Ruth Elaine Wollter

Ruth was born on March 12, 1927 in Belmont, MA to Clara Ruth Wheaton Thomas and William Thomas, joining the family that already included her brothers Richard Alvin and Ralph Hunter Thomas. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be on stage and was schooled in dancing and music. At age 17, just after her graduation from Belmont High School, she won her first beauty contest, Miss Boston. She also enrolled in Academie Moderne, a Boston modeling school. One month later, she was chosen Miss Bathing Beauty of Boston 1944. That fall, she enrolled in the Bishop-Lee School in Boston, a technical school specializing in all aspects of theatre. The next summer (1945), she landed her first professional acting job in summer stock theater in Rockport, MA.

During an August vacation with parents in Fieldston, MA, Ruth entered the local Miss Fieldston contest on a whim and won, which led quickly to the title of Miss Massachusetts and thus entry into the Miss America pageant in September 1945. After Bess Myerson was named Miss America, Ruth went back to Bishop-Lee, with her eyes set back on the stage.

In 1946, Billy Rose, proprietor of the famous Diamond Horseshoe Club in New York City, boasted that college girls (i.e., “smart girls”) could not also be beautiful. He offered to put six of his professional showgirls (his “long-stemmed beauties”) up against six college girls chosen by the Harvard Lampoon staff. Ruth (as an enrolled student in a post-secondary school) qualified for the Harvard team. At the last minute, Rose’s NYC team failed to show, and the Harvard team won by default.

Ruth graduated from Bishop-Lee in 1946 and joined the Lowell Stock Company, a theatre company formed by fellow student (and boyfriend) Vin Kehoe and performed in various plays in Lowell, MA for the summer. In the fall, she made the leap to the Big Apple to pursue a serious acting career.

Upon arrival in NYC, Ruth went to Billy Rose’s club, reminded the manager of her participation in the failed Harvard Lampoon contest, and was hired as a showgirl on the spot. She continued her interest in stage acting but supported herself as a showgirl and model, appearing in many product advertisements, incuding Polaroid Sunglasses and Camay Soap. Photos of her could also be found in”Life,” “True Detective,” “Vogue,” “Harpers Bazaar,” and other magazines.

Ruth scored her first role in a Broadway musical in 1948 in “As the Girls Go” alongside famous comedian Bobby Clark. This role helped her gain more exposure and notoriety as an actress. In 1949, she was named New York’s Most Beautiful Blonde by 20th Century Fox executives (beating 4,000 other contestants). Shortly after (July 1949), she was hired as part of a group of women to perform in Monte Carlo to celebrate the casino’s introduction of the game of craps in an attempt to attract more Americans to the country.

On the ship across the Atlantic, Ruth met Joe Yamron, who was doing a European tour after recently graduating from MIT. They had a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo and fell deeply in love after just a few days. However, this idyllic scene came to an abrupt end when a polio scare forced them both into quarantine. Ruth was sent to a convent in Monaco, and Joe and his sick friend were sent to a hospital in Paris and then back to the US. During those difficult times, all attempts at communication failed, and Ruth and Joe lost contact and were not to meet again until 60 years later (even though at one time both worked forCBS in NYC).

As a result of the Most Beautiful Blonde contest, Ruth had caught the eye of famous Yankee fielder Joe DiMaggio, and the two became an item after her return to NYC in September 1949 but broke up when she declined to go with him to Spring Training in Florida. (Because he couldn’t convince Ruth to go with him, DiMaggio had to settle for Marilyn Monroe.)

Ruth resumed modelling, and in February 1950 she won a national photographic contest, Miss Photography, sponsored by the Herald Tribune of New York. Contestants were nominated by modelling agencies and judged by professional photographers.

The new medium of television was coming to the public, and on May 12, 1950 Ruth began appearing in comedy skits on the first weekly television variety show, the Ken Murray Show, broadcast live from the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. She also made an impression on Morey Amsterdam, who talked her into also appearing on his weekly show. During her off days, she acted in such TV serials as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (playing a victim of archenemy Ming the Merciless). During this busy time, she met fellow Ken Murray Show actor and singer Robert Wollter, and they married in Belmont on November 3, 1950.

Tragedy struck the Thomas family in 1951, when Ruth’s brother Ralph, an experienced US Marine Corps pilot, was declared Missing in Action after his plane was shot down during a combat mission over North Korea. Ruth stayed in touch with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency throughout the rest of her life as they have continued to search for and identify Ralph’s remains.

Ruth and Bob’s first daughter, Kimberlee, was born in Manhattan in March 1952. Not wanting to raise a child in the city, the new parents moved to the suburbs, Massapequa Park, in 1954. Ruth continued modeling and traveled with Kim and Bob as his singing group, the Mello-Larks, toured the US, Canada, and Cuba, including a year in Chicago with another daily variety show, Club 60, the first live show to be broadcast in color.

Daughter Robin was born in Massapequa Park in 1959, followed by son Dana in 1960. At this point Bob and Ruth decided that the show business life was not stable enough for a young family, so Bob accepted a job in an advertising agency in Los Angeles, and the family relocated in late 1960 to southern California, land of sunshine and orange trees. Ruth settled down to the life of a homemaker in Covina, CA for a while, until an opportunity arose to join a growing new company that promised an exciting life of meeting people and traveling. Bob and Ruth became independent Amway distributors in 1965, and their rapid success allowed Bob to quit the 9-to-5 world. He and Ruth then resumed the kind of life they loved in a slightly different form, performing in various Amway musical productions, travelling nationally and internationally to meetings and conventions, and helping people enter this new world of multi-level marketing. In 1971, they relocated to their dream home in Escondido, CA where they remained active in their growing Amway business.

In 1989, after the birth of their first grandchild Alex (to Kim and husband Tom Titus) in Kansas, Bob and Ruth took a hiatus from southern CA for an 18-month trip around North America by motorhome. They crisscrossed the country via Kansas (to see Alex) and visited most US states and parts of Canada, renewing ties with family, friends, and business associates. They eventually returned to Escondido energized about their lives and business, which continued to flourish until Bob’s death from complications from diabetes and heart disease in October 2003.

In December 2004, at age 77, Ruth decided to realize her dream of living full time at the beach in a tropical climate, so she moved across the country to Largo, FL. There she established herself with a new church and a wonderful circle of new friends, with whom she traveled extensively (Bali, Tahiti, Israel, etc.) and had many other adventures (whitewater rafting, zip lining, etc.). In 2006, Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was successfully treated at the time but returned in metastatic form in 2014. During her remission period, she decided to return to a long-delayed project: writing the memoir of her amazing life. As part of this process, she began to wonder what ever happened to her Monte Carlo love, Joe Yamron. Her son Dana advised her that you can find anyone on Google, so in late 2007 she searched and finally found Joe in Lexington, MA. He had been widowed about the same amount of time as she had after a long marriage, so Ruth and Joe were free to pick up their romance where it had been cut short 60 years before. After much correspondence, they finally managed to meet in person on April 28, 2008 in a parking lot in Florida and have been together since. During the next several years, they maintained a long-distance relationship, traveling back and forth between Florida and Massachusetts and making trips to Quebec, Bermuda, Europe, the Caribbean, and Mexico.

After the recurrence of her cancer in 2014, Ruth decided to move to Lexington to be with Joe full time. For a while her health improved, and they were able to enjoy their new life together with several regional excursions. Ruth and Joe married in Lexington on July 19, 2015.

Her health began to decline in early 2016, and she succumbed to complications from cancer on September 20, 2016 at her home in Lexington attended by husband Joe, daughter Kim, and granddaughter Laurel.

She is survived by husband Joseph Yamron, daughters Kimberlee Wollter (Tom Titus) and Robin Evans (Joshua Evans), son Dana Wollter (Judy Hoyer), grandchildren Alexander Titus, Laurel Titus, and Julia Evans, and great-grandson Edmund Titus.

She was predeceased by her parents, her bothers Richard A. and Ralph H. Thomas, previous husband Robert Gustav Wollter, and daughter-in-law Lisa Wollter.

Private services to be held in Lexington, MA and Escondido, CA.