No Regrets

talent to lift herself out of the poverty of her youth. Perhaps, most of all, it was her forte as a consummate actress that helped her get what she wanted. Throughout her life, Ruth was able to be whatever she sensed people wanted her to be—seductive, sweet, cozy and comfy, sharp in business deals, stubborn, controlling, or compliant. And she would always have both her detractors and her supporters, some who declared she was the devil and others who swore she was an angel on earth.
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    Nettie Ruth Myers started her life in the Midwest. She was born on February 8, 1920, in Beardstown, Illinois, about fifty miles northwest of Springfield, a small town in Cass County with just a few thousand residents. It was hard by the Illinois River and the site of the Lincoln Courthouse and Museum, but it wasn’t the kind of town where young people tended to stay. Most of them grew up and moved away to bigger cities where salaries were higher and there was more to do.
    Life itself was a challenge for Nettie Ruth. There were ten children in her family—some born in Ohio and some in Illinois: Mamie, Mary, Robert, Walter, Asa, Paula, Carl, Enoch, Paul, and, finally, Nettie Ruth. Some of them remained in the Ohio and Illinois area, but most moved to places as far-flung as Biloxi, Mississippi, Rockaway, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California.
    One of Ruth’s siblings didn’t live to adulthood. Like most families whose children were born in the early part of the twentieth century, the Myerses lost a baby: Enoch. He died at the age of one year. Another brother simply disappeared. Carl Myers walked away from his family home during World War I.
    “He left home and never came back,” Ruth recalled. “He was just—he just went missing. [They] sent his trunk back and all of his possessions. That was in 1919. We don’t know whether he’s dead.”
    Ruth and her brother Paul were the youngest of the Myers children; she was the youngest girl and he was the last boy to be born. Ruth explained that their positions in the family birth order had made them quite close.
    Ruth left the Midwest for Louisiana and moved in with a man named Morris Daniels when she was in her midteens.She had her first child a year later: Morris Daniels, Jr. Warren “Butch” Daniels was born when she was twenty. Whether she raised her boys from infancy to maturity isn’t known. They were in their twenties by the time Ruth met Rolf in Seattle. It’s quite possible that she had left them behind for their father to raise; as grown men, they still lived in Louisiana while their mother was in Washington State. Still, as adults, her sons—particularly Butch—were steadfast in their allegiance to her and she was in close touch with them.
    Ruth had relatives all over America. Surprisingly, she managed to keep in touch with many of her siblings. She would often say how much she loved her family, and how—as she grew older—she realized the importance of having a family you could count on.
    Unfortunately, when Ruth met Rolf Neslund, her mother was dead. Some members of the Myers family whispered that Ruth was responsible for that.
    Even though her mother lived in Illinois and was elderly, Ruth had managed to write a life insurance policy on her through the Seattle company Ruth worked for. Not too long after, her mother became ill. When Ruth learned that her mother had been hospitalized back in her home state, she rushed to her side. Ruth soon managed to convince her mother’s doctors that she could take much better care of her at home. As it turned out, she could not— or did not. Some of Ruth’s sisters claimed that she deliberately fed their mother the very foods that the doctors had put on her forbidden list. The elderly woman died shortly thereafter.
    “Ruth was the beneficiary of our mother’s insurance,” a relative sniffed in derision. “She collected her money, and when anyone said anything to her about how she gave in toMom’s cravings for sugar and all, Ruth just said, ‘Well, she was going to die anyway. . . .’”
    Her sisters may only have been jealous; Ruth was already a lot better off financially than most of her siblings were.
    Her mother’s insurance payoff wasn’t much of a windfall, but Ruth was very good with money. At the time she met Rolf, she was buying the small house she lived in in Everett, Washington, twenty-six miles north of Seattle. She paid five thousand dollars for her little house. This was in an era in