Finding Dr. Ruth

Dr. Ruth hated dirty jokes.

Intercepted with an off-color wisecrack, she would raise her four-feet-seven-inch frame as high as she could, point across the room, and in her distinctive high-pitched voice that was often imitated, she would curtly dismiss the joke-teller.

"Go tell it to the person over there. I don't want to hear it," rebuked the world's most popular sex and relationship therapist who felt that these remarks demeaned her profession and her audience.

When the charcoal four-door Mercedes pulled up in front of an orange brick building in upper Manhattan several years ago, its tiny passenger peered through her prescription eyeglasses and quite out of character, stared for a long time and offered no advice.

She looked over the six-story tenement engraved with Lorraine Court over the entranceway, and its cement brick dating the building to 1930. Pigeons nested on windowsills of apartments on a street named after a physician who introduced the smallpox vaccine to the United States. The outside of the building hadn't changed much since she lived there in the late 1950s.

She was Ruth Karola Siegel back then, settling into her first apartment in a German-Jewish enclave stretching from Washington Heights through Fort George and then Inwood. Names on building mailboxes included Zacks, Kissinger, Hess, Kirchheimer, Bernstein.The mailman delivered postcards and bills to Farrells, O'Reillys and Fitzgeralds and a scattering of immigrants from China and Cuba.

On Saturdays, after religious services had ended, she walked with other German Jews through Fort Tryon Park, with her husband, daughter, and later, two children, then grandchildren, neighbors and visitors through winding tree lined paths overlooking the Hudson River. In her later years, she visited her tulips, a bench named in honor of her third husband and a garden filled with heather. She never lived far away from that park.

Dyckman Street, Broadway and 207th Street were lined with German bakeries that sold babka and fresh onion rolls. Irish bars served men returning from a shift with the New York City Police Department. Inwood's social life included two movie theaters, sit-down Chinese restaurants, two bowling alleys and diners that served coffee in thick ceramic cups.

Ruth Siegel picked up notions at Woolworth's while women sat under hair dryers the size of jet engines at beauty salons. Gamblers placed bets at the Off Track Betting on Broadway, hoping for their horse to win. Candy stores sold newspapers, magazines, and well, candy. A telephone was a luxury to many, including Ruth Siegel, but she did have one. LOrain7-9585 was listed first under her husband's name and later under her name. Women were encouraged to marry, have large families and be a "happy homemaker." Sex was a taboo subject and simply not discussed.

A first apartment marks moving from one life to another, of independence, of starting over. For Ruth Siegel, her one-bedroom apartment overlooking Seaman Avenue became a catalyst for becoming Dr. Ruth Westheimer and she never forgot that.

Her childhood ended at the age of 10. The daughter of Orthodox Jews living in Frankfurt, Germany, Ruth Siegel's parents sent her on a train to an orphanage in Switzerland in 1938 for safekeeping from the Nazis. Her six-month stay turned into six years of laundry and ironing for the privileged Swiss children who lived there. Then, letters from her parents stopped arriving. She never saw them again.

At 17, Ruth Siegel moved to Israel (then Palestine), picked tomatoes and olives on a kibbutz, and joined Haganah (now known as the Israel Defense Forces). She trained to be a sniper, although a tiny target herself, and loaded an automatic rifle, blindfolded, in a minute but never had to use it. She married, moved to Paris where her husband attended medical school, and studied psychology at the Sorbonne. She and her husband divorced when he wanted to return to Israel and she didn't.

Ruth Siegel, who had switched her middle and first names, emigrated to New York City in 1956 with her boyfriend, Serge "Dan" Bommer. Pregnant with her first child, she arrived with a suitcase containing a blue and white washcloth embroidered with her initials from her home in Germany, a few black and white photographs of her relatives, and the letters her parents mailed her. She and Bommer rented a room on Cabrini Boulevard and married.

Knowing that it was better to be single and happy than married and not, they divorced in Mexico in 1958. Ruth Siegel was 30, a single mother, twice divorced, an extraordinary testament to her strength and resilience at a time when raising a child without a husband was considered scandalous, undesirable and perilous to any thought of having a career. But her apartment was her anchor. She knew what it was like not to have a home and knew that the security and stability of an apartment for herself and her daughter was one of the most important things in the world. And then she got to work.

She walked through the lobby of her building with its sparkling brass banisters and checkerboard ceramic tiles to her work as a maid for 75 cents an hour. Her neighbors within the 54 apartments were German Jewish and a few Irish families who stored tomatoes and onions in metal bins inserted into kitchen walls.

She learned English from romance and true confessions magazines and ate a lot of eggs and sandwiches. Bicycles were stored in the basement. Ruth Siegel sat on wicker seats and under overhead fans on the A train to attend classes for her master's degree in sociology, (class of 1959) at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, at least an hour's ride downtown on the subway. Friday evenings were designated for entertainment. Although she hadn't much furniture, she invited friends who arrived with platters of food, potato chips, beverages and records to play on her phonograph.

She borrowed from philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" — "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Although her private moments were just that — private — her accomplishments are an extraordinary record of fortitude.

As she was slowly becoming Dr. Ruth, six blocks east in a public housing complex called the Dyckman Houses, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, was just starting out, too. He was six feet tall at 11 years old in 1958, already making his moves on the local courts before perfecting his skyhook as a Hall of Fame center with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers.

She and Fred Westheimer married in 1961, moving to Bogardus Place and then to a three-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights where she lived for over 50 years. She was officially a doctor at 42 after earning a doctorate in Family-Life Studies from Columbia University's Teachers College and then trained as a sex therapist.

She never left the neighborhood.

At 52, Ruth Westheimer became an overnight success in 1980 with a radio show called "Sexually Speaking." She followed the wisdom of the Talmud: "A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained." There was no such thing as a silly question.

Then there was the "Dr. Ruth Show" and "Ask Dr. Ruth" on television. Her more than 40 books transcend generations. Bookstores carried "Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex," "Dr. Ruth's Guide to Erotic and Sensuous Pleasures" and "Dr. Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex." She branched into books for teenagers and children: "Dr. Ruth's Guide to College Life: The Savvy Student's Handbook" and "Dr. Ruth: Grandma on Wheels." She loved music so she wrote "Musically Speaking: A Life through Song." Her books were translated into 17 languages.

She appeared in movies, in commercials for shampoo and typewriters, as a board game, as a play. She was nominated for a Grammy award in 2002 for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, for "Timeless Tales and Music of Our Time." Her autobiography points out her first apartment and a documentary shows her standing in front of the building. She was everywhere, her warmth and humor inexhaustible.

And at the age of 94, she appeared in commercials for Whipshots, a vodka-infused whipped cream by rapper Cardi B with tips for spicing up Valentine's Day. Dr. Ruth reminded viewers if they're thinking of having a sexual threesome, to use a plastic doll as a tryout. "Inflate him or her and use it as part of the sexual encounter," she says. "See what that does. If you don't like it, don't ever try it again."

When she spoke of sex and relationships, she included people with disabilities. She embraced HIV positive people and people living with AIDS at a time when they were shunned and reminded people that geriatric sex was still happening. She made it possible to use the words penis and vagina without embarrassment. By bringing the joys of sex out into the open, the frank conversations on "Sex and the City" and the New York Times evaluation of vibrators may well not exist.

To family and close friends, she was Ruth, mommy and omi, a German word for grandmother. She would hold their hand while in conversation, making a connection reflecting back, perhaps, to the time when she was a child without the touch of her own parents.

The whirlwind of her life was filled with birthday parties, concerts and meetings at the local YM & and YWHA, where she served on the board of directors from 1969 until her death on July 12, 2024, and as president from 1992 to 2003.

Dr. Ruth would telephone The Y's CEO and her confidante Martin Englisher several times a day. In her distinctive German accented high pitched voice,  she summoned him for lunch, always with mashed potatoes.

"Mar-tin Englisher!," she commanded. "Let's go for a drive around the neighborhood. Let's talk. Let's talk as we go '' as he attempted to keep up with her schedule of luncheons, dinners and speaking engagements.

"Whenever we went to lunch, she would say she wanted to sit in the middle of the restaurant," Englisher said in his office on Nagle Avenue, filled with copies of her books and albums of photographs of her taken at the Y. "I said, 'Couldn't we sit in the corner where people won't come over?' She said, 'No, I want people to come over.' And I said, 'Yeah, but I don't really want people to come over.' She said, 'Too bad.'"

He laughed. "She loved that attention."

Englisher was the one who drove her back to her first apartment as she surveyed the building and perhaps her life through the car window.

"She never complained that things were not good," he recalled. "She was always positive. She adapted to a world as she became more famous, more accomplished and more everything than anyone could imagine. And it wasn't because anyone gave her anything. She went after it."

But Dr. Ruth also knew the loneliness of returning home alone from an evening out, a floral centerpiece from the dinner table in hand, turning the key in the lock and opening the door to darkness and the sound of a refrigerator humming and a tugboat horn blaring in the fog off the Hudson River.

She was still writing up until her death at her home in Washington Heights. "The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life" comes out this fall. In her introduction, Dr. Ruth writes: "And it's why at age 96 I couldn't sit idly by when so many are suffering. If you've sunken into the swamp of loneliness, you may feel like it's impossible to get out. Take my hand. Let me pull you out of the muck."

She pulled people out of the muck during COVID by instituting daily check-ins. Her routine involved Erik Ochsner, 53, a conductor and music director with the Sonos Chamber Orchestra, who has lived in the building since 2000 with his partner. Dr. Ruth, who knew the names of neighbors, doormen and the exterminator, met Ochsner in one of the building's elevators not long after he moved in. She, of course, was impossible to miss.

"She just looked up at me and said, 'Who are you? You're new,'" Ochsner said. "That's the way she dealt with people. She would just ask people questions, and there was no BS or anything like that."

In person check-ins were mandated twice a day.

"I would check in with her at 11 am. And that was just a brief check," Ochsner said. After a few minutes of conversation, she would order him back home. "'You have to go back to work. Go upstairs. Dismissed.'"

At 4 pm, he would step away from his computer and knock on her apartment door. Chats on her sofa turned into walks through Fort Tryon Park.

"It turned into pushes on the wheelchair. We would go out for coffee. We would go out for cake. We would talk about anything under the sun," Ochsner said.

But their friendship did not include advice.  

"She knew that I'm gay," Ochsner said. "She asked, 'Are you married? And I said, 'No.' And she said, 'Why not? I pointed up to my floor. You can go ask him.'"

"No, no," Dr. Ruth protested. "'As a therapist, my job is to solve problems, not create them.' "

Ochsner accompanied Dr. Ruth to concerts and sometimes, she went upstairs and listened to his musical compositions on his living room piano. When cataract surgery diminished her vision, Ochsner would help her around the house.

They often stopped at a local bakery where she would order French pastries cut in half and filled with strawberries and whipped cream. He would carry the other half home for her. And when they returned to her apartment, Ochsner would place her tiny, tan sheepskin slippers onto her tiny pedicured feet.

Ochsner felt her deep need for a connection.

"I think as an older widow, she missed human contact," he said. "She loved to just hold people's hands. That contact was very important for her. And even until the last few days," he said quietly. "I would hold her hand, and I got a strong squeeze. And I was like, 'Whoa, where did that come from?' She was already very weak at the end, but that grip was still strong."

Twice a day every day for over three years of spending time with Dr. Ruth leaves Ochsner wondering what to do with his free time. He'll miss the phone ring, her unmistakable voice and her giggle.

"There's a hole in my calendar right now. I loved spending time with her," he said. "Sometimes I would come home and realize 'oh my God, I just spent two hours with Dr. Ruth!' So that was a wonderful gift to me. She would always say, 'thank you for coming on our walk.' It was good for me, too. I got out of the house. The relationship worked both ways. It wasn't just me looking after her or checking in on her."

Ochsner accompanied Dr. Ruth through Fort Tryon Park where the local Medieval Festival takes place almost every year and where most joggers move swiftly through the uphill and downhill paths. She helped ensure that the park was cared for the way that she remembered it after it became grimy and dingy in the 1990s. She couldn't bear to see it that way.

Dr. Ruth could have written out a check to help maintain the grounds. But that wasn't how she operated. She accepted a challenge to serve on the board of the Fort Tryon Park Trust, a conservancy which restored the Heather Garden front of the bench she dedicated to her husband, Fred, who died in 1997, and the paths and greenery of the entire park.

"She wanted to share that beauty with everyone. She was a tireless booster for Fort Tryon Park," recalled Jennifer Hoppa, then the Northern Manhattan Parks Administrator. "Whatever she did, she poured her whole self into it," Hoppa said. "She really was small but mighty."

Even more so than Dr. Ruth's attendance at meetings and events, Hoppa remembers her kindness.

"We'd encounter park staff and she'd always roll down the window and say, 'you are doing a wonderful job'," she said. "She wanted to make the world a better place."

In a city that is always replacing itself, Dr. Ruth's first apartment building has changed with the times. It's been home to other single women with children, including Chrissy Flickner, 57, who has lived in the building for 50 years, and remembers the Italian, Irish, and Vietnamese families who lived across from the doctor's offices. Patients used to wait on thick iron chairs and benches in the lobby. Dr. Ruth raised her daughter in her one-bedroom apartment facing the front, but the exact apartment number has not yet been located in public records, telephone directories, and calls to the landlord's office.

But at Lorraine Court, the building with the lion and two ducks on top of the house number, a few of us still remember the older women who outlived their husbands. Irma Sinsheimer, the wife of a handbag salesman, and her twin sister, wore beige from head to toe from their hair color, smart skirt suits, shoes and matching pocketbooks.

Susan Ward lived on the fourth floor, sat outside of the building and banged on your door demanding in a voice husky from too many cigarettes why she didn't see your lights on. Later, there was Joy Miller, long retired as a reporter with the Associated Press, who lived on the third floor and set out cans of cat food under mailboxes for strays. Another neighbor still does that today.

A few residents were recently told that Dr. Ruth once lived in their building.

"That's amazing," said one woman, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic whose first job was working in a factory. Dr. Ruth, she said, died on her birthday.

"I loved the way she approached human sexuality in an easy to understand and not judgmental way," she said. "She was remarkable. I learned English by watching her program."

Whatever apartment Dr. Ruth lived in, the only original items are likely to be the bathtub, glass doorknobs, a vintage etched bathroom mirror dating back to 1930 and the wall bin for potatoes and onions. Today, the brass banisters in the lobby are still somewhat shiny, the floors not as sparkling and the cement walkway cracked. But it is home.

The A train is still running with air conditioning, most of the time. Babka, onion rolls and black and white cookies are no longer to be found in bakeries in Inwood. Instead, strong Dominican coffee, flan and sweet cakes are sold. Candy stores have been replaced by illegal smoke shops. The Alpine movie theater on Dyckman Street is now a McDonald's. Only two Irish bars remain and one coffee shop. Kosher foods in the supermarkets are scarce, replaced by plant-based foods and Goya products. Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, and other languages are spoken but rarely German. The pigeons are still here.

In the apartment building today, neighbors range in age from a few months to about 80, a mixture of families, couples, dogs and cats, single men and women. Some are just starting out, others are starting over. A mix of many different peoples.

Julio Núñez, 66, semi-retired from his work as an interpreter for the New York State court system, blushed when asked if he had ever listened to Dr. Ruth.

"Now and again," he admitted. "I think I might have a couple of her books in my collection. But not ones that I've purchased. Someone may have donated."

This was his first time hearing that Dr. Ruth lived in our building.

"I feel so proud," he said. "Hers is a classic immigrant story. Now we have all these Dominicans in this building and others whose children have moved on into mainstream America."

Arlene Schulman is a writer, photographer and filmmaker living in Manhattan. She is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed "The Prizefighters: An Intimate Look at Champions and Contenders" and "23rd Precinct: The Job." Visit her at www.arlenesscratchpaper.com She's also on Instagram: @arlenesbodega Read More