Spoonhandle, Ruth Moore

When we first toured the house, I found a book written by my great aunt, Ruth Moore, among a box of hardcovers on the third story. Another sign!

Ruth Moore was born in 1903 on Gotts Island, a small island near the both of Bass Harbor in Temont, Maine. Her middle sister, Esther and known to her siblings as ‘Tug’, was my grandmother. In a family of nicknames, Ruth was known to all as ‘Uppy’. Her books in my collection are sign “Love, Up.”

The family traces its way back to the early pilgrims including several on the Mayflower. Charles Gott and his wife Gift (Palmer) came across on the Abigail in 1628.

Daniel Gott IV was a Private in Colonel Prescott’s regiment in the Revolutionary War. Daniel moved to a Maine island known as Petite Pleasants. He then relocated to the head of Somes Sound and finally to the island that now bears his name. In 1814, he alone with his two sons Charles and Daniel drowned while fishing off Duck Island.

Daniel’s descendent Asenath married Philip Moore in 1826 on Gotts Island. They were Ruth’s great grandparents. Moore is a direct descendent of Edward Winslow, Sr., father of Mayflower passenger Governor Edward Winslow, and fellow passenger James Chilton.

Uppy and her siblings grew up on the small island off midcoast Maine. Her father ran the island shop, post office, and boarding house. He also operated a fishing weir in the cove which no doubt inspired the name for her first novel.

She credits a local summer resident, Mary White Ovington, with beginning her love for literature. Ovington, an heir to the Philadephia Ovington department store family had donated a collection of great books to the local one-room school. Ruth devoured them all. Later Ovington would be her bridge off the island.

Ovington was a prominent New York suffragist, progressive, and journalist. She was one of the original co-founders of the NAACP. She hired Ruth as her secretary and supported her relocation to New York City in 1926. The Ovington archives at Case Western University contains several early drafts of poetry by Ruth attesting to her early inclination to become a writer.

Eventually Ruth would take on multiple jobs with the NAACP. She eventually became Assistant Campaign Manager working directly with James Weldon Johnson, then NAACP President. I still have among my books Ruth’s copy of God’s Trombones signed to her by Johnson.

In 1936 Ruth conducted investigations on behalf of the NAACP. She traveled into the South, the thought being that a woman might generate less suspicion. She would later relate how she was eventually “run out of town.” She also investigated a case where two African American boys were wrongfully accused of murder. They would eventually be exonerated due to the evidence she uncovered.

In the 1930s, Ruth worked for the prominent minister and orator Dr. John Haynes Holmes. She later took employment with Alice Tisdale Hobart, author of Oil For the Lamps of China. She relocated first to DC and eventually Berkeley, California where she operated the Hobart’s nut ranch.

“It is doubtful if any American writer has ever done a better job of communicating a people, their talk, their thoughts, their geography, and their way of life.”

—The New York Times

Her first published work, a poem “Voyager”, appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1929. Her debut novel, The Weir, was published in 1943. The New Yorker published her story “Things Don’t Change Much” in 1945. In 1946, her follow up novel, Spoonhandle, became an international bestseller.

On a return visit to Maine in 1940, her sister Esther introduced Ruth to Eleanor Mayo. The two returned to California so Mayo could gain residency status and attend UC Berkeley. They would remain life-long companions until Mayo’s death from a brain tumor in 1981. Mayo was also a novelist and published five books including Turn Home that became the Republic Pictures film Tarnished.

In 1948, 20th Century Fox released Deep Waters based on Spoonhandle. The film, directed by Henry King, starred Dana Andrews, who had just had starring roles in Laura (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Jean Peters, and featuring Caesar Romero and Dean Stockwell.

The release of Deep Waters gave Ruth the means to purchase land in her beloved Maine. In 1947, after a brief stint as a Hollywood screenwriter, she returned to Bass Harbor—Gotts Island visible from her shore. Ruth and Eleanor built their own house near Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse, the flames of the great Bar Harbor fire of 1947 visible in the distance. Ruth retells the story in her piece “First Christmas In Our New House” published by the Boston Sunday Post (1963) and included in the collection I edited The Day Foley Craddock Tore Off My Grandfather’s Thumb.

Ruth’s books remain available and are currently being republished by Islandport Press.

I have reprinted five of Eleanor Mayo’s novels through Rebel Satori Press. Mayo was also a local politician, the first female selectman elected anywhere in Maine, and an accomplished photographer. I am currently editing a collection of her photos In the Blink of an Eye. I’m sure I will post more on her later.