front line and our job was to block the entrance of conference participants and shut down the meeting. The problem with me was that I was short and the person next to me was tall. We surrounded the conference center and when a delegate would come along we would stand up, blocking his entry. They could not get in. When President Clinton heard of this, he was madder than Hell, and said, “Punish them.” What they did first of all to scare us was to blast over the bullhorn, “Go home!” We didn’t go home.
When they couldn’t disperse us, they came at us on horseback. We knew that if you lie down in front of a horse, the horse will stop. We all lay down and the horses stopped. So then the police came at us on motorcycles and our supporters on the outer ring stopped the police. They couldn’t break us up. We were determined to close down the meeting and make the world aware of what the WTO was all about. After two hours, without warning, out came the tear gas, the pepper spray, and the rubber bullets. That was the greatest punishment I’ve ever had in my social justice life. I was eighty-four years old then. My eyes were tearing, my throat burning. Rubber bullets bruised my back. As we were staggering out, our support group came up to us and washed our faces with lemon juice. We managed to get back to our hotel and wash up in time for the big march later that day. We kept away from the conference center though, since it was enveloped in a cloud of tear gas. But the outcome of the morning was clear. We had shut down the WTO. And wow, we were feeling so good that we had accomplished our goal without violence on our part.
The mayor of Seattle had called a state of emergency. They were desperate and didn’t know what to do with us. They put on a curfew. By six o’clock, when we tried to get to our hotel, we couldn’t. They blocked us everywhere we tried to enter. Finally about a mile out, we found a cab that took us to our hotel. We were pretty upset because the police had announced over the bullhorns that the curfew wouldn’t start until seven that evening. At seven the next morning, we met in Denny Park and decided to walk to downtown. We thought we were on the outside of the curfew, but the police said we couldn’t go any further. We walked on. So finally the cops stopped us and we sat down. That’s when the arrests began.
I protested the WTO again in Cancun in 2003. I wasn’t arrested there, but the meeting broke down again because the industrialized countries had broken the agreements they had made at Doha after the fiasco in Seattle. Our delegation was right behind the Korean contingent where the President of the Korean Union took a sword and killed himself.
My last arrest was just a few weeks ago in front of the Army Recruitment Center in Capitola. I went with a group of Raging Grannies from WILPF, dressed in our traditional wild hats and aprons. We oppose both the aggressive recruitment tactics used on younger and younger kids, and the Iraq War where the Army plans on sending them. We read our proclamation as we stood in the blocked entrance of the Center before the police escorted us off to the Station.
If you ask me why I continue these radical moves at age 91, I just have to say that I do what I have to do. People have to know that civil society is not asleep. The corporations and political elite who make the do’s and don’ts of this world cannot continue to rule and inflict human suffering without our voices being heard. If I’m called, I’ll go.