Kliger, Edna Ruth (1918-2020) | University of Illinois Archives

Edna Ruth (née Schaeffer) Kilger (1918-2020) was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Belarus and Romania. She was born in her maternal grandmother’s home in Purcell, Oklahoma, on Oct. 28, 1918, two weeks before the Armistice of WWI. At the time of her birth, her father, Leon Schaeffer, was serving in France as a U.S. Army medic. Edna’s mother, Helen Schwartz, was the third of nine children. In 1900, her mother, Selma, had sailed from Odessa with four little girls and a baby boy, to join her husband, Paul, in Oklahoma. They entered through the Port of Galveston, to settle and become Jewish pioneers of the West. Edna Ruth graduated from high school in 1937 and studied art at the University of Oklahoma. In 1943, Edna Ruth enlisted in the Women's  Army Auxiliary Corps (the WAACs, the first cohort of service women to shed the title “auxiliary” and be inducted into the Army). Sergeant Edna Ruth Schaeffer was stationed at Pine Camp, New York, as Private Paul Kliger’s secretary in the Public Relations Office. Three months later they were married, on August 15, 1943.

After the war, Ruth and Paul moved back to Champaign-Urbana to continue Paul’s studies in social work. Ruth worked at the News-Gazette in Urbana. In 1949, their first daughter was born in Champaign. Their second daughter, Elizabeth, was born in Peoria in 1952. In 1956, they moved to Minneapolis to study social work at the University of Minnesota. Ruth earned her B.A. Degree. In 1960, they moved to Evanston, Illinois. Ruth taught full-time for the Head Start Program in Chicago. In 1997, Ruth and Paul moved to Colorado to be closer to their eldest daughter. When Paul died in 2000, Ruth moved to Moscow, Idaho, near Elizabeth. She later moved to assisted living in Boulder, Colorado. Ruth passed away on July 2, 2020, at the age of 101.