"Frankly," he says, in the living room of their ranch house in downtown Gary, "after I got involved with government, I just never slowed down enough to think about marriage. I felt it was going to require a considerable amount of courage, but I always knew we'd do it."
"I didn't," counters Ruthellyn, 34. "I sure got tired of waiting. When he asked me, on Friday night, Aug. 6, 1976, to marry him that Sunday, I said okay and told my mother, 'Well, I guess we'd finally better get it together.' On Saturday my cousin made the wedding cake, and I found a dress on sale, and—well, it couldn't have been nicer."
A lot happened between their meeting—Hatcher spotted her in a church choir and asked his law partner to set up a double date—and their marriage. Hatcher was elected the second black mayor of a big U.S. city (Cleveland's Carl Stokes was first). He landed a quarter-billion dollars plus of federal money to rehabilitate public and private housing, curb lead poisoning and VD, provide day care for children and services for the aging. Of Gary's 186,000 people—two-thirds black—26,000 are still below poverty income levels, but Hatcher has been effective and tough enough to be likened by fellow mayors to the late Richard Daley of Chicago. (Hatcher takes that as a compliment, but jokes, "If I had a machine like he did, some people wouldn't treat me the way they do now.") As Detroit Mayor Coleman Young puts it, "Gary probably reflects the serious problems of all the cities, and Dick has been able to handle them all."
While there were reports that Hatcher rejected the White House job because he was not promised enough access to Carter, the mayor explains, "The last 10 years the people of Gary have shared my dreams. My job is to improve the quality of their life." Black activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, who married the Hatchers, was less diplomatic: "If the President appoints you under political pressure, he can disappoint you under political pressure. There's no one on the President's staff with the credentials to have Hatcher answer to him—he's presidential material himself."
Diminutive Ruthellyn—5'3" and, when not in her current very pregnant state, 117 lbs.—is in Jackson's view "a perfect political wife—a down-to-earth woman who has no foolish expectations of equality of careers." An ex-tomboy from Boonville, Mo., she's the eldest of eight children of a Sears service manager and his wife, a hospital worker. She studied at Lincoln University (with a master's from Roosevelt University in Chicago) and now teaches music at the Williams Elementary School, a middle-class, almost all-black institution in South Gary. (Ruthellyn moved to Gary after a brief early marriage because teachers' salaries were higher there than in Missouri.)
She pushes "Hatch," as she calls him, toward women's concerns. Of 38 new police officers he appointed last year, 23 were women, a break with the past "which Ruth tells me is a vast improvement." His consciousness hasn't been raised enough to persuade him to be with Ruthellyn in the delivery room, however. (The baby is due any day now.) He acknowledges some dismay over all the preparations at Gary Methodist Hospital: "The doctors have actually been debating when pictures should be allowed, how I'll hold the baby, if I can hold the baby."
Hatcher's childhood memories are of cruel poverty. Born in rural Georgia, he was one of 13 or 14 children—"not even my father knows for sure because only seven survived." He grew up in a shantytown called the Patch in Michigan City, Ind. His sharecropper father, Carleton, had moved north to find work in the Pullman Company foundries. "In the winter," Hatcher says, "we'd wake up with snow on our beds from the cracks in the walls." He lost his left eye when another boy accidentally hit him with a rock. "The doctor, he put him in the hospital," Hatcher's father recalls, "but he wouldn't operate until I brought him $75." The mayor now wears a glass eye.
Among his fonder memories of childhood was "junking" with his dad. "When Pullman laid off anybody, it was blacks first, so we went around scrounging with a little pushcart Dad made himself," Hatcher recalls. "I jumped on the scrap cardboard to pack it down."
One result of that early life is that Hatcher always feels cold. ("He likes the thermostat at 80," kids Ruthellyn. "An acquaintance suggested he may have turned down the White House because the President keeps it at 68.") Hatcher has also stayed close to his father, still living in Michigan City at 85. His dad, the proud son points out, learned to read two years ago "so he could recite the Bible at family reunions." It was his father, Hatcher adds, who "got all of us through high school, and coming from where he did I think that's roughly equivalent to being president of GM."
A summer job after high school brought Hatcher his first real encounter with bigotry. ("I was on the football team," he says, "so I was personally never left out.") A restaurant, where he worked as a dishwasher, refused to serve a black couple. "In the first dramatic act of my life, I ripped off my apron and told the man what he could do with his job." But his father talked Richard out of quitting because he needed the money for college—first Indiana University and then Valparaiso University Law School. Once he had his degree, Hatcher returned with three friends to that same restaurant and staged a four-day sit-in until the owner agreed to serve blacks. "Later," Hatcher says, "I got a long letter from him, in effect thanking me."
Hatcher was a general practice lawyer when he met Ruthellyn, and even after he entered political life—as a city councilman—he had no extravagant ambitions. Ruthellyn stayed out of politics until his 1975 mayoralty campaign when, he says, "She read some very unflattering things about me in a newspaper."
Both Hatchers have mixed feelings about turning down Washington. "For the great-grandson of a slave, to be asked to join the staff of a U.S. President—well, that's probably the greatest honor I'll ever receive," he says. "As a person, Jimmy Carter impressed me as few people have. He is a decent man, sensitive, flexible, with good intentions."
"I hate to see my husband limited to Gary," says Ruthellyn. "But I'm a homebody and I'm not comfortable in politics. I feel like I'm sharing Richard with everyone else in this city."
Hatcher is sympathetic. "I'd like her to know enough about politics to keep from becoming bitter or jealous, the way some political wives do," he says. "I want her to understand that when I'm out late or on weekends, I'm working hard. Nothing's going on that shouldn't be."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
