(Nov. 16, 1918 – June 25, 2016) E. Ruth Blanchard died in Salem on June 25, 2016. She was 97.
Ruth was born to Roland and Erma Roberts in Long Beach, Calif., on Nov. 16, 1918. She attended schools in Long Beach and graduated from Bend High School in Oregon, where her family had moved when she was a teenager.
She was athletic, and a baseball and tennis player. She went on to graduate from Southern Oregon Normal School (now SOU) and taught in a one-room multi-grade school situated in a caboose near La Grande.
She met her future husband, John Milan Blanchard, in La Grande and they married Sept. 7, 1941. John’s service in the U.S. Army Air Corps took them to San Antonio, Texas, where their first daughter Linda Jean was born.
After the war, they returned to La Grande where Patricia Lynn was born. John became a pharmacist and started Economy Drug Store in Sweet Home in the late 1940s. Ruth and John operated this business for several decades in Sweet Home where their son, John Michael, and daughter Mary were born.
Ruth was a devoted mother, wife and grandmother. She participated in countless skiing, horse-packing and camping trips with the family and was tireless in making sure everyone practiced the piano.
After retirement, she and John enjoyed traveling with their trailer to Mexico during the winters and in the summer months sailed the waters out of Winchester Bay and north to Canada until John became ill and died in 1987.
Ruth then traveled with friends around the world and had adventures riding camels in Egypt and being escorted by the Turkish militia for protection during unsettled times there. She hiked the north-south distance of New Zealand and visited many other countries.
Golf captured her interest and she enjoyed many good golf days with her friends at the Pineway Golf Club. Ruth belonged to Chapter DD of PEO for over 50 years.
She is survived by her children and their families: Linda Scott in Salem; Pat Blanchard in La Grande, John Blanchard in Bend and Mary Evenson in Vancouver, Wash. She had seven grandchildren and three great- grandchildren
A family celebration of Ruth’s life has been held. Her ashes will be interred next to her husband’s at Gilliland Cemetery.