Ruth Lucille VanLehn was born in September of 1928 to Ed and Lucille (Ford) Robinson in Detroit, Michigan, as the third of four siblings. Her education through the Detroit school system and her civically active parents during the later Depression years in an ethnically mixed neighborhood fueled her quest for further schooling in a social-economics discipline at Antioch College.
She was also wooed and won by a returned GI Bill veteran, Robert B. VanLehn. The products of their marriage in their years in Yellow Springs, Ohio, included two sons, Kurt Alan VanLehn, and a year later, Todd Robert VanLehn.
Ruth worked with the Lacys at Fels Institute. Then, after raising the boys to an age, she was employed at Miami Deposit Bank as the receptionist.
Her work and family were her devotion and her commission at StarBank, and her two sons flourished — Kurt, as a professor and research director in artificial intelligence, late of Tempe, Arizona; and Todd, as a firefighter/paramedic, then excavator near Yellow Springs, Ohio.
After retirement, Ruth and Bob lived in Seven Lakes, North Carolina, where Ruth was very active in the Habitat Foundation while also indulging her traveling feet with many excursions all over the United States and nearly all continents of the world.
