Ruth Blaser’s Fair Haven Mic Drop: Soaring with the Principles of an Iconic Dragon Gadfly

We are gathered here today … in gratitude for a Fair Haven gadfly. Mic drop.

Gadfly. It’s a caricature of those governing body meeting regulars, the characters who persists in challenging authority or the status quo, holding officials accountable, prompting change or even self-reflection. Gadfly. It’s not the true menace it sounds like. In fact, there’s a lot of beauty in a gadfly. Call it a dragon gadfly — a colorful, principled mosquito eater, ridding the environment to which it always returns of welt-wielding pestilence.

One decades-famous gadfly faithfully landed with its own brand of due diligence in the audience at Fair Haven Borough Council meetings on the regular. With this special breed of dragon gadfly, things went like this …

Flutter, flutter aaaaand land … And the gavel gets that one rap and a “Now we will open the public portion of the meeting” from the mayor who presides over it. Gavel rapping. That’s what they call it. Funny, but it sounds like what it is — the start of letting people rap away — sometimes poetically and rhythmically and sometimes not so much — about whatever irks them around the town at a governing body meeting. Sometimes there are even compliments. Sometimes.

But in this little niche of a riverside community aptly called Fair Haven — aptly, depending on which “rapper” you talk to — one near 60-year resident gadfly made it her mission “for the good of the borough” to hold officials accountable at every single Borough Council meeting. Every. Single. One. Or very close to it. That’s roughly 1,400 meetings, folks — 1,392 in 58 years, to be exact. And while the dais gavel rapper changed over the years, there was always that single constant in the audience — call her a highly principled fan with strong, mighty-winged opinions. Undaunted, she flew.

Sometimes there were telling winces as the mayor presiding over the meeting and officials looked out into the crowd to always see that one dragon gadfly. She was so vibrantly colorful, who could miss her? Striking, fashionable and ageless, she sported a signature, carefully-manicured blonde up-do that popped up out of the crowd like her hand did as soon as that public portion gavel hit the dais sound block. She was Ruth Blaser — “Ruth Blaser, 523 River Road!”

“Yes, Mrs. Blaser,” you’d hear from the mayor of the term and era, sometimes with an eye roll that did not escape her, either.

And the older she got, in numbers only, and the younger the governing body got, the more you’d hear gems from her like the unabashed “Back in the day … and I know you don’t want to hear that, because I say it frequently.”

Yes she did. She was persisting in her mission, her responsibility as a resident. And she’d repeat until she was truly heard. That sometimes never happened.

She was always waiting for that mic drop moment, though. She never relented on living her own dream of making her haven a better place, keeping the good of the borough good, or at least holding elected officials accountable to the people they represent in the tiny peninsula niche she moved to, called home and loved for decades.

Ruth Blaser’s quotes in doing so were sometimes gems. She added a certain charm and entertainment value to meetings for we reporters who were charged with getting the story from all sides, balanced and, yes, with some highlights in issue controversy — always revealing the truth of the matter. And truth is what Blaser was after, too, albeit sometimes sought after in a bit of a round-about way, like her eagle eye zooming in on an expense voucher for something like a candy bar that didn’t sit right with her. But that was OK. She was looking when no one else, or very few, really were.

It was that sort of thing and the questioning of more maddening (to her and probably many others who weren’t at the meetings) new policies, major issues and borough quirks that made her a stand-by-your-borough kind of lady — passionate defiance and all. How?

As former Councilman Rowland Wilhelm told the audience at the borough’s annual teaching meeting at Knollwood School in 2014, Ruth Blaser is here “at every meeting holding us accountable.” She “exemplifies what residents’ rights are all about, like it or not. She is keeping us in check.”

In that respect, yes, Ruth Blaser was an unbeknownst lesson in civics wrapped in that blonde bun. Ironically, the meticulously coiffed blonde, upswept hairdo had become an unchanged symbol of the change she sought to inspire.

Change. There was a lot of banter over the decades between Ruth Blaser and officials over what she saw as just plain harmful, unwilling to see everyone go with that flow, just because the a few people at the dais thought it was a better way. And she’d persist, bucking, or at least questioning change if she thought it was bad or didn’t make sense.

While the comments prolonged the sometimes endless meeting times —for we reporters who had to go home and write about it, ending our work day sometimes into the early morning hours of the next day — the Blaser entertaining comment reprieve was a welcome one. We’d hit “record,” scribble our notes and chuckle, knowing that a Blaser nugget was on the fly, landing soon and waking people up and holding everyone in an accountability vise grip with a “Ruth Blaser, 523 River Road!”

A colleague once said to me after a meeting he had covered, with a wily grin, “Mrs. Blaser. I don’t understand. Seems like she hates the town. If she hates it so much, why’s she still there — and with a vengeance, it seems??” He started laughing over her chiding the mayor at this one meeting for being “fresh” to her, showing what she felt was disrespect to a longtime resident.

“Well, that’s just it,” I, a longtime resident and journalist raised my hand like Ruth and said, with an accompanying giggle to that colleague in the neighboring cubicle, “She does love the town. She’s relentless in holding accountable the people she thinks don’t know (because they weren’t there) the true good in the borough’s past and what and who made it such a desirable a place to live in and govern all those years ago when she first came to Fair Haven.

“She’s trying, albeit in a sometimes off-the-right-track way, to extract the things that she thinks made the borough such a great place to live, bring them to light with her ‘back in the day’ repeat. She’s trying to instill and preserve the value of those sometimes very small things for the good for the future, I think. She wants the future generations to experience what she and her family experienced, not to say that there weren’t always some negatives that needed change, too.”

He nodded a “Yes” nod, smiling and typing her quotes into the story from the meeting the night before. “Ya gotta give it to her,” he shook his head, still smiling and typing away, “She says what’s on her mind and doesn’t back down. Holding them accountable is what these meetings are for, after all. Gotta give it to her. She throws some zingers out there.”

That well-respected reporter and friend has since passed away, but I can’t help but think of him chuckling as Ruth Blaser in a meeting in more recent years cut the polished niceties and formalities of the usual “Thank you,” for your comments at a meeting, with that “moving on” undertone, to the quick.

“You shut people down at the end (of their comments) and thanked for input but you have not given them a reason,” Blaser said. “Are you going to shut me down, too, without an answer? I think you owe it to everyone to let us know why the decision was made and who made it … “Why? I’d love to know what the borough council and mayor are doing to defend this decision …”
Ruth Blaser, 523 River Road, Fair Haven

At one point in time, Blaser had asked council, among other things, if they’d consider having an open public meeting, agenda-free, to get people in town together when more are available, perhaps on a Saturday.

Since her suggestion was made, about 12 years ago, Ruth Blaser passed away.

And, guess what? There will be such a meeting of a different kind on a Saturday, this Saturday, June 6, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Bicentennial Hall in Fair Haven, of course, to honor her memory and celebrate this civic lesson of a person, volunteer extraordinaire, feisty defender of Fair Haven senior affordability and true lover of all that’s right in a “here stays the neighborhood” kinda way.

Raise your hand and be present. And, as Ruth had said, “Now, folks, come on, keep it simple. That’s it.” Mic drop. Fly.

Ruth Blaser passed away in March. For more about her, here’s her obituary, prepared by her family.

Rest in peace, keep your hand raised and keep soaring, mighty dragon gadfly. You are remembered.

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