A Very Special Woman Meets The President

By Kevin Gray

Not far from where the Rev. Samuel Adair and his wife Florella once hid slaves in their cabin, a safe house on the Underground Railroad, history has come full circle at Osawatomie High School.

An African-American woman, who came to Osawatomie at the age of 4 just two years after President Theodore Roosevelt gave his famous “New Nationalism” speech, met with Barack Obama the first African-American President of the United States, just a short walk from the original cabin owned by the Adairs and frequented by Florella’s half brother, John Brown.

On Thursday, Dec. 6, about 17 days shy of her 103rd birthday, Ruth Wrench listened to President Barack Obama’s vision of America’s future, one not much different than the one President Theodore Roosevelt plotted out when he, too, came to Osawatomie in 1910.

Wrench said she was thrilled with what the President had to say. “I liked what he said about the economy,” Wrench said.

Voting for Barack Obama in the 2012 election is a forgone conclusion. “Yes, I plan to vote for Obama,” she said.

Icing on the cake at the end of the day was an autograph. Wrench had brought her copy of President Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

After Ruth Wrench was born in Weston, Mo., her parents soon moved across the river to Atchison, Kan.

Her father had entered the construction trades, Wrench said, and began driving down from Atchison to lay Main Street’s brick pavers. This is when the Wrench family chose to move south because, as Wrench said, her father did not have a place to stay. “He had to drive back and forth every day,” Wrench said.

But due to a lack of available housing, the Wrench family lived in a tent city, as did others in similar circumstances, in the block just north of the St. Philip Neri Catholic Church.

After graduating from Osawatomie High School in 1926, she attended Kansas State Teachers College in Pittsburg, Kan., for a year and a half. She almost finished the second semester, but Ruth’s mother needed her at home.

“My mother needed me at home to help with the little ones,” Wrench said.

Wrench never gave up on her desire to finish her education. When the chance to take part in the Kaw Valley Convention in Topeka in 1920, a teacher-training program, Wrench went back to school.

Upon her return to Osawatomie, Wrench accepted a job in the dietary department at the Osawatomie State Hospital, where she remained until retirement in 1975.

During a visit to a church meeting in Fort Scott, Kan., Wrench met James Wrench. They married in 1963 and both remained active in their church until his passing in 1993 at the age of 97.

In retirement, Mother Wrench or Auntie Wrench became Grandma Ruth and began riding a bus back and forth daily to help in Diane Gray’s kindergarten room at North School in Paola. After doing this for about 13 years, she transferred to Swenson Early Childhood Learning Center in Osawatomie, where she worked with Marilyn Cook and Helen Woolsey.

At the Foster Grandparent Dinner in October 2010, then Miami County Foster Grandparent Director Sherry Duer said Wrench had been part of the program from the beginning, that being about 30 years.

“Besides the devotion to school children, she has given freely to her family, church and her community to make this world a better place,” Duer said.

At Grandma Ruth’s 100th birthday celebration in 2009, Sandy Wrench of Fort Scott said it best, “Ruth Wrench is a woman of many families. There is her traditional one. Then, there is her church family, the Foster Grandparent program and her school family. There are so many people who love and honor her,” Sandy said.

Wrench once told me her secret. “By giving respect, you get respect,” Wrench said.

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Posted by admin on Dec 7 2011. Filed under News and Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry