Colin Ruthven

From teen grifter to Marine aviator to artist to Zen master, this Local Treasure can tell tales and listen better than anybody.

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Editor's Note: "Local Treasures” is an occasional series that celebrates our city’s senior celebrities, people whose impact over the decades has helped make Memphis a better place.

To know Colin Ruthven is to risk being uncomfortable. Not initially, as he is thoughtful, witty, personable, and a splendid conversationalist who carefully pays attention as you speak. In due time, however, you realize he listens so well that he’s seeing right through you. Best to curb your pretensions.

Ruthven’s atypical life’s journey has allowed him to develop a rare insight into individuals, institutions, and systems. It may be that both sides of his brain run at top efficiency. At any given moment his synapses find concord with both logic and intuition; he juggles linear thinking and daydreaming, and is effortless with facts and fluent in the arts.

To oversimplify his bio, he came out of a rough childhood in Canada running on low esteem and hoping to escape into the Marines. He hadn’t finished high school but found that he was something of a whiz at flying, becoming a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, running sorties and fighting demons. After that, he parlayed his affinity for drawing into doing advertising work in Memphis and was hired on as an artist at The Commercial Appeal. He was at the newspaper for 16 years as an illustrator, winning awards and running the art department. Since then, his art has evolved from feature concepts and portraits for the newspaper into mostly abstract paintings. At 84, he continues to hatch new works.

But that’s the pencil sketch. It is the details in his life that provide the fascination.

To really get to know Ruthven, begin with his recent book, Enders, a coming-of-age memoir with insightful looks at those he knew in his first 19 years. Had you the opportunity back then, you would not have bet the street kid who sometimes worked in logging camps or on the railroad would last long or amount to much. But hear him talk today and appreciate the change. An acute observer, he can discourse on Buddhist thought, artistic motivations, human foibles, cats, philosophies, and how things work, or fail to work. Most of which, you realize, are essential qualities for both pilots and artists.

But back in the early 1950s, he was a teen busy running away from his miserable life that was on a downslide and had come to a point that often sent a lot of boys into the military: He’d gotten a girl pregnant. Well, no — decades later he found out he hadn’t, but as he put it: “There was no DNA testing or anything like that. It’s the time when jobs were crashing. I was living on the street and in a basement room with a bunch of thugs and I was trying to be a con man. I was orchestrating my whole career around this grifting that was going on in Vancouver. I just fell apart.” So he got out of town as far as he could go.

Thank “pattern analysis” for giving him a clue. Ruthven was tested when he went into the Marine Corps, and scored well enough in that category to qualify for flight school as a cadet. “‘Would you like to fly?’ they asked me, and I said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ And I’d never flown except once when I’d gotten airsick.” He could barely even drive, but he was motivated. “It was an opportunity to get away from what I was,” he says, “which was a private first class in the Marine Corps that did not want to clean that rifle.”

His mother was a mystic and taught him well. She said, “Keep an open mind to all things and don’t disbelieve anything but don’t be too naive. Believe in the essence of man, but learn how to read them and who to let into your home and who not to.”

And he turned out to be pretty terrific as a jet jockey. “It was the damnedest thing, and it was just natural to me that I could fly well,” he says. He would stick around for 20 years, although for 10 of those years he risked it all. “I was as alcoholic as hell,” says the man who his fellow pilots called “The Animal.” “I got myself in a lot of trouble and I was about to be cashiered when I got sober in 1964.” Ruthven was a flight instructor in the Naval Air Advanced Training Command. “We were the last squadron a guy got in before we give them their wings,” he says. “Part air combat maneuvering and weapons delivery. I got sober in that squadron and three months later, March 1965, the Marine Corps goes into Da Nang.”

Ruthven was cutting it fine. They needed experienced pilots in Vietnam although they weren’t thrilled about one with a history as a drunk and a flight violation to boot. Headquarters told him he was going to have to show he could do it, so they made him officer in charge of 17 Marines on a tank landing ship (LST) that would take them from California to Japan. “They said, ‘If you can pull that off, you’re going to be okay.’” It took 38 days, and when he arrived they told him he was up for major. He made it through that tour and later another, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

He’s been sober now for 55 consecutive years. Ruthven is forthright about how 12-step programs have helped him, and he’s made it a part of his life to be there as a sponsor or even just to lend an ear when needed. Those who seek his counsel find his empathy is strong and his knowledge is broad, nurtured in no small part by his mother, who he says was a mystic and taught him well. “She said to keep an open mind to all things and don’t disbelieve anything but don’t be too naive. Believe in the essential goodness of man, but learn how to read them and who to let into your home and who not to.” As a young Marine, he was further guided by the older, wiser servicemen in his circle: “These Second World War veterans were just sparkling novas trying to guide me, trying to scare me.”

And when he found sobriety — it was December 1, 1964 — it came with an epiphany. “I dove into the spiritual realm,” he says. “They talk about acquiring a God of your own understanding and bringing that to the thing and that’s the thing that’s going to help you. The whole trick is how do you release yourself to that?” Ruthven began reading from Krishnamurti to Christmas Humphreys, nurturing his faith and his knowledge of thinking. It has been a journey of inquiry ever since.

Between his two tours in Vietnam, he was stationed in Millington and connected with people in the advertising business who knew of his artistic gifts. He did freelance jobs, including some cartooning for Pidgeon-Thomas Iron Company. As Ruthven tells it: “In the meantime, I’d been married twice. Wife number two does a number on me. I fall in love with wife number three who has five children and she’s destitute and I say, ‘This is perfect.’ And I bring them to Memphis because I know this guy’s got me a job. Halfway here he gets drunk, loses his job, loses my job.”

But work came now and again with small house agencies. One day, Ruthven looked in The Commercial Appeal and saw an ad seeking an artist to work at the newspaper. “I just knew I was going to get the job,” he says. “I took my portfolio although it had nothing in it. The secretary to the editor, Mike Grehl, took it in with my résumé. I waited and figured I’d be asked to leave.” But Grehl came out and took him into the newsroom and pointed to the giant window where the art department was located. Nothing was happening. Ruthven remembers: “Grehl says, ‘I’m going to put you in that department over there. You’re a retired lieutenant colonel. I was a staff sergeant in the Air Force. I don’t care if you can’t draw a straight line. I want you to kick ass and take names. And I’m going to put you in charge there in a year.’ He didn’t even look at my portfolio.”

Every day Ruthven “keeps the line alive” by breaking out the brush, pencil, pen, or whatever. And his current series of paintings are all abstract.

Ruthven loved it. He started out by illustrating an op-ed piece, and then came feature projects and drawings and maps and dingbats and portraits. He did 18 Elvises. And he was given a lot of latitude. “I just got better and better and better and better,” he says. “And I started winning awards. Eventually they put me in charge of the department and later I was named lead illustrator. I enjoyed the hell out of it and I finally had landed where I felt I belonged.” And, wryly: “It was different from dropping napalm on children, you know.”

He retired in 1996 having lost vision in one eye from radiation treatments for melanoma of the retina. He could illustrate, but not as fast as he wanted to. It made him anxious and he was no longer enjoying it. But he did not surrender his need to make art. Every day he “keeps the line alive” by breaking out the brush, pencil, pen, or whatever. And his current series of paintings are all abstract. “At the paper, I didn’t ever think I was an artist because what I was doing was copying stuff or making a caricature of it.”

Now Ruthven can indulge something fresh that comes along and he will push and experiment, at least until he realizes, “OK, it’s getting really sane here; I’m tightening it up into a formula, and I walk away. That’s when I go and write for awhile.” That writing now is on the second installment of his memoir when he became a Marine aviator. “It’s very narcissistic,” he cracks.

For the last 33 years, Ruthven has been married to Alice, who is his rock. They travel frequently, he does his art daily, he goes to meetings. He is, he says, treated like a prince. “I’m a spoiled brat,” he says. “Should have died so many times. I should’ve had my ticket punched years ago, but I keep going.”