The Honorary Mayor of Gorman- Looking Back!

by E.J. Stephens

Ruth Ralphs was born on February 29, 1920, and since leap years only come every four years, she has actually celebrated only 22 birthdays during her 90 years. Sitting across from Ruth, the honorary mayor of Gorman – where she has resided for 60 of those years – she recounts her life with the enthusiasm of a twenty-two-year old.
“I didn’t always live in Gorman, and I wasn’t always a Ralphs,” she says, with a trace of an Australian accent that six decades in America hasn’t fully erased. “But sometimes it feels like it,” she laughs.
Ruth’s story began in Townsville, Queensland, Australia where she was born Ruth Coleman. As a young woman she moved to Sydney and became an executive secretary. She vividly remembers a night in 1942 when Japanese mini-subs tried to sink allied military ships in Sydney harbor.
“I was coming home from a dance with a friend when I thought I heard thunder,” she recalls, “My friend said, “That’s not thunder, those are bombs!”
She married a Danish chef during the war while still in Australia and eventually migrated to America to be with her husband, who had come over earlier.
“I arrived by boat at the Embarcadero in San Francisco,” she remembers, “I got there at 8 o’clock in the morning and expected to meet my husband. I ended up waiting there until ten-thirty that night for him to arrive. It turned out that his car broke down on his way to get me.”
Her husband worked for a company that provided food services to movie sets throughout the Southwest. Ruth spent the first of her years in America travelling with him to sets in out-of-the-way locales.
“I remember being in Monument Valley when they made “Fort Apache,” and in Sedona, Arizona with Dick Powell when he made “Station West.” When he arrived on the set I didn’t know who he was. He asked me if this was where the movie was being made. I told him yes, but that they weren’t looking for any extras.”
The couple helped Powell and his wife June Allyson celebrate their second wedding anniversary on the set, and Ruth’s husband flew Powell to the Del Mar Racetrack in San Diego in his own plane.
Ruth and her husband moved to Hawthorne for a few years, and then to Burbank. In 1950, the couple moved fifty miles to the north, when Ruth’s husband was offered a job managing a restaurant in Gorman off of Highway 99. It felt like they had left civilization behind.
“At the time, there were maybe 50 people in Gorman, nine registered voters, and the only phones in town were two payphones,” Ruth remembers.
The restaurant was the only significant eatery between Newhall and Bakersfield and was constantly packed. She remembers having to escort Charlie Chaplin Jr. out of the establishment because he insisted on bringing in his pet monkey.
Ruth and her first husband got divorced in 1960, and she became a Ralphs a year later when she married Lloyd Ralphs, a descendant of the Ralphs supermarket-chain family.
“Oscar Ralphs and his brothers started the merchant business in Los Angeles in the 1880s,” Ruth explains. “Oscar soon realized that he preferred farming to being a merchant and sold his interest to his brothers and moved to Gorman to homestead 2700 acres. My husband was Oscar’s grandson.”
The Ralphs built their own coffee shop and motel called the Caravan in 1965, to take advantage of the traffic on the 5 freeway, which was built that same year.
“Before the 5 was built, the 99 was a three-lane road, with the middle lane called the “suicide lane” because drivers coming from both directions used it to pass,” Ruth remembers.
As any seismologist will tell you, Gorman is one of the most geologically-active places on the globe, with the San Andreas Fault running literally through Ruth’s front yard.
“I asked once how they were able to build the Caravan on top of the fault line, and I was told that they simply moved the fault,” she laughs.
She wasn’t laughing in July 1952 when the nearby Garlock Fault ruptured with the largest earthquake to hit Southern California in the twentieth-century. At the time she was bathing her infant daughter in the kitchen.
“I remember seeing the eaves of the house striking the ground,” she recalls.
The Ralphs owned the Caravan for the next 30 years, serving thousands of customers and hosting a film shoot for a scene from “Thelma and Louise.” In 1988, Lloyd Ralphs passed away and a few years later Ruth sold the Caravan. Today it is a Ranch House Restaurant and the motel is an Econolodge.
In 1991, an agent for the Bulgarian artist Christo showed up at Ruth’s door explaining that the artist wanted to make Gorman the North American site of one of his massive environmental art displays. Christo would eventually dot the hills surrounding Gorman with 1760 six-foot tall steel yellow umbrellas for 10 days that year while simultaneously displaying a field of blue steel umbrellas in Japan.
Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude (who passed away last November) became good friends of Ruth and she hosted a party for them at her house to celebrate the event. In appreciation, Christo placed one yellow umbrella and one blue one at the entrance to her driveway and took Ruth’s children on a helicopter ride over the umbrellas. Ruth later flew to Japan as Christo’s guest to see the blue umbrellas.
Ruth has spent many years as a public servant in the Gorman area. She still serves on the water board, and was named the honorary mayor of Gorman. She was also honored by L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich when she retired from the school board after 33 years.
Today, Ruth lives in the same house that she moved to in 1951 that now parallels the 5 freeway. Three of her four children still live in the area, with the fourth in Bakersfield.
All in all, she sure has packed a lot of living in for someone who has only had twenty-two birthdays.