Ruth T. Bakke

1915-2005

Ruth was born in a small log cabin in Ferndale, Washington.  She had older sisters and brothers who adored and perhaps spoiled her, depending on who was talking.  She grew up herding cows and attending a small rural school, but her social life, as with many other Norwegian kids, revolved around the youth activities of the Lutheran Church. 

Her mother was widowed in 1921 when her husband John died of cancer.  In spite of money sent home by older brothers who sought work in Alaska, they lost the farm when they could not pay the taxes. 

When Ruth married Tollef Bakke in 1936, they moved into a little house on the Bakke farm at Saxon, outside Acme, where they lived on five dollars a month. Ruth canned hundreds of jars of fruits and vegetables, feeding the family and gifting neighbors and relatives.

During World War II, Alaska beckoned laborers. Tollef went to seek work. Shortly after her first child Ray was born, she moved to Cordova and then later to Kodiak, where Tollef found truck driving and construction jobs, and where her second child Marilyn was born. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, all women and children were evacuated by ship. Ruth and her two children moved to Bellingham where Ray entered first grade. A year later Dennis was born, the war ended, and the family moved back to the farm at Saxon, into an abandoned house. Under Ruth’s vision and direction, Tollef expanded that house and yard for years, and Ruth decorated.  A fourth child, Lowell, came in 1948. 

Life was hard. Tollef spent four to six months each year in Alaska, but strikes or layoffs made the checks infrequent.  Ruth did her share of complaining about circumstances, sometimes to the wives of her older brothers. Their lives in Seattle seemed happier and more prosperous.   Her sister-in-law, Leah Hawkinson, cared enough to confront her and to label such self-pity and “woe is me” attitude by a frankness that shocked those of us old enough to listen around the edges of such conversations.

She ran her household as a business, with husband and children as her employees.  Everyone had schedules and jobs.  She organized each day. It was not long before relatives and neighbors came for coffee, meals, and in the summer, for picnics and camping.  Convinced that she was good at supervising children, she approached the county. Over the year, nineteen foster kids came to live with the family.  She taught them all to work. Once you could leave the high chair, you had a job and accountability.

Dick Gregory, a black comedian in Chicago, said of his family: “We was broke, but not po.”  That describes the Bakke Saxon years perfectly.  Ruth made poverty an art form and gave her children enormous freedom to innovate, once the jobs were completed.  Before Dennis went to first grade, he had organized Ruth’s pantry into a store from which she could order and pay him for the food to be prepared that day.  Not surprisingly, he started a kindling business as a child. With Seattle uncles as investors, he acquired a large herd of beef cattle before going off to university and Harvard Business School. Eventually he became founder and CEO of a company with a forty billion dollar value.  Marilyn learned from Ruth how to decorate and formed a successful interior design company, with wealthy clients in mostly eastern states. 

Lowell and Ray become pastors: Ray in inner city Chicago, and Lowell in Boulder.  Ray founded Seminario – a Spanish language training school – and an urban training program for seminaries. He authored seven books, and became an international consultant for urban ministry. Lowell, after twenty-five years as pastor in Illinois, Colorado and Washington, completed a doctorate and now teaches Theology of Work seminars to master and doctoral students on three continents, an outgrowth of Dennis’ national best selling book: Joy at Work.

In 2001 the Bakkes were offered a failing theological school in Seattle. Bakke Graduate University is now approaching enrollment of five hundred master and doctoral students, from over forty countries. Accredited faculties teach in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Ray is chancellor, Lowell is a professor, Dennis is a director, and Marilyn Bakke Pearson Scholarships are given to leaders worldwide. The newly launched business school will focus on some of the toughest economic locations in the world.

Ruth and Tollef left the farm when Lowell completed high school. After Tollef died of cancer in 1990, Ruth moved to Puyallup, Washington, near Lowell’s family and church. Until she retired at age eighty-five, she shelved and bagged groceries for Safeway, the oldest by seven years of 25,000 Safeway employees. All agreed that she lit up that store with her joyous attitude.  Back in 2000 when INC, Fortune, and other magazines identified Dennis as being the 126th richest American (Enron and 9/11 impacted those numbers), Ruth was happy with her $6.15 an hour.

More than twenty years ago, as Ray concluded a lecture on commitment to troubled cities, two school counselors confronted him:  “You don’t get it, do you? You think these students can just move in and take risks?  You can afford to take risks because you don’t need a successful job to know you are OK. You got a lot of love when you were a kid. What you don’t seem to realize is that you can take risks because you were born into an identity you did not earn.”

All four Bakke children were given unconditional love and unbridled freedom to love God and serve the world.

Written by Ray Bakke