Photo--Paul Gaylor

There are 2 entries for this date: Ruth Hurmence Green and Jack London

On this date in 1915, Ruth Hurmence Green was born. The Iowa native received a journalism degree from Texas Tech in 1935, married, had three children, and settled in Missouri. Ruth, a "half-hearted Methodist," first plodded through the bible when convalescing from cancer in her early sixties, calling the shock she suffered from reading the book worse than the trauma caused by her illness. "There wasn't a page of the bible that didn't offend me in some way. There is no other book between whose covers life is so cheap," Ruth discovered, prompting her to write the enduring modern freethought classic, The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible (1979). When terminal cancer developed in 1981, Ruth, who always insisted "There are atheists in foxholes," took her own life, swallowing painkillers. In her last letter to Anne Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation on July 4, 1981, Ruth wrote: "Freedom depends upon freethinkers." D. 1981.

On this date in 1876, novelist Jack London was born in San Francisco. The short-lived adventurer sought gold in the Klondike rush, traveled, worked for newspapers, and found fame as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, humanistic classics with dog protagonists. London, an admirer of Marx and Nietzsche, called himself "a hopeless materialist." D. 1916.