Ruth Woodman

Despite her eastern roots, Ruth Cornwall Woodman created one of the great anthologies about the American West. A descendant of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and a Vassar graduate, Woodman was a mother of two and wife to a New York investment banker when she was asked to create a radio show (she was working at the time as a copywriter in an advertising agency). Given the product ties of the sponsor (U.S. Borax) to the remote desert region of the United States, Woodman thought the program should be tied to that area. The sponsor agreed, on one condition--that she travel to the region (the sponsor didn't want stories coming out of the imagination of someone sitting back in New York). Woodman's creation, "Death Valley Days," with its devotion to realistic drama and western character studies, ran on American network radio from 1931 to 1951 and then on television for another two decades. Woodman's trips to the Death Valley region to pick up bits of fact and fiction themselves became legend. On her first trip, Woodman recalled later, she encountered Death Valley Scotty, a man who had built a castle in the desert and rode around in a car that had a machine gun on the front. In her lifetime, Woodman became known as one of the foremost authorities on Death Valley history and folklore. She served as story editor and chief writer of "Death Valley Days" until she retired in 1959, although she still wrote occasional scripts for the series. She died in 1970 at the age of 75 following a brief illness.