IONS Latest Gift Annuitant Is the Vibrant Ruth Lofgren
Ruth Lofgren, a retired microbiologist whose classes on beneficial bacteria drew crowds at the University of Michigan Medical School in the 1950s and who at age 91 can still deliver a speech that wins a standing ovation, has become IONS latest charitable gift annuitant.
(Gift annuities provide fixed guaranteed payments to donors for life, leaving what remains in the account to benefit IONS at the donor’s death. Because of her age, Ms. Lofgren is receiving payments of 11.3% of the face value of her gift.)
Ms. Lofgren, who holds a PhD in microbiology from the University of Michigan where she taught in the bacteriology department of the medical school, found IONS exploration of the interface of science and spirituality consistent with her convictions. “You get to a place were conscious reasoning reaches its limits,” she said. “You then enter the realm of mystical experiences.”
Ms. Lofgren, whose unhesitating speech and clarity of expression reflects her years at the teacher’s podium, spoke of her life as a university instructor, science teacher to troubled children, environmentalist, world traveler and peace advocate.
“I was very lucky at the University of Michigan,” she said. “A professor asked me to develop a course for liberal arts students on good bacteria, the ones that produce cheese, beer, wine, and fertile soil. The course was fun to teach and very popular.”
When her university teaching career ended with early retirement from City University of New York in the mid-1970s, she took a position teaching science to children with serious emotional problems at a Quaker school in San Antonio, Texas.
The experience lasted about a year-and-a half when special ed funds shifted to the public schools and the Quaker school closed. But she had observed close up the healing power of the natural world on violence-prone students, many of whom lacked parental guidance and some of whom had undiagnosed neurological disorders. She helped children who had expressed their rage by breaking windows, hitting classmates or worse find release in positive interactions with nature.
“When I saw a child on the edge of a fit of violence, I’d send him outside out to gather grasshoppers for the terrarium,” she said. “That would often resolve the problem. We are a part of the natural world. We benefit by interacting with it properly.”
Her belief in the power of positive interactions with nature, which guided her approach to volatile students, led her in retirement to the edge of Mitchell Lake 15 miles from downtown San Antonio and the unhappy recipient of excess treated sewage pumped from San Antonio’s antiquated water treatment plant.
As volunteer Water Chair for the League of Women Voters, she joined the Waste Water Advisory Committee to the San Antonio City Council and over several years monitored the planning and completion in 1987 of a new water treatment plant that has ameliorated Mitchell Lake’s sludge problem. With its adjoining mudflats and wetlands and its position along the Central Flyway, the restored lake is one of the birding hot spots of South Central Texas, with more than 300 water foul and shorebird species recorded there. Ms. Lofgren has recently co-authored a book on the lake’s history--Mitchell Lake Wildlife Refuge: An Illustrated History--with historian Dwight Henderson and illustrator Rita Schimpff.
Over the years she has traveled world-wide, visiting Asia, Central and South America and Western and Eastern Europe. In January San Antonio’s peaceCENTER, an interfaith group working toward peace through prayer and education, named her their first ever “Peace Laureate.” Her acceptance speech won her a standing ovation.
IONS is proud to list Ruth Lofgren as a member of its Visionary Circle for including the organization in her estate plan. For Visionary Circle and gift annuity information contact Kathleen Erickson Freeman at 707-779-8232 or KathleenEricksonFreeman@noetic.org.
