Ruth Jean Dale

by Walter Farley, her very favorite. Fortunately for the young author, she was completely unaware of the law regarding plagiarism. She attended seven schools in three states during the seventh grade alone. By the time she graduated from high school, she'd also lived or attended school in South Dakota, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey. She obtained her Journalism Major in a college in Missouri. Betty Lee also spend a stint in the U.S. Navy, where she met her husband, a U.S. Marine. She settled down to life as a wife and mother of four daughters in Illinois, California, and Texas. Eventually she went to work as a newspaper reporter; upon retirement from the Corps, her husband became a reporter for the same California daily. Just before Thanksgiving 1984, she was felled by a brain aneurysm which resulted in three brain surgeries, two weeks in a coma, four weeks in Intensive Care, and a recovery so complete that her surgeon called it