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1911 – 1972
The tie, exactly: Ruth Marguerite McKenney was born November 18, 1911, in Mishawaka, the daughter of John Sidney McKenney, a mechanical engineer, and Marguerite Flynn, a grade-school teacher. The family moved to East Cleveland, Ohio, in 1919, when she was seven: the tie is birth and early childhood only, and no Mishawaka formation is claimed past the age of seven.
The course: McKenney was valedictorian of Shaw High School in East Cleveland, having skipped two grades, and studied journalism at Ohio State from 1928 to 1931 without taking a degree. She worked at the Akron Beacon Journal and the New York Post and edited at New Masses. Her first book, Industrial Valley (1939), covered the Akron rubber strike. The work that carries her name is My Sister Eileen — the New Yorker stories about her life in Greenwich Village with her younger sister, collected as a book in 1938, made a Broadway play in 1940 and a film in 1942, and reworked in 1953 as the musical Wonderful Town. Ten books stand to her name in all, The Loud Red Patrick (1947) among them. Her sister Eileen (born April 3, 1913) married the novelist Nathanael West; Eileen and West were killed together in a car crash near El Centro, California, on December 22, 1940, and McKenney adopted their son. She married the writer Richard Bransten, who wrote as Bruce Minton, in 1937; the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History records that both were expelled from the Communist Party in 1946.
The end: McKenney died in New York City in 1972. The date stands in conflict and is printed in conflict: July 25 is the standard date, carried by the reference record; Case Western Reserve's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History prints July 15, and one compilation prints July 27. The Mishawaka claim on her is seven childhood years; the fame is Cleveland's and New York's, and this section prints the proportions as they stand.
Sources:
- Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, "McKenney, Ruth" (the 1919 move; death printed July 15, 1972 — conflict printed)
- Encyclopedia.com and Wikipedia, "Ruth McKenney," read November 2026 (birth at Mishawaka; the bibliography; death July 25, 1972)