Ruth Amy Stroshane (Spoolman) passed away recently at the age of ninety-nine and a half at Silverado Belmont Hills Memory Care in Belmont, California. She was a musician, teacher, mother, and gardener, all roles in which she served her community, church, and family throughout her adult life.
Born in early 1926 in Birnamwood, Wisconsin, she was the last of eight children of Jacob Spoolman (a Congregational minister and college professor) and Ethel Dodge Spoolman (a former Women's Christian Temperance Movement activist and early Stanford University graduate). Ruth's family moved to Ashland, Wisconsin where she grew up. Ruth had a lively mind, taking up flute and piano, singing in high school, college, and church choirs, and was a student of the Bible and philosophy.
Growing up in Wisconsin, she heard stories from her parents about the San Francisco peninsula, Stanford, and the Redwood City area. Her mother Ethel, had graduated from Sequoia High School in Redwood City and had been among the first few women to attend and graduate from the new Stanford University in 1902. Ethel briefly taught school in Pescadero and Millbrae. Ruth's father, Jacob, had taken a divinity degree from UC Berkeley, and met Ethel circa 1905, marrying soon after. His various church assignments took them and their growing family to numerous places throughout the American West, to New York and Connecticut, and back out west before settling in upstate Wisconsin where he became a professor of philosophy at Northland College in Ashland.
At Ashland High School in the early 1940s, Ruth accompanied the choir on piano, her first of many such roles, and met Dick Stroshane, a solid tenor. Together they attended Northland College in Ashland where she took a Bachelor's in history and he a joint degree in Biology and Chemistry. In spring 1947, their college choir toured the northeastern states, enjoying especially Boston and New York City.
After graduating Northland, they took jobs as schoolteachers for a year, married, and had their first son, Frank in 1950. Shortly after his birth they moved to Kennewick, Washington, where Dick found work with General Electric Company, an important contractor with the Atomic Energy Commission's Richland plutonium production plant. (Dick's work was classified, and his family never learned what he did.) While Dick was away three months in Newport News, Virginia, Ruth survived an appendectomy while a neighbor cared for Frank. When Dick left GE in early 1951, the young family moved that spring to Pasadena, California, where their second son, Richard, was born. Dick worked in industrial sales and attended night school to become a chemical engineer while Ruth raised the boys and worked as a substitute teacher.
The family purchased a home in Altadena, after which their third son, Tim, was born in 1957. When Dick transferred to San Francisco in 1962, they looked for a home to purchase in Redwood City, where Ruth still had relatives from that earlier time in Spoolman family history, including Ralph and Amy Dodge, and some members of the Bray family.
While Dick immersed himself in his engineering career, Ruth made Redwood City her home, attending the same First Congregational Church (FCC) where her parents were wed (but in a different location decades later), teaching piano after school to children from the community, and raising her three boys. She befriended church organist Joanna Smullin, who agreed to give Ruth organ lessons on the FCC's top-notch multi-stopped pipe organ. Becoming an organist in her late thirties benefited Ruth later via substitute organist opportunities at churches up and down the peninsula, adding to her community experiences and contributions.
In the late 1970s, she went on local Sierra Club hikes with friends, and joined the Cañada College chorus led by director Carl Sitton, singing alto for many years in the 1970s and 1980s. Also in the 1970s she took up a brief interest in missionary work, spending a few weeks serving a southwestern American Indian reservation. She continued her interest in philosophy and history, reading works by William James, Joseph Campbell, Loren Eiseley, and René Dubos and discussed religion, music, and politics with her sons when they visited home.
After Dick died suddenly in 1985, Ruth found work as a choir piano accompanist with Abbot Middle School in San Mateo, where she earned a modest pension. She continued playing church organs on the peninsula where needed. In 1994, she left her Redwood City home of thirty-two years for a condominium in Menlo Park where she lived independently for the next twenty-five years. She joined the Silverado Belmont Hills community in early 2019.
Following in her father's footsteps, Ruth was active not just as an organist. She brought a passion for community service to her church. She joined various committees, helping organize and host potlucks and social gatherings, and accompanied the youth and adult choirs. In her later years, she continued to play piano preludes and postludes for her church's services past her 90th birthday in 2016, and attended Wednesday prayer meetings and Sunday evening services.
Ruth loved her many musical friends Lucille Johnson, Carol Bangert, Jay and Carol Selby. Annette Howitt, Kathleen Wade, and Tina Baird, all of whom resided in Redwood City. They performed together and in later years would attend a variety of Peninsula symphony and choral events.
Ruth's quick smile and twinkling eyes earned her loyal, loving, and long-lasting friendships in the peninsula music community. She is survived by her sons, Frank, Richard, and Tim; daughters-in-law Geneva, Siu Wai (Mae), and Jan; grandchildren Lauren, Kelsey, Alex, and Maya; and great-grandchildren William and Hazel.
Ruth's family wishes to express our heartfelt thanks to Silverado Belmont Hills Memory Care and to Grace & Glory Hospice for their compassionate care of Ruth through her final days.