Focus on Education A lady governor who overcame the odds

Recently “People” magazine ran the following account of an unbeatable woman who never lost an election in 26 years despite the fact that she was a high school dropout. Today at age 66, Governor Ruth Ann Minner is the state of Delaware’s first woman governor! Her story deserves to be told as a role model to show what a person can accomplish once he or she sets goals coupled with determination.

At age sixteen, her father told her to quit school. Though she was an excellent student who also drove a tractor, milked cows and tended crops on the family farm, Ruth Ann Minner obeyed her father’s decision. As the youngest of five children of tenant farmers Samuel and Mary Ann Coverdale, Ruth Ann recalls, “It was hard but it was expected of us.”

Within a year she married her eight-grade sweetheart Frank Ingram. Together they started a pesticide business. When Frank was 34, he died of a heart attack, leaving Minner with three young children and a mortgage. Desperate, she somehow managed to feed herself and her children. She returned to school determined to get her G.E.D. She recalls how her son, who was in the eight grade, was in class only a few rooms down the hall from her. “All of us did our homework together,” she relates.

Ruth Ann Minner was only 32 years old when her husband died. The best job she could find for a high school dropout was driving from farm to farm along the back roads of southern Delaware counting rows, ears and kernels of corn for government surveys. Because her 1963 Chevy was dying, she tried to buy a new one, but all the auto dealers refused to give her a loan for a car. They’d say, “Oh, you’re single; we need a man to sign for a loan for a car,” she sadly recalls. Even the banks required a male signature.

A few years later she married a family friend whose marriage had broken up. Together Roger Minner and she started a towing company. When she found time she volunteered stuffing envelopes for the Democratic party. In 1973, Delaware Governor Tribbitt hired her as his receptionist. A year and a half later the party backed her as a state representative from her district.

Years later in 1974, when Minner decided to run for state office, she recalled those times of rejections and became determined to correct the discrimination against women. Since than she has successfully lobbied bankers in the state to grant loans to women more freely.

During her 26 years in political life, she served four terms as a state representative followed by three as state senator and two as lieutenant governor. Than in January 3, 2001, she was sworn as the state’s first woman governor.

Throughout her long and successful public life career, she still manages the same warm friendship with all her constituents. Though she lives in the governor’s mansion, Governor Minner still shops off the rack and insists that everyone keep calling her Ruth Ann. She feels that her role is to help woman achieve a better status in a man’s world.

When I read Governor Ruth Ann Minner’s powerful story rising from a high school dropout at sixteen to becoming Governor, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement what one can do. I could feel her courage and determination as she struggled to succeed. She had a vision and fulfilled it.

Once Helen Keller was asked: “Miss Keller, is there anything worse than lost of eyesight?” Miss Keller quietly replied: “ Yes, to have sight–but no vision!” Have a great day.