At 45th Parallel, we believe every writer has unique and valuable approaches to share with the literary community. Our last reading period connected us with Ruby Juster, a 92-year-old writer living in New York who has made writing a lasting habit. In this interview, Zoë Bossiere talks with Ruby about the wisdom she has acquired from sitting down to write for the past 70 years.

Zoë Bossiere: Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Ruby Juster: It started to dawn on me in junior high school when I had a chance to work on our school newspaper, and the thought blossomed further when I got to high school and chose journalism rather than English, and I managed to work up to editor on the Polaris, our high school paper. So there was no question what I was going to do in college, and the rest of my life.

ZB: In 1945 you moved to New York all alone to pursue a writing career, and then later worked as an editor for a military service magazine. What was it like to be a writer in those places then?

RJ: Well, for me, it was hugely exciting and rewarding. When I got to New York, I managed to get a job as a news feature writer for a news service, and my stories marvelously appeared in my hometown Minneapolis newspaper. After a couple of years, I got a notice from one of my college professors telling me about a job as radio/TV editor for Pathfinder News Magazine in Washington, D.C., and that was my next writing assignment for a couple of years; that ended when two other editors and I were awarded huge salary increases from Union negotiations and the three of us were fired. So, onward and upward.  Back in New York, writing jobs weren’t available so I took other jobs for a while until shortly after World War II ended. I went to Europe on vacation — but, I found a job in Nuremburg, Germany, as one of the editors of Spotlight Magazine, a monthly mag for US Army soldiers still in Europe. Every one of those writing jobs has been challenging and exciting.

ZB: Where do you live now?

RJ: I live in New York City in the West Village. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. New York is alive, vibrant. It can be a horrid mess with traffic, people, construction work, but I don’t care. I was born and raised in Minneapolis, and after college, I knew I wanted to get to New York City and be a writer. So from Minnesota, my mother and I drove to the West Coast so that she could live near my sister and her family. I stayed a few days, then boarded a plane. That was in 1945. Would you believe it took us 24 hours to get from California to New York on the plane? We had to stop every few hours to get gas. And that’s where I’ve been ever since — with a couple of interruptions for writing jobs in other cities — a few years in Washington DC, and a few in Nuremburg, Germany.

ZB: The title of one of your pieces, “You’re Never Too Old,” seems to be your motto. You write about adopting a daughter with your partner at the age of 71, delighting in your first grandchild at 86, and now writing consistently everyday. What can you tell us about this philosophy that one is “never too old”?

RJ: There are difficulties getting old — physically and mentally. I have no teeth of my own, some arthritis in my knee, my memory is disastrous. But you know what? When I talk to younger people, they have problems too. So I don’t focus on my age. Every day is something new, and I don’t want to miss any of it. Forget the numbers; focus on the rewards.

ZB: What are some of your hobbies, aside from writing?

RJ: Well, my main daily physical activity is walking my dog. And it really is a blessing, because if it weren’t for her, I probably wouldn’t get off my butt and move about to keep my body in motion. We do it four times a day  — in the morning at 8 am, at noon, at 1:30, and in the evening at 6 pm.  Our last walk is in the night at 11pm and it’s goodnight to the city, a city that is bustling with activity at any hour. Other than that, I spend a lot of time on the computer — including playing games.  And I spend a lot of time trying to solicit my writing to good people like you. There weren’t any computers when I started my career as a writer.

ZB: You still set aside daily time to write, even at 92 years old. What does your writing routine consist of?

RJ: It’s not so much a routine as a do-whatever-I-feel-like.  My daily walks with the dog generate thoughts and I can pursue those when we get home. To tell you the truth, these days I’m more involved with soliciting what I have written over the past 70 years than I am over creating new writing. Though now and then I get an idea and write about it — like recently I wrote a “Walking Tour of the West Village” just because I love walking in the West Village.

ZB: What advice do you have for young writers, or those starting to write?

RJ: Observe, react, write. Keep an open mind to what’s happening in your life. Let your mind roam freely, and if something catches your eye or your mind, write it down. And don’t give up, no matter how frustrated you may become when nothing seems to be happening.

Below is a short essay by Ruby Juster, titled “The Night of the Explosion”

We never quite got used to the explosions that occasionally emanated from our basement — maybe once or twice a year between spring and fall when Dad made root beer. Not that we didn’t know they were coming.

Those were the days in the 1930s before Hires bottled their own and only made and sold the extract for home brewing. Dad was not a died-in-the-wool root beer fan. He was an expert at it, but his heart was in wine making, and it was only at the insistence of my sister and me — who were still connoisseurs of milk, not wine — that Dad would consent to brew a batch, which to this day I contend was far superior to any product Hires ever bottled since.

Yeast was one of the main ingredients, and it was tricky. Through no fault of my father’s, the mixture could build up quite an explosive power once the whole concoction was capped into the bottle. The bottles were initially stored in mother’s “vegetable room,” which contained shelves full of canned vegetables, while the mixture inside the soda bottles performed, it always seemed to me, some sort of magic that turned them into root beer.

This was the critical period that lasted some two weeks or so and during which we sat on tenterhooks, with fingers crossed. When the explosions occurred, they always seemed to pick the quiet of the early evening when the whole neighborhood was settled around the dinner table. When a bottle did burst, Dad was first to react. He was a heavy-set man, but extremely light on his feet.

“There it goes,” he said and started toward the basement door.

Mother put a restraining hand on his arm.  “Wait a minute.”  And we waited because one explosion sometimes set off another, a sort of pre-atomic chain reaction. After five minutes, it seemed safe enough so we trooped downstairs in usual file, with me second behind Dad (I really wanted to be first, but there was something lacking in my bravado). Then Mom, and last my sister trailing a little distance behind since she never found the excitement that I did in the explosion of a bottle.

We circled down the stair, and Dad gingerly opened the slat door of the vegetable room to survey the damage; it was only one bottle gone to splinters, but there were some dampened vegetable can labels and fragments of glass here and there. Mom began picking pieces of glass off the shelves.

“For the last time,” she said, “will you please put these bottles somewhere else? It’s going to take days to clean up this mess of broken glass! What’s the matter with the wine cellar?”

Dad was quick to temper, and I thought it was rather undiplomatic of Mother to make such a suggestion. Dad stood for a moment with his brows pulled menacingly together, and stomped out of the vegetable room. He walked over to the wine cellar and had a little trouble getting the lock undone on the cellar door. Mom continued to pick glass from the shelves. The vegetable room was her domain, its shelves weighted down with cans ranging from no. 2’s to no. 10’s of fruits, vegetables, meats, fish — not always conveniently labeled. Sometimes we had to take pot luck on a can, one of those that came in without labels and were sold in gross lots  at bargain by the railroads when a shipment arrived damaged. I remember in particular one lot of the giant no. 10’s — they all contained turnips and none of us liked turnips. The vegetable room also contained huge crocks — full or empty — used by Dad for making sauerkraut and corned beet. Then there were old magazines, discarded toys and the general oddments of household debris.

Plus the root beer.

Mother slowly — and it seemed a little too nonchalantly — followed Dad into the wine cellar, which was his domain and contained about ten 55 gallon barrels of aging wine, plus a few jugs of very potent cherry brandy.

“And where would you suggest putting the root beer?” Dad asked after surveying the hoop-to-hoop arrangement of the barrels. The wine cellar was the newest addition to our basement although its appearance had all the earmarks of a medieval winery. When the house was originally built, the basement had extended only up to the wine cellar, which lay under the front porch. The basement was not too large. One corner was a general tool and storage center. The opposite corner was totally occupied by the oil storage tank for the furnace. Wash tubs, washing machine and stove primarily used for baking eggplants lined one wall, and the rest of the space was just about big enough to get around in. When wine storage became a problem, Dad had a doorway knocked out of the wall and had the dirt scooped out of the foundation under the porch. The dirt floor was often muddy from seepage of rain and snow, and the foundation walls were always damp, none of which mattered to the aging wine.

“Can you see any place to put root beer bottles?” Dad asked though tight lips.

“How about there and there?”  Mother pointed under the wooden pedestals that lifted the barrels off the dirt floor.

“And have one of those damn things explode under a barrel?  Do you know what would happen to the wine?”  Dad was pretty explosive at this point, thinking of the delicate vintage sealed in the barrels.

Mother turned a firm eye on him and said quietly, “I don’t care what happens to your wine” and walked out and up the stairs to the kitchen.

I started after her, but suddenly feeling that I might be accused of taking sides, I began rummaging through a pile of old books and pulled out one, something about Mongolian tribes. It was musty and made my nose hurt and my eyes itch, but I waited until Dad came out of the cellar. He had trouble, as he always did, in closing the door, because the bottom needed planning where it scraped along the concrete floor of the basement. But he managed to close it gently, slipping the padlock into place almost noiselessly. I didn’t want to appear to be on his side either, so I waited another five minutes before going upstairs. Dad sat scrunched behind the newspaper. Billows of cigar smoke bloomed from behind the paper. From the noise that came from the kitchen, mother must have been injecting a new vigor in her dishwashing. My sister was upstairs doing I don’t know what. I quietly slipped out of the house and went looking for some kids to play kick-the-can.