Ready for anything

Ruby Ingram learned early in life about the importance of being prepared for anything.

Born Ruby Elsie Hoski on Aug. 1, 1934, at St. Boniface Hospital, she arrived in the world with the so-called Dirty ’30s and the Great Depression in full swing and families struggling to make ends meet. The following decade, the world’s focus shifted from economic survival to the Second World War and its aftermath.

The lessons she learned during those tumultuous times played a key role in defining the person she would become as an adult and helped her deal with every curveball that life threw her way.

“Yeah, I’ll be honest with you, mom was always very well prepared for everything,” her son Rod recalls.

That preparedness was evident even in early childhood.

Ingram lived the first seven years of her life with her parents, Nicholas and Pauline, in the town of Bissett where her dad worked at the local gold mine. They then moved to Hamilton where her dad landed a mining job before moving a year later to Winnipeg where the family put down permanent roots.

While such upheaval might have proven difficult for some kids, it was never an issue for young Ruby.

Ingram spent her teenage years in the city’s North End, where she attended Norquay School and later St. John’s High School. Even though she would eventually move out of the neighbourhood, she never forgot the influence it had on her and always referred to the area with a sense of pride.

“Growing up in the North End wasn’t easy at the time,” Rod says.

“But as you know, there’s been a whole bunch of really important and famous individuals that grew up in the North End who became doctors, lawyers and musicians in Winnipeg. I think that’s why mom was always so proud of being brought up in the North End.”

The North End was also where Ingram fell in love with sports. As a teenager, she excelled in basketball, hockey, bowling and curling, but it was softball that was her real sporting passion.

She took up the sport at the age of 13 when she joined WECO in the Greater Winnipeg Senior Girls Softball League. Soon after she was invited to play with the Elmwood Pats of the Greater Winnipeg Junior Girls Softball League where she earned league MVP honours in her rookie season, an honour she would capture a total of three times in five seasons with the club.

Ingram was then recruited to join the CUAC Blues senior women’s team that became one of the most dominant softball squads ever seen in this province. The CUAC Blues won an astounding 17 consecutive provincial championships and became the first Manitoba team to win a women’s Western Canadian Softball Championship when it did so in 1957. Ingram and the rest of her CUAC Blues teammates were inducted into the Manitoba Softball Hall of Fame in the team category in 2005.

Dot Rose was a pitcher with that western Canadian championship team and became close friends with Ingram, who played first base for the club for three seasons. Rose says what she remembers best about her friend as a ball player was her defensive prowess.

“She played first base and she was a very good one, too. She knew the players (on the other team) and she knew just where to stand when the batter was up. She made a lot of good plays. She saved our bacon a number of times. She was very good defensively. She was always on the ball,” Rose recalls.

Rod says while his mother was proud of her accomplishments on the softball diamond, she was never boastful about them. Perhaps the one thing she was proudest of as an athlete was being part of the CUAC Blues squad (1957-1963) that was inducted into the Softball Hall of Fame, something her son attributes to the fact she was a team player and enjoyed team success over individual accolades.

A series of nagging injuries eventually forced Ingram to walk away from the game — something she was fine with, since it gave her more time to spend with family.

It was through softball that Ingram met her husband Richard. He came out to watch his sister Joan’s team play one day and quickly noticed the attractive first baseman playing for the opposing team. The two were introduced to each other following the game and became inseparable a short time later. They were married in 1963 and remained together until his passing in 1996 at the age of 61.

The same work ethic that set Ingram apart on the softball diamond also distinguished her in the business world.

She began working full-time at the age of 17 as a clerk at a local woodworking company until it was destroyed by fire. She went on to work for several different companies, eventually finding her calling as a comptroller. Amazingly, she never had any formal training in accounting but excelled in the role thanks in part to the fact she was a natural with numbers.

Ingram officially retired from her last employer, Goldin & Co., after 30 years with the company at the age of 75. However, she continued working part-time for another 10 years after that until the COVID-19 pandemic brought her career to a close in 2020.

“I think she just loved to work,” Rod says of his mom’s long career. “It helped keep her mind sharp. She would rarely use a calculator. She was very smart and just naturally good with numbers.”

As important as her work was, there was nothing Ingram cared more about than family.

She would host huge dinners at her East St. Paul home every Christmas and Easter. They became the stuff of legend with friends and family members who were lucky enough to be invited thanks to her out-of-this-world culinary skills.

“Growing up, I was definitely fortunate my mom came from a Ukrainian background,” Rod says of the seemingly limitless supply of perogies and cabbage rolls his mom produced for family gatherings. “We would always have so much food. It was enough for an army.”

Ingram died Oct. 3, 2025, following a brief illness caused by the shingles virus. She was 91.

Rod says what he remembers best about his mom was her unconditional love and support for him including when he told her that he was gay.

“A lot of people say … they have the best mom in the world, but that really was her. She was loving, she was caring. She was my best friend,” he says.

“And she was not only a mother to me, but was a mother to so many of my friends, who she cared about so much, and thought of them as her honorary children.”

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca