Ruth Ann Carpenter

Ruth was born in Elgin, Ill., and was the daughter of Mildred and Arnold Hartman. She was the middle child of five, growing up alongside her five Van Horn cousins next door. As she told a USF student journalist in 2015 for an oral history:

“So we grew up with the ten of us,” Carpenter said. She said the family spent Christmases together in Florida with her father’s parents.

“Sometimes my mother’s parents also would sometimes come with us, and we’d have a whole bunch of us in that truck,” Carpenter said, remembering the converted panel van that her father prepared for their annual road trip to visit the grandparents.

She moved to Orlando in the 1970s with her first husband, Richard Shick, and their two children. She was a registered nurse and worked at hospitals, nursing homes and with special needs students in the Orange County school system.

Ruth enjoyed painting and traveling throughout the world. Among the destinations, she visited Paris, Normandy, London, Switzerland, Tokyo and Rome.

She told another student journalist her advice to her younger self, words that she lived by after her first marriage ended: “Go out and live, travel, do things, meet more people.”

She is preceded in death by her husband, Donald G. Carpenter of Apopka. She is survived by her brothers, Paul Hartman of The Villages and John Hartman (Roberta) of West Dundee, Ill.; daughter, Laura Ann Garcia (Wayne) of Tampa; son, Michael Shick (Denise) of Clermont; step-daughter, Carol Tomlinson of Orlando; and grandchildren, Christopher Shick of Los Angeles, Brian Garcia (Cindy) of Herndon, Va., Nicholas Garcia of Beaverton, Ore., and Savannah Tomlinson of Orlando.