Opal Rue

Here is another digitalized version of my grandmother’s (Opal Brooks Rue) photo album. The original is in my possession. This digitalized version is posted here: 1930-1931 Album of Opal Avarilla Brooks Rue, documenting her years with Arthur Rue who passed through the New Mexico town where she lived with her widowed mother. Arthur was traveling the country on trains after losing his hearing as a consequence of malaria when he and Opal first met. He had been a seminary student at Smith Bible College, followed by two years at Philips University in Enid, Oklahoma before dropping out without completing a degree due his hearing loss.

Opal was born in Giles, Texas on September 26, 1909 to Clara Ada Morrow Brooks and Joseph Winfield "Jay" Brooks. Her father was struck and killed by lightning in 1913, after which life was not kind to her mother. 

Opal and Arthur married in Kansas City, Kansas on August 3, 1926, at age 16, still married to a man twice her age named William H. Crosby with whom she had first tried to escape life under her mother's roof in Tucumcari. Crosby beat her with a rope and a razor strap and forced her to drink mash whiskey, she told the Quay County District Court. Meanwhile, Arthur's travels took him to Tucumcari where he met Opal while staying with a pastor named Rev. Grace for whose child Opal babysat. Opal and Arthur hitchhiked to Kansas City, where they tied the knot. Her divorce from Crosby was finalized a year after she married Arthur on August 27, 1927, which may in part explain why she never mentioned the brief first marriage to the family she and Arthur later raised. 

This album focuses mostly on the couple's life in Cleveland, where Opal completed school after giving birth to her first son on August 15, 1930 in that city. Opal graduated from Cleveland Central Junior High School, June 1930. She finished at the Detroit Practical Nursing Center in May 1960 and worked as an LPN at Plymouth State Home with developmentally disabled children. 

Like Opal's brief marriage to Crosby, also not mentioned in two her albums (or to their children as they were growing up) was Arthur's first marriage to Ana Galan Sara, whom he wed on December 19, 1925, in New York City (less than a year before he married Opal), in a marriage that was never formally dissolved and of which no one at home ever spoke during the rest of his or Opal's lifetimes. Opal and Arthur were together for 46 years when Arthur died in 1973. Opal died six years later during 1979 in California. They are interred together in Livonia, Michigan where they spent most of their lives together.

Arthur and Opal had five children: Jacqueline Rue (1928-1928 of crib-death, buried in a potter's field in Kansas City); William Arthur Rue (1930-2004 [74]), Clyde Bieber "Bud" Rue (1934-1993 [59]); Robert Nelson Rue (1936-2007 [71]); and James Alphus Rue (1948, living).

Autobiographical statement by Opal Brooks Rue (1975) 
Biographical summary of Arthur Harold Rue (1975)