Ruth Ost

Ruth was a person of love, strength, warmth, determination, and originality. She was also an extraordinarily happy person, invariably injecting good cheer and hope in everyone around her. The youngest of five children, she grew up in a loving family in Bensonhurst. On her 22nd birthday she married Milt Ost, and after his death thirty-seven years later became the life partner of Bill Mardo.

Ruth might have become a concert pianist but chose instead to raise two boys and work at a variety of jobs before becoming the long-time office manager of a PR firm. Besides family, friends, and classical music, her passion was social justice and progressive politics. Like many in `her generation she affiliated with the Communist Party, participating in election rallies for Vito Marcantonio and Ben Davis and for freedom for the Rosenbergs. She left the Party after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956 but stayed fully committed to progressive causes, marching against racism, the Vietnam War, or the invasion of Iraq.

Yet there was never anything doctrinaire about her. For Ruth was above all a person of love, warmth, and compassion, as was instantly and always clear to everyone who came in contact with her, and especially her sons, her sons’ partners, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, her nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews, and her many close friends. We are bereft at our loss while we rejoice at her wonderful life and her eternal presence in ours.