Ruth V. Hernandez

Ruth, a lifelong Fresnan and beloved sister, wife, mother and grandmother, died Tuesday at her home in Fresno after being diagnosed with lung cancer in July. She was 85 years old. In 1942, in a garlic patch on the outskirts of Fresno County in Las Deltas, Ruth Velasquez was delivering lunch to farmworkers when she met Ruben Hernandez. They were both 16. One year later they eloped, and together they raised a family that over the next seven decades would come to rely on her for her strength and her wisdom, her homemade tortillas and her hand-sewn dresses. She was a businesswoman, seamstress, parish leader, Election Day pollworker, neighborhood volunteer and, in her later years, an at-home caretaker to her ailing husband. She did not move mountains. She moved houses.

For nearly 25 years, Mrs. Hernandez helped her husband run the San Joaquin Valley Housemoving Company, which moved hundreds of homes, school buildings and churches throughout the Central Valley in a gritty yet delicate dance of trucks and beams and jacks. For a time, the company was the only one of its kind operating in Fresno. After the business closed in 1987, she started a second career, working full-time in fabric stores. At home or in a store, she sent relatives, neighbors and complete strangers off into the world with clothes, cutains and costumes she cut and designed. Hundreds of her creations, many of them made without charge, are hanging in closets around the Valley. As a mother and grandmother, she was one of a kind: unconventional in her words and deeds, full of moxie, a woman raised dirt-poor and barefoot in the farmlands of the Valley with just an eighth-grade education who taught herself how to cook, how to drive, how to sew, how to manage money and, most importantly, how to live. She loved deeply, laughed loudly and spoke frankly. She was known by her friends and family as Cuca, but her given name as an infant was Refugio. It means refuge.

A daughter of the late Frank "Pancho" and the late Paulina Camarena, she is survived by her husband, Ruben Hernandez; her son, Ruben Hernandez Jr. and daughter-in-law, Irene; two sisters, Phyllis Hernandez and Frances Morales; a brother, John Martinez; six grandchildren, Ruben Hernandez III, Alvina Hernandez-Cooley and her husband Eric Cooley, Gabriel Fernandez, Manny Fernandez and his wife, Michelle O'Donnell, Robert Hernandez and Monica Hernandez. Four great-grandchildren and numerous nieces, nephews and cousins also survive her. Her daughter, Paulina Hernandez DeCheney, 50; her son, Georgie Hernandez, 7 and her granddaughter, Irene "Baby" Hernandez, 15, preceded her in death.

Her family would like to thank Cheryl Weber, Margot Hawkin-Franklin and everyone at Saint Agnes Home Health and Hospice for the care and comfort they provided her.

Viewing will be held Lisle Funeral Home on Sunday, November 6, 2011 starting at 10:00 am and followed by the Recitation of the Holy Rosary at 7:00 pm. A Mass Christian Burial at St. Alphonsus Church on Monday, November 7, 2011 at 10:00 am. burial to follow at St. Peters Cemetery.

Arrangements under the direction of Lisle Funeral Home, Fresno, CA.