Anticipating her birthday this past July, West Philadelphia writer Ruth Branning Molloy Ed’30 invited friends to help her celebrate “90 years of uninterrupted living.” The party venue was to be the Woodlands Cemetery, where Joe, her husband of 47 years, is buried. Should she not make it that far, she quipped in her invitation, a memorial service would be held instead. “In any event there will be cake!” It’s a testament to her tenacity that Molloy insisted the party continue when she was unexpectedly hospitalized on the morning of July 23 for heart problems; she later pronounced the event “a great success.”
Perhaps even more impressive is her recent publication of a book of poetry, Finally (Sutter House, 2000). The poems were selected by the author to represent each decade of her life, which began in 1910 (“the year of Halley’s Comet”) in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Molloy graduated from the Philadelphia Girls High School in 1925 and enrolled at Penn, where she was editor-in-chief of the women’s yearbook. Over the decades, Molloy has published articles, short stories, poems and photographs in a variety of magazines, including the Gazette. She has also produced three daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Her poems, writes Philadelphia author and former English department lecturer, Kristin Hunter-Lattany, “range from lyricism to starkness and from exuberance to cynicism, displaying the varied experiences and sharp insights of a long, rich life.”
While Molloy didn’t make it to her party, she managed to return to the cemetery two weeks later to have a video filmed as she read from her book at her husband’s graveside.
