I grew up visiting my grandmother Sundays with my dad; this effort is a loving tribute to her life and legacy. She would give me a silver dollar for each new prayer I could recite to her. Ruth enjoyed an occasional Salem cigarette while visiting her sisters, "Aunt Josie" and "Aunt Porfie" in San Bernardino. The sisters are said to have had a dress shop in San Francisco in the early 1900's. Dad used to tell that Ruth had a premonition of the 1906 earthquake and left San Francisco just before this happened. Her extended family stretched south to San Diego, allowing her mobility and a measure of freedom, marrying at the unconventional age of thirty-two, passing as twenty-six. Ruth might have been the model for the poster art for Monterey, Lester Boronda's 1909 "Fandango Dancer". He was her first cousin, an only child growing up on the Monterey cattle ranches as she did.

Ruth had a rustic cabin in what is now Thousand Oaks, near a historic zoo. My dad, Frank, would drive her there through Topanga Canyon, a dirt road then, and check on her weekends until she decided to return home. Once while on leave as a B-17 bomber pilot and expert marksman, he teasingly invited her to shoot his 45-caliber service revolver and was astonished at her unflinching sharp shooting. Sent to a rest home after a hospitalization, Ruth simply took the bus back home and lived alone until her death at county general from lobular breast cancer. Ruth was friends with my maternal Aunt Olive, an RN and WWII veteran, living nearby and also a devout Catholic, who provided some care to her. They share a plot at Holy Cross cemetery, with my dad and his older sister Virginia buried nearby with their spouses.

When her mother died just as she turned seventeen, Refugio was left with her younger sisters, Petra and Josie, deferring marriage until later in life. Within a few years, their father had remarried and relocated to a new ranch in Tijuana. The census of 1900 shows the four sisters just across the border in San Diego, perhaps to establish their U.S. citizenship, staying with the Jassuad family, two of whom married her sisters. A 1901 directory shows her boarding at 612 East 2nd Street in downtown Los Angeles. Ruth was in the 1910 census as a 25-year-old cafeteria waitress living and working in the Victorian era Hotel Melrose on West 1st Street, where she met her future husband Frank, an Englishman. He courted her with letters in Spanish, with a poetic flair, while he worked in Arizona as a surveyor. Her early Californio community often saw men from Europe marrying California's native daughters, sometimes the link to land grants their wives could acquire. They wed in 1911, settling in Santa Monica in the home she would have the rest of her life, birthing two children at home. His 1917 draft registration has him self-employed in agriculture, Lankershim location. In the 1920 census, Frank and Ruth Pritchard lived at 2024 Eighth Street which they owned with no mortgage, both 35, with 4-year-old Virginia and infant Frank. He was noted as immigration from England in 1913, naturalized in 1915 and was then a truck chauffeur, perhaps from his days with a horse-drawn milk delivery wagon. The 1930 census has their house as worth $6500; the street had been renamed Lincoln. Frank was a real estate broker, now noted as immigrating in 1909, both 46 years old and owning a radio. Virginia was fourteen and Francisco had just turned eleven. Widowed as the Great Depression was beginning, she struggled with her two children until some investment properties resumed an income for them. The 1940 census shows the house valued at $2000, Ruth now a widow and stating her true age of sixty, with son Frank, 20, working as a mechanic in an airplane factory, earning $560 the year before. Her daughter, son-in-law, Joe, and their children lived with her after Joe came home from war; Joe had lived with her years earlier as a young teen and a friend of her son Frank. She is listed in the 1952 Santa Monica directory as "Ruth B (wid F Henry) h2024 Lincoln blvd ( OP)".
April 1963: A Social Security application listed her as RUTH B PRITCHARD [Ruth B Boronda], born in Salinas, daughter of Francisco Boronda and Maria Y Castro.

In her old age, Grandma seemed to me content and peaceful, self-reliant and free of any impositions, fading in her physical abilities but sharp mentally, with mirth in her smile and joy in her heart, especially for the new babies. Her faith and love, now sixty years later, seem to linger here with her family, always a comfort. God bless you, Grandma. Rest in peace.