How else to explain her devotion to the program she started from scratch, her Portage for Youth? 

The after-school program is run as a haven for preteen girls by Ruth with more than occasional help from husband Steve and the couple's two adult children, out of one of the two Dayton's Bluff homes the family owns. 

Get to know Ruth, and you'll find yourself getting to know a woman who will do anything for her girls, currently numbering 36. Her devotion to expanding their horizons and letting them learn and have fun is undiminished by even the most pragmatic of all concerns - money. 

This is the sixth year Ruth's Portage has been open in a residential section of Dayton's Bluff, and she's got enough money coming into the program (although she refuses to say exactly how much) to hire professional photographers so the girls can have their own photo exhibit, and professional musicians so her girls can release their own CD. And that's not all. 

There's camping at an old Boy Scout camp up near Brainerd that Ruth and her family spent a summer repairing so the girls could stay and camp: there's also computer classes, karate, creating cards they sell at the local schools, a pending Boundary Waters trip, and Jump-In through 4-H. Some of her girls are even in this year's Winter Carnival junior royalty pageant.

In most cases, because of funding constraints, not every girl can participate in every activity. The photo program, for example, only has seven girls  this year, because there are only seven cameras. To get involved in the program, every girl is interviewed by the photographers for both interest and patience levels. To win involvement in the CD project, the girls had to go through voice auditions with the two singers, Barb With and Deb Brown. 

While some might recall visions of the school playground, where some kids were always the last to get picked, Ruth works hard to make sure that all her kids are involved in as much stuff as possible.

She doesn't coddle the kids and protect them from rejection, however. As she notes, a lot of her kids, even at their young and tender preteen ages, are already used to rejection in their everyday living. "I think they deal with it all the time," says Ruth. "These girls handle rejection very well." 

That's one of the reasons she runs such a program, to let her girls know that rejection happens, but that it doesn't have to be the sum total of their existence. It's possible to work through it, to constantly enjoy new things to do and places to go. 

It's a theme that Ruth herself has lived by. 

An adopted child, Ruth grew up with reasonably well-off parents on St. Paul's West Side, who put her in private schools. At the age of 18, however, she hit the road, explaining the urge to leave as nothing more than typical '60s disillusionment. 

She moved to Las Vegas and had a son, then moved on to Florida, Colorado, Idaho, and Illinois, finally moving back to St. Paul 10 years later. 

She ended up getting a job with City and County Credit Union, holding it for 10 years before becoming a business manager for a local church.  It was through, the church that she started her first kid adventure, helping out with canoe trips for kids "who had never set foot outside of St. Paul," she says. 

She got hooked to the fun she had on those trips, and with a little guidance she said she got from state Rep. Steve Trimble (when she asked her local legislator what the East Side needed, he took no time at all to reply. "He said 'that's easy-we need something for girls,'" Ruth says.) as well as the approval of her husband, she soon quit her job to begin the Portage for Youth, setting up shop in the second house they owned across the street from their live- in home. 

For two years, they lived on his salary while she sought funds for a girls' program. "I wrote 120-some grants, and got 120-some no's," she says. 

It was when the Ruths were down to their last 59 cents that they got their first funding, she says, from United Way. Since then, other private grants have followed, as have funds from the city. 

Her fledgling organization has now steadied somewhat financially, but it is far from being out of danger yet. She still finds herself scrimping and saving wherever she can. To take the karate class, for example, her charges had to agree to give up snacks for a while. 

"We can make a nickel scream, because we can pinch it so hard," she quips. Money-seeking is a never-ending process for Ruth, who recently applied for and won $200,000 in city STAR funds to renovate and reopen the old Mounds Theater at 1029 Hudson Road, with the aim of using it as a theater for her kids and possibly for a Hmong theater troupe. They've also gotten a $100,000 donation from a private citizen, and a donation of the theater's land, worth another $100,000. Which in total, according to Ruth, leaves them only $350,000 in the hole to buy and refurbish the theater. 

The exasperation of fund raising is anything but pleasant for Ruth, but she understands the necessity. It's for the girls, and for her. 

"My daughter said I did this on purpose, so I would still have daughters when she left," says Ruth, laughing.