# Citytalk: New Orleans Eccentric Ruthie The Duck Lady Passes



## Sean in New Orleans (Apr 7, 2005)

French Quarter institution is gone....crossed paths with this New Orleans eccentric many, many times. I fed this lady many, many beers.










*Ruthie the Duck Girl dies of cancer at 74*
by John Pope, The Times-Picayune Friday September 12, 2008, 10:36 PM
Ruthie the Duck Girl, a French Quarter eccentric who zoomed from bar to bar on roller skates, often wearing a ratty fur coat and long skirt and trailed by a duck or two, died Sept. 6 at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge. She was 74.

Ruthie, whose real name was Ruth Grace Moulon, had been suffering from cancer of the mouth and lungs when the residents of her Uptown New Orleans nursing home were evacuated to Baton Rouge as Hurricane Gustav approached, said Carol Cunningham, a close friend who watched over her for nearly 40 years.

"I've always looked at Ruthie like a little bird with a broken wing, " Cunningham said. "She was always so dear to me."

More: http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/ruthie_the_duck_girl_dies_of_c.html

http://www.eccentricneworleans.com/ruthie.htm

Radio Interview:

* Ruthie interviewed on B-97 

January 24, 2000*


HAPPY BIRTHDAY is played.

Booker: Some people call her Ruthie the Duck Lady. It’s officially Ruthie the Duck Girl.

Stacey: Well, it can go either way.

Booker: Ruthie!

Ruthie: Good morning, Sugarplum!

Stacey: Oh, happy birthday.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Yeah. Hey, Mr. Gary Moody was there yesterday, huh?

Ruthie: Oh, how you know he was there? My boyfriend, my husband.

Booker: Is he your boyfriend or your husband?

Ruthie: My husband.

Booker: Oh, he is your husband.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Did you guys get a little nookie going on after the party?

Ruthie: Yeah, I was dancing, huh?

Booker: Mr. Moody danced with ya, huh?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: So, was it just another birthday party, or was this one a special one Miss Ruthie?

Ruthie: No, I might have another one.

Booker: Oh, you’re gonna have another one.

Ruthie: Yeah, on a Sunday.

Booker: Sunday?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Stacey: Oh, this is just the early one.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Wow. You deserve all kinds of birthday parties, huh?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Ruthie, what’s it like to be a local celebrity?

Ruthie: I sure do. What about you?

Booker: Like me?

Ruthie: (barely intelligible) Do you like boys?

Booker: No, you’re much more famous than I am, Miss Ruthie.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Yeah. So, do you get bothered by people always comin’ up tryin’ to talk to ya?

Ruthie: Uh huh?

Booker: Does it bother you when people always come up and try to talk to ya?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: It does?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Yeah. You like your privacy?

Ruthie: What?

Booker: You like your privacy?

Ruthie: Yeah, you?

Booker: Yeah… yeah.

Stacey: So how do you like your new home, Miss Ruthie?

Ruthie: Oh, I’m doing fine!

Stacey: Yeah?

Ruthie: Same thing like you do.

Stacey: Do you miss the French Quarter?

Ruthie: No, no, no.

Booker: Not at all?

Ruthie: Bad to worse. One foot in the graveyard, one foot out.

Booker: Starting a new life, huh Ruthie?

Ruthie: Yeah, my new life.

Booker: Yeah, you rite.

Ruthie: Yeah, I’d like to go to Minnesota.

Booker: You’re going to Minnesota?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Are you gonna go be with your husband Gary Moody?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: You are?!

Ruthie: I like it better over there.

Booker: Oh, Ruthie. It’s cold in Minnesota.

Ruthie: Don’t ask me. I don’t want to know.

Booker: I don’t think you’d like it in Minnesota. It’s too cold.

Ruthie: I got my cold pants on, I’m gonna go.

Brad: Are you gonna heat things up?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Brad: You and Mr. Gary Moody?

Ruthie: Yeah. My duck’s going too.

Brad: Did you drink a lot last night?

Ruthie: No, you?

Booker: (laughs) Did you drink any of that Budweiser?

Ruthie: I bet you got loaded last night.

Staceylaughs) He did Miss Ruthie. He was watching football.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: Hey, Miss Ruthie?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: You got any ducks there at the nursing home?

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: They let you have some ducks?

Ruthie: Huh?

Booker: You got any ducks?

Ruthie: Yeah, I got a duck.

Booker: At the nursing home?

Ruthie: It make do-do (nap) like you in bed with a girlfriend.

Booker: Ohhh.

Stacey: Mmmm.

Booker: Do you ever go visit some of your old ducks in City Park?

Ruthie: No.

Booker: You never do?

Ruthie: No, I don’t take ‘em to the City Park, you.

Booker: I bet they miss you.

Ruthie: No they don’t.

Booker: Hey, Ruthie. We just wanted to say how much you have entertained us over the years and how beloved you are, and how near and dear you are to some many people’s hearts in this city. And you’re just truly the epitome of New Orleans.

Ruthie: Don’t ask me. You ask too many questions, you.

Stacey: (laughs)

Booker: I have no idea what you just said, but I’ll go along with you. Ruthie, we love you, and very very happy birthday.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Stacey: Happy birthday Miss Ruthie.

Ruthie: Yeah.

Booker: (parroting Ruthie) Yeah, how you know?

Ruthie: I think I got a real mind like you.

http://www.eccentricneworleans.com/b-97_interview.htm


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## spongeg (May 1, 2006)

awww

there was a woman here in Vancouver - i haven't seen her in years

she pushed a duck around in a baby carriage type thing and gave people their duck fortunes


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## Svartmetall (Aug 5, 2007)

Anyone has to be better than the mascot of Northampton - 50p Lil! So named because schoolkids used to joke she'd charge 50p for.... Well, you get the picture. She wandered the town centre of Northampton, stopping occasionally to urinate in the street and pass lewd remarks at everyone. hno:


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## Sean in New Orleans (Apr 7, 2005)

*Mourners bid farewell to French Quarter's 'Duck Girl'*
Posted by Chris Rose, Columnist, The Times-Picayune September 21, 2008 5:00AM










Ruth Grace Moulon,"Ruthie the Duck Girl," photographed with her duck Jimmy Corona on July 2, 1958. Ruth Grace Moulon was laid to rest this past Monday in the pouring rain in a family plot in the stately Greenwood Cemetery, at the terminus of the Canal Street streetcar line, in what I guess you would call the New Orleans Cemetery District -- where people come from all over the world to see our Cities of the Dead majestically rise from the ground to lay their claim to what is arguably the most alive city in the world. 

Perhaps due to the weather or perhaps to the timing -- a post-hurricane Monday afternoon when the world's financial stability was caught in a grave downpour (pun intended) of instability and doubt -- the gathering of family and friends was surprisingly sparse, yet expectedly diverse and passionate. 

After all, Ruthie was, by any measure, a legendary character. Depending on when and if you knew her personally, or whether your familiarity with her was derived from the impressive wealth and depth of local oral history, Ms. Moulon would have been known to you as A) Ruthie the Duck Girl or B) Ruthie the Duck Lady. 

Of no matter. At either stage of her maturity, she was a French Quarter character of the highest order. 

It is undocumented (and not for lack of trying; Ruthie drew documentarians like, well -- like she drew ducks) at what point in her life she went from "duck girl" to "duck lady," but there was never a known period of her life when the word "duck" was not affixed to her name or introduction. 

As a young, frail and eager waif -- with a physical stature no match for even a Virginia Slim 100 -- to an aging, frail and decidedly less vigorous spinster, Ruthie was in constant companionship with one or more ducks for virtually all of her life. 

Admittedly, in her most recent years, living under the more austere auspices of the St. Charles Health Care nursing home -- as opposed to say, Johnny White's Sports Bar -- most of her fowl companions were restricted to that of the species manufactured in China. But for most of her 74 years -- didn't everyone think she had to be at least 100? -- she lived, dined, drank and danced with real ducks. 


"She was the tiniest little thing," Jo Anna Palmer said. "She did not walk the stage a poor player. She was just Ruthie. She was a light that was happy and alive. This thrilling little person -- she gave just by being herself." 

And so it was, that as the unceasing downpour drenched the assembled mourners, the funeral's chief celebrant, Monsignor Robert Massett of St. Mary Magdalen Church in Metairie, took note of the water pooling at and soaking through everyone's footwear and commented in rather unpriestly fashion: "Even today, she chose the damn ducks over the rest of us!" 

Indeed. In a town in which funerals are near-mythic events unto themselves, and in which distinguishing oneself in the field of eccentricity is akin to entering the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Yankee uniform, Ruthie the Duck Lady's interment was fittingly both mythic and eccentric. 

The small but magnificently disparate assembly of mourners -- maybe 60 in all -- comprised elder family relations, representatives sent from the New Orleans police and fire departments, assorted musicians of varying genres, Jackson Square artists, Bourbon Street bartenders, documentarians (how they loved Ruthie!), and others drawn randomly from the ranks of the business, commerce, hospitality and striptease industries, in addition to the requisite smattering of 9th Ward hipsters. 

In short, Ruthie's people. 

She grew up in, lived in, got drunk and arrested in and basically did everything but die in the Vieux Carre. To a lot of folks, Ruthie was the Vieux Carre -- unconventional, incorrigible, over-emotional, overly opinionated, charmingly cantankerous, generally intoxicated and to hell what you thought of her anyway. She certainly didn't care, as long as you opened your door or your wallet or preferably both. 

In truth, after her status as the French Quarter's primary duck specialist (how many others there might have been remains unrecorded to this day), her most acclaimed talent was an astonishing proficiency at garnering free meals, drinks and smokes at some of the area's finest dining establishments, most of which presumably waived their right to refuse service to domesticated waterfowl to accommodate this extraordinarily beloved denizen of the night. And the afternoon. And, truth to tell, most mornings -- if the previous night's adventures allowed for it. 

At the intimate requiem Mass at the Jacob Schoen Funeral Home on Canal Street, Jo Anna Palmer, a lifelong friend of Ruthie's -- and a Jackson Square artist -- gave a brief invocation. 

"She was the tiniest little thing," Palmer said. "She did not walk the stage a poor player. She was just Ruthie. She was a light that was happy and alive. This thrilling little person -- she gave just by being herself." 



Ruthie was, by any measure, a legendary New Orleans character.As several of the assembled partook of the traditional Catholic Communion service, an older, blind black man with a long white beard, wearing overalls as well as a hospital wristband, pulled out a mouth harp and began a mournful dirge, something along the lines of "Amazing Grace," but with some other, improvisational elements in it. 

The mourners, already prone to tears from the service's beginning, fell further into -- what was it, exactly: Sorrow? Remembrance? Nostalgia? 

In the back of the room, sitting on a folding chair, there was a second-line grand marshal on hand, a former Jackson Square artist named Jennifer Jones. 

Dressed in spats and mostly black parade garb, with her long hair braided in gold bands, she had been sitting in the back of the chapel, wiping away tears throughout the service. But at the final prayer's conclusion, she stuffed her Kleenex in a sleeve and rose to perform a silent pantomime. 









She approached the casket from one side, moving slowly, mournfully. She worked her way around the casket and once on the left side, she began a high-stepping dance, now fast and celebratory, spinning her umbrella with vigor. 

On the top of her second-line umbrella, where a white dove of peace traditionally resides during a funeral service, she had attached a small stuffed duck for the occasion as well. Her silent movements were oddly surreal in the absence of the traditional funeral band. 

"'Sending them off right" is what they say in the jazz business; giving someone their due respect," Jones told me. "The dance signifies a spiritual portal onto the next life. I guess you could call what I do a liturgical dance. A New Orleans jazz liturgical dance." 

As six pall bearers led Ruthie down the aisle, joining the procession out of the chapel -- and seemingly from out of nowhere -- was a large brown puppet that appeared to be some kind of Muppet on the down and outs, and it made me consider where I might wind up if I were a drunk Muppet in the waning years of my career. 

Exactly! New Orleans. 

At the cemetery, the crowd had dwindled to perhaps two dozen, and Massett made haste of the interment ceremony for practicality's sake. 

Ruthie, it should be noted, died Sept. 6 at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, after residents of the nursing home were evacuated to that city as Hurricane Gustav approached. The official cause of death was cancer, but many speculate that the stress of the storm and relocation hastened the outcome. 

My own inexpert opinion -- and this is not an implausible theory -- is simply that her time had come. Suffice to say that neither abstinence nor moderation were among her marked characteristics. A life well lived or good health thrown away, really what is the difference in New Orleans and what does it matter now? 

One of the French Quarter's most revered eccentrics has passed on to the great juke joint in the sky, to a corner of the Everlasting where, no doubt, there is no repentance for cussing, the drinks are all doubles -- and on the house -- and you're still allowed to smoke. 

And there's probably a lot of ducks. 

In his last words of the funeral service -- acknowledging Ruthie's proclivities toward the steadfastly unholier activities of this material world -- Massett made a simple and quite appropriate request of the gathering of mourners. 

"Maybe," he said, "we should say a prayer for God." 

Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at [email protected], or 504.826.3309 or 504.352.2535. 

http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/09/mourners_bid_farewell_to_frenc.html


Goodbye Ruthie---I'll always remember you and miss you!
Sean


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