‘Our Linked Lives’ | University of Michigan Heritage Project

Margaret Bourke-White was a frequent visitor to campus through the decades. She supported her sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi, and the Alumnae Council. She spoke at the Michigan League and Hill Auditorium. “I can say that I owe quite a debt to the University of Michigan for two reasons,” she said during one appearance, “because of the invaluable photographic experience I gained from the Michiganensian as an undergraduate here, and because of the fact I studied science.”

In 1962, she was invited to attended a massive 80th birthday dinner for Ruthven, thrown by alumni and friends and staged in the ballroom of the Michigan Union. Bourke-White was unable to attend – she loaned her name to the planning committee – but sent a telegram. Ruthven said it was the “nicest feature” of the evening. He also shared that while the dinner actually took place two months after he turned 80, it fell precisely on Bourke-White’s birthday.

“You will agree, I am sure, that fate seems to have taken a special interest in our lives,” he wrote. “Something must have inspired the alumni to move my birthday to yours. It is one more happening which links our lives.”

The following year, both Ruthven and Bourke-White published autobiographies. Her book, Portrait of Myself, arrived in Ann Arbor just as Ruthven was autographing Naturalist in Two Worlds to send to her in Connecticut.

She enjoyed his memoir. “I knew, of course, that I would, but I was totally unprepared for the account on pages 20 and 21 of the young lady who visited your office and told you she would like to become ‘a news photographer-reporter and a good one.’ And you tell of your advice to her. It has been such a good friendship all these years and I have drawn a lot of strength from it.”

They had continued to compare notes and advice on living with Parkinson’s disease.

“It is my earnest hope that life is not being too rough for you and when I say this, I am sure you realize how much I mean it,” Ruthven wrote.

Bourke-White’s last visit to Ann Arbor came in the fall of 1970, the centennial of the admission of women to U-M. The Museum of Art staged an exhibition of photographs by one of Michigan’s most famous female students. Here was the best of Margaret Bourke-White, displayed within a stone’s throw of the site of one of her earliest darkrooms. (The old University Museum, where she and Ruthven had met, had stood just north of the art museum.) Across campus, the massive Museums Building, built four years after she left U-M as an undergraduate, carried Ruthven’s name.

Her visit was not publicized in advance. By the late 1960s, she could barely walk, had great difficulty speaking and required near-constant assistance. Still, “it was such a joy to be on campus again,” she wrote U-M President Robben W. Fleming.

Bourke-White spent two days in Ann Arbor. We do not know if she met with Ruthven during her visit; her physical disabilities may have been too much of a challenge. He undoubtedly would have welcomed her. He lived in a house along Fuller Road; the nearby stables where he had kept his beloved Morgan horses were gone, sold to make way for a new Ann Arbor high school. And Ruthven was lonely; his wife, Florence, had died two years earlier, and friends felt he was lost without his partner of 60 years.

The ties that so often bound Bourke-White and Ruthven in life also linked them in death. They would die six months apart, in 1971. He was 88, and passed away at home, alone and sitting in front of the television. Her death at 67, brought on by complications from a fall, was reported on the front page of the New York Times. On its editorial page, the Times paid her tribute: “If the photograph record she made was often uncompromising and blunt, it was also sensitive and straightforward. These qualities put her in the top ranks of American photographers.”

For all the years and friendship between them, there is no known photograph of Ruthven and Bourke-White together.

Sources: The Alexander G. Ruthven Papers at the Bentley Historical Library; the Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography by Vicki Goldberg; Portrait of Myself, by Margaret Bourke-White; Alexander Grant Ruthven: Biography of a University President, by Peter E. Van de Water; Naturalist in Two Worlds, by Alexander G. Ruthven; and Margaret Bourke-White: The Early Work, 1922-1930, by Ronald E. Ostman and Harry Littell.