Ruth Peale, 101, 'Positive Thinking' Author's Wife
Ruth Stafford Peale, who died yesterday at her home in Pawling at 101, was the cheery and practical helpmeet to Norman Vincent Peale, among the foremost American ministers of the twentieth century, as well as one of its bestselling authors.
While the Reverend Peale delivered inspirational sermons from the pulpit of the Marble Collegiate Church on West 28th Street, it was his wife who ran the printing house that delivered a steady stream of his thoughts, including "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952). In 1945, she helped launch Guideposts magazine, a Christian monthly offering "True Stories of Hope and Inspiration." Paid circulation stands at 2.5 million.
While outspoken in her own right, Ruth Peale saw her mission as standing by her man. In a tract the couple co-wrote in 1969 titled "The Secret to a Happy Marriage," Mrs. Peale wrote, "No job, no hobby, no activity on earth can compare with the drama and exhilaration of living with a man, loving him, doing your best to understand his infinitely complex mechanism and helping him to make it hum and sing and soar the way it was designed to do."
Loretta Ruth Stafford was a Methodist minister's daughter, born in Iowa, but by the time she was ready to graduate from Syracuse University she had vowed with several sorority sisters never to marry a minister. "We had a notion it was a little restrictive," she told the New York Times in 1969.
Yet in 1930, a local Syracuse radio station announced that Miss Stafford, by then a high school math teacher, had married the most eligible bachelor in town. Norman Vincent Peale was already a clergyman of renown. In 1932, the Peales came to New York and Marble Collegiate, where Norman Vincent Peale would serve as pastor for more than a half century.
"I soon discovered that Norman was going to be completely absorbed in preaching sermons, writing books, and counseling the troubled," she said in the Times interview. "I decided the best contribution I could make was to work with the organized church." Over the years, she was president of the Board of North American Missions of the Reformed Church of America, editor in chief of the Peale-founded Foundation for Christian Living, and co-editor of Guideposts. She also sat on the boards of many schools and church organizations.
In 1942, she published her first book, "I Married a Minister." Her semi-autobiographical "The Adventure of Being a Wife" (1971), revealed that the man behind "Positive Thinking" sometimes had to be cheered up. Another volume of hints, "Secrets of Staying in Love" appeared in 1984. She also published an autobiography, "A Lifetime of Positive Thinking." Norman Vincent Peale died in 1993.
She leaves behind two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, her son John, eight grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren.
