A Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving For the Life of Ruth Oakes Butwell

January 5, 2019, 2:00 pm Rev. Kent Gilbert, Pastor

Union Church

Prelude                  Selections Ruth’s Musical Friends
Ringing of the Peace Bell Kim and Raylon Bingham
Welcome  Rev. Kent Gilbert
Opening Prayer
¨ Hymn Be Thou My Vision Slane
Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart; naught be all else but to me, save that Thou art; Thou my best thought by day or by night,
waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
Be now my wisdom, and be my true word; ever within me, my soul is assured; Mother and Father, you are both to me,  now and forever your child I will be.
Riches I need not, nor life’s empty praise, you, my inheritance, now and always; You and you only are first in my heart,  great God, my treasure, may we never part.
 Sovereign of heaven, my victory won, may I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun! Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision, O Ruler of all.
Readings
Ruth 1:16-17 Kathy Bullock
   Hymn #476 Black My Life Flows On in Endless Song
23rd Psalm Doug Oakes
   Hymn #238 Black Now the Green Blade Rises
“Birth And Rebirth”  Connie Esh
   Special Music Falling Leaves Danny and Jenny Thomas
by Louis M. Jones
“On Work” from Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Gail Wolford
   Hymn  Morning Has Broken (next page)
Words of Reflection & Remembrance John Butwell,
Ann Butwell, & Virgil Burnside
Gospel Reading John 14:1-7 Lisa Vaughn
Sermon   Rev. Kent Gilbert
Sung Affirmation of Faith #351 Black Borning Cry
I Was There To Hear Your Borning Cry
Prayers of Commendation and Thanksgiving Rev. Kent Gilbert
Song          “Alleluia! The Great Storm Is Over”                  written by Bob Franke
Solo:      The thunder and lightning gave voice to the night, The little lame child   cried aloud in her fright, Hush little baby, a story I’ll tell, Of a love that has conquered the powers of hell.
Chorus: Alleluia, the great storm is over, Lift up your wings and fly!
Alleluia, the great storm is over, Lift up your wings and fly!All: Sweetness in the air and justice on the wind
Laughter in the house where the mourners have been
The deaf shall have music, the blind have new eyes
The standards of death taken down by surprise.  ChorusAll:      Release for the captives, an end to the wars
New streams in the desert, new hope for the poor,
The little lame children will dance as they sing,
And play with the bears and the lions in spring.  Chorus
Solo:   Hush little baby, let go of your fear, The lord loves his own and your mother is here, The child fell asleep as the lantern did burn, The mother sang on ’til her bridegroom’s return.  Chorus.©1982 by Telephone Pole Music Pub. Co. (BMI). All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
¨  Benediction    
   Departing Music O When the Saints Go Marching In                    
¨ All are invited to rise in body or in spirit
    Music led by John Wright Rios, Deborah Payne, Sam Gleaves, and Dr. Kathy Bullock

Weather Permitting, a brief interment will follow the service in the Union Church Memorial Garden.

All are invited to join the family downstairs in the Community Room for a reception to share food, fellowship and stories.

Donations in Ruth’s memory may be made to:

Union Church, CPO 2105, Berea, KY, 40404 or

Berea College, CPO 2216, Berea, KY, 40404

 
Ruth Oakes Butwell,
She changed a lot of lives, and now hers is over.
Ruth Oakes Butwell, retired dean of student life at Berea College, died December 10 in her adopted hometown of Berea, KY, where she has resided for nearly five decades. She was 89.
Thousands of students passed through her office in Fairchild Hall during her years as dean, beginning in the summer of 1971 – and many living all over the college’s Appalachian service region still remember her.
“She turned my life around,” they consistently say, ranging from high school principals to city attorneys to airplane pilots to accountants.
Butwell’s work included enforcing college rules, but with an eye on getting errant students back on track. She also kept a box of Kleenex on her desk for counseling sessions that got tearful. Hers was a shoulder to cry on – and then to straighten up and give each student a quiet lecture on self-confidence and pushing forward. She hired and supervised the head residents and resident assistants of the “residence halls,” and she chided even her children for calling them “dormitories.” Every August until her retirement in 1995, she organized and coordinated a training retreat for residence hall staff. She played a leading role, kept active and up-to-date in the profession and organizations of college deans and administrators.
Butwell changed others’ lives for the better, but she also lived through several phases of her own life. In her retirement, she enrolled in the college’s Westervelt Program and became a woodworker in the style of Berea’s famous artists and crafters, turning beautiful cherry and spalted maple bowls on a lathe and constructing benches, boxes, and a grandmother clock from various hardwoods.
Her skill with bowl-turning and woodworking seemed to echo her role in designing three houses mostly from scratch in her lifetime in locations where she lived, each of which she then had built by contractors. Each one features open-beam construction in its living room ceiling, a signature design element, including her home on Prospect Street in Berea. Variations include a redwood exterior on her first home, cedar shingles on her second, and an old-time Kentucky stone chimney and California sundeck on her third.
Butwell also traveled, immediately after she retired, to the Netherlands with friends, and (in 2005) to Vietnam and the Philippines with her daughter Ann and son-in-law John Wright Rios. But that wasn’t her first experience with world traveling.
In another, earlier life phase, in the late 1950s and early to mid-60s, she traveled around the world two and a half times to accompany her then-husband Richard Lee Butwell on university teaching grants from the Ford, Fulbright, and Rockefeller foundations. In these travels, Butwell first lived a year in what was then known as Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) where she learned to make Burmese beef curry, long a staple entrée at her dinner parties. On the way home, she and her late husband took the Orient Express train through Iron Curtain countries into West Germany, where they drove on the Autobahn in the Volkswagen Beetle they purchased to ship home to the United States, where it would be one of the earliest on American highways.
Butwell’s second foray into Southeast Asia included a summer living in Bangkok, Thailand, and other stops including Japan (where her son John ate the emperor’s horse’s carrot) and Saigon during the early stages of the Vietnam War. A third trip placed her for a year in the Philippines, which she reached via Europe including Paris, the Netherlands (where John fell into a mucky canal), Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Moscow, once again a rare destination for Americans during the Cold War, in 1964.
The family’s stop in India was marred by John catching a high fever that kept her from ever seeing the Taj Mahal. But Butwell loved it all, venturing into the Buddhist temples and exotic markets of Asia with her young blond son on her hip, and forming close friendships with other university women, both visiting and local. Later, at Berea College, the Butwell clan served as a host family to international students including Ecuadoran sisters Karla and Debbie Ruiz, Vietnamese Linh Nguyen and Janice D’Souza from India.
In the Philippines, too, in 1965, Butwell gave birth to her daughter Ann, now Education Abroad advisor at Berea College (the 2005 trip was a return visit for her and Ann). After a year enjoying scenic Sedona, AZ, with her parents, Butwell resumed her professional career in 1966, accepting the position of associate dean of students at Missouri Valley College in Marshall, MO. She served at “Valley” through 1971 and also was honored with the college’s Woman of the Year Award that year.
It was a tumultuous time in college life. Butwell helped bust a mobile LSD lab bound for her school from New Jersey in a semi-truck on I-70, tracking its westward journey; and once she raced to the college to stop an old-fashioned “panty raid,” only to learn the college women had taken to their rooftop to view the aurora borealis, not to encourage the raiders. She also helped establish a “Vikings” pep squad that paddled onto the football field to build school spirit with a sail like a Norse warship; a daycare for the college’s single-parent employees and students; and a student coffeehouse, the Bell, Book, and Candle (the latter two in abandoned military housing on campus).
In her earliest life phase, Ruth Jane Oakes (aka “Oakie”) was born in 1929, in Kalamazoo, MI. She was a junior high civics teacher’s daughter living on a small riverside farm in southeastern Michigan (near Ypsilanti). Her father Edwin Charles Oakes taught in the nearby Ann Arbor public schools. Her mother Helen Louise Thompson Oakes helped with the typing for Edwin’s elected position as township clerk, and together the couple helped create one of the nation’s first integrated public housing projects for displaced Appalachians and African-Americans, near the Willow Run World War II bomber plant.
Oakie’s parents’ ideals and joint belief in the “social gospel” helped guide her own life. Both her parents also held master’s degrees and worked after college in Hull House-like settlement houses for recent immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in New York City and Detroit, where her parents met in the mid-1920s. Similarly, Butwell later would meet her husband while both were pursuing the master’s degrees they received in 1953 from Indiana University (a master’s of science in student personnel for her, which followed her 1951 bachelor’s of science in elementary education from Eastern Michigan University). A fellow resident assistant and graduate student in the IU program, Nancy Schwartzwalder, also became Oakie’s lifelong friend and now survives in Tucson, AZ.
Oakie and her brother Tom enjoyed hearty childhoods on the farm where, during some summers, their parents operated a country day camp complete with a working narrow-gauge railroad, ponies, swimming, and boating on the Huron River. The fun was not without its mishaps: one time Oakie dived elegantly into the river and got stuck by her swimming cap head-first in the mud on the bottom. Another time, in winter, the toboggan she was riding down a steep hill with the Baptist Youth Fellowship crashed, and she broke her two front teeth.
For part of her childhood, the family in Oakie’s home also included her aunt Ruth Davidson, for whom she was named, and her cousins Forrest Davidson, Jr., Frances (“Frankie”) Davidson French, and Jane Davidson, all now deceased but who remained close with her their entire lives. Her late parents accompanied her first to Missouri and then to Berea, where her father joined the Optimist Club and
the entire family joined Union Church, having belonged to Covenant Presbyterian in Marshall.
Butwell’s interest in working with and guiding the lives of young people began when she was a young person herself and worked her college summers at a New Hampshire mountain camp. Her first job was serving as dean of women at Wilmington College in Ohio, from 1953-54. A series of positions followed as her husband repeatedly relocated in his career as a political scientist: Counselor, University of Kentucky, 1954. Instructor, Wayne State University College of Nursing, 1955. Assistant Dean of Women, University of Maryland, 1955-57. Director of Christian education, New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC, 1957-58. Assistant Dean of Men, University of Illinois, 1960-61. Assistant Dean of Women, University of the Philippines, 1964-65.
The Great Commitments at Berea College strongly appealed to her and influenced her decision to relocate to Berea, where she was named Honorary Alumnus of the Year by the college in 2000. Also influencing her selection of Berea was the opportunity to bring the college’s policies more up-to-date by, for instance, giving female students keys to their own residence halls and eliminating the curfew.
Additionally, Butwell helped make the college safer for women by successfully urging then-President Willis D. Weatherford, Jr., to install more lights on campus. Later, her support for non-traditional students could be seen in providing a housing for single parents, which led to the creation of the EcoVillage. She also began daycare services at Berea College, which became the Child Development Lab (CDL). A final contribution to both College and community was the inception of the Stephenson Trail to Indian Fort.
Butwell’s memberships, professional and political, included the National Organization of Women, League of Women Voters, National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (serving as administrators’ liaison), National Association of Women Educators (serving on the resolutions committee), Kentucky Association of Women Educators, Phi Kappa Phi, and Berea College Women’s Network (founder, chairperson 1978-80).
She was particularly active in the Kentucky Association of Women Deans and Counselors (KAWDAC), serving as its treasurer in 1986-87, vice president in 1987-88, and president, 1988-89.
Butwell’s lifetime of travels also included tourism in South America to Bolivia and Peru, where she visited landmark Machu Picchu, the 15th-century Inca citadel, with her daughter Ann. She also flew on a rescue mission of sorts to El Salvador when Ann was run over by a speeding car there, and she traveled to Nicaragua in 1990 as an election observer.
Butwell co-authored, with four other Bereans who also served as election observers, the book “Democracy Watch: Nicaragua,” a collection of their journals from the trip. Since her last name comes first alphabetically, she is listed first on the cover and in library search engines, also making her an author of sorts.
Butwell also knew when to quit while she was ahead, famously swooshing a basketball into the net from half-court during a Berea College Mountaineers fan contest, and then refusing to try for a repeat performance. She was known as a good sport who liked to have fun, including an incident she never lived down in which she used a stick to drag a possum out of a Berea College driveway during her morning jog to protect it from traffic. The possum promptly got up, walked out and laid back down in the middle of the road.
For years during their mutual retirements, Butwell played a Saturday night bridge game with a close group in Berea including her longtime friend and colleague from the college, the late Gloria Van Winkle. Group members also rented an oceanfront cabin together each summer at Pawley’s Island, NC, and several also belonged to the “Peachbloom Hill gang” of friends.
Butwell was preceded in death by her parents, Edwin Charles and Helen Louise (Thompson) Oakes, and her brother Edwin Thompson (“Tom”) Oakes. She is survived by her sister-in-law Marjorie (Johnston) Oakes of Albuquerque, NM; one son, John Butwell, and his wife Connie Esh of Woodbury, TN; one daughter, Ann Louise Butwell, and her husband John Wright Rios of Berea; step-grandchildren Ann-Marie Mansfield of Holton, MI, Jenny (Danny) Thomas of Gray, Bonnie Still of Richmond, and Marc (Judy) Williams of Kinston, NC; step-great granddaughter Kim (Ricky) Bingham of Gray Hawk; and about 30 other step-great grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory to either Union Church or Berea College are appreciated.