Ruth Fertel

  b. 1927; d. 2002 | American entrepreneur

At The Bottom

— 1965

A 37-year-old divorced mother of two, living paycheck to paycheck...

Ruth Fertel never expected to be a 37-year-old divorced mother of two, living paycheck to paycheck and wondering how she would ever be able to afford college tuition for her teenage sons.  But that’s where she found herself in 1965.  Fertel was a bright woman who had graduated from Louisiana State University at the age of 19 with a dual major in physics and chemistry.  For two semesters, she taught science at McNeese Junior College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before leaving the work force when she decided to get married in 1948.  When she and her husband parted ways eleven years later, Fertel tried to put her education to good use by accepting a job as a lab technician at Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans.  The income from her job provided enough to get by, but with her ex-husband more or less out of the picture, Fertel needed to think about her sons’ future and realized that her income would not be enough.