Ruth Ramsey arrived at Blooming Grove High School in 1927, in what a caption calls her second year at Blooming Grove.¹ She taught English. By 1937 she was also directing the school's one-act play — a newspaper photograph headed FIRST PLACE WINNERS names her as director and the four seniors on that year's cast, Mae Boyd, Mary Campbell, Mildred Sims and Lola Crocker, and records that the team had placed first the year before and third in district before that.²

She kept directing it. A run of yearbook and newspaper captions puts her in charge of the one-act play from 1928 through 1965, the year a Blooming Grove cast won the Texas state championship with Our American Cousin — the first time a school in Navarro County had ever taken it.³

Twice, twenty years apart, the yearbook turned the dedication around on her. The 1948 Monarch is dedicated “to one who has been both friend and adviser of the students of Blooming Grove High School — Mrs. Ruth Ramsey.”⁴ The 1968 Monarch pictures her holding a copy of Enjoying English 12, Teacher's Edition, and thanks her “for tireless efforts, encouraging words and high ideals.”⁵

The scholarship that carries her name is still awarded.⁶ On an April Saturday in 2009 its committee of eight, meeting that year at Jean Hinkle's home on South Hinckley Street, chose the recipients over brunch; the awards went out that May at the high school auditorium.⁷ The fund is filed with the IRS as the Ruth Edmundson Ramsey Scholarship — which is where Edmundson, her actual middle name, is confirmed rather than guessed.⁸

One line in the town's own 2005 pictorial history explains a debt the book owes her directly: several of its photographs are credited “from the files of Ruth Ramsey.”⁹ She spent decades in front of a classroom and directing a stage, and for at least some of that time she was also one of the people deciding what the town's pictures were worth keeping.