She grew up on-the-go during Great Depression

Ruth Byrn has been, at various times in her life, a social worker, a nonprofit administrator, an author and an artist, and her time as a nature observer in her home state is underway.

She started life in a boardinghouse, owned by her grandmother, at the corner of Third and Arch streets Little Rock.

“I drive by there and it’s a shock to me every time because it’s all commercial now,” she says.

She doesn’t remember details about people she met in those early years, but the impressions have stayed with her. “Fourth and Victory,” a novel she wrote based on her experiences, was published in 2021.

“It occurred to me that the basis of that would make a good story,” Byrn says. “I made a ton of composite characters out of the real characters and made a story out of it.”

Byrn was 3 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. “People refer to it as the last of the Great Depression, but here in Arkansas it was still the Great Depression,” she says. “Nobody we knew had any money.”

Her mother worked at the lunch counter in Walgreens. Her father helped his mother in the boardinghouse until he entered the military.

“My mother and I followed him around the country while he did his military training,” she says. “Thousands of women followed the men around so that they could be with them as long as they could before they were deployed to the war.”

She remembers traveling on trains packed with soldiers and sailors.

“I even remember the seats on the train,” she says, explaining that the rough upholstery scratched the backs of her legs.

They lived for a time in an Alabama chicken house that had been renovated for military family housing and cold air wafted into their

quarters through gaps between wooden floor slats.

“I was in eight different schools before I got to the third grade,” she says.

When she came home in tears because she had missed learning to write in cursive like her peers, her father solved the problem by showing her how to connect her letters.

After her father was sent overseas, she and her mother stayed in Washington, D.C., near her mother’s family. Her mother did clerical work for the federal government.

Byrn’s aunt took her downtown when the war was over.

“There were people in the streets celebrating. I can remember that, people just being so jubilant,” she says.

Following the war, Byrn and her parents returned to Little Rock, where Byrn attended Eastside Junior High School and Mount St. Mary Academy.

She completed a master’s degree in sociology, with a minor in psychology, through night classes over several years at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — working day jobs as a secretary and later as a surgical assistant.

While working for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, Byrn penned a grant application to the YWCA of the USA to create a breast cancer prevention and awareness program.

“When the program was funded, they needed someone to operate the program, and so I agreed to do that,” she says.

She ran the nonprofit organization Encore for Women’s Health for about 20 years, helping low-income women access breast health care.

“It was probably one of the most worthwhile things, in my opinion, that I’ve ever done,” she says.

She is as fascinated by animals as she is by people.

“My parents weren’t keen on animals and I didn’t have dogs until I got out on my own. I’ve had them ever thereafter,” she says, “because I just love dogs.”

She has three, though her pack has been larger in the past, she says, because of “simply not being able to shut the door.”

Byrn, 83, was 60 years old when she began to draw and paint.

“Someone told me the basic fact that you learn to draw the same way you learn to do anything. You learn how to do it and then you do it and keep practicing, that drawing is like playing the piano or playing tennis or anything else,” she says. “That was news to me. I thought you were either born knowing how to draw and do art or you weren’t.”

She got some books and started creating, using her hand as her first “model.”

She moved on to more mobile subjects, including beloved pets, people and places.

“I took up watercolors based on them being controllable materials that don’t cost too much and you can use them if your space is limited,” she says.

She has since tried other mediums, including pastels, oils and acrylics.

“Central Arkansas is full of really good artists, and the learning opportunities here are many and varied and I found myself in a very fertile field for learning about art,” she says.

Byrn has created a website enchantedhabitat.com focused on Arkansas’ natural areas.

“I have tried to do some things there to express my love and appreciation for this is sort of my homeland,” she says. “I’ve lived here all my life and loved it all my life. Central Arkansas is a very special place.”

(Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Ruth Byrn) Ruth Byrn started drawing and painting when she was 60, after realizing that the skills she needed to do that could be learned and honed, they didn't have to be innate. “That was a revelation for me,” she says. She started out with watercolors, using that medium to create images like this one of the sun setting over the Potomac River.

(Special to the Democrat-Gazette) Ruth Byrn has called Little Rock home for most of her life. At 83, she has led a nonprofit organization that helped low-income women get access to lowcost breast health care, written a book and learned to create art based on the people, pets and nature she sees in her native state.

(Special to the Democrat-Gazette) Ruth Byrn has come to appreciate the nature in the Natural State more and more as years pass and has sketched, painted and written on that topic. “It’s almost a universal childhood experience of being outdoors and standing in a creek and seeing the tadpoles and tiny little lobster-like creatures at my feet,” she says. “It’s a beautiful place we live in.”