They were two Ruths who became friends. Ruth Redding and Ruth Bogan both overcame obstacles early in life, including poverty born of war and the Great Depression and broken families. Both were well educated. Ruth Redding had traveled the world, was fluent in French, German and Spanish and had first come to the Vineyard as a swimming instructor in 1934. Ruth Jackson Bogan, a nurse by training, first came to the Vineyard in 1946 and was famous for her saying, “Anyone can do anything.” An artist and lover of the natural world, she was “the one who turned dumps into lovely gardens, a cellar into a workshop and a shack into a lovely home,” the Gazette recounted a few years after her death.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the two Ruths lived year round on Martha’s Vineyard, in an Oak Bluffs cottage they named Serendipity Ltd. Ruth Redding was an amateur archeologist who prowled agricultural fields and dirt roads looking for primitive artifacts; her collection was later donated to the county historical society (today the Martha’s Vineyard Museum). Jackie Bogan, as she was known, was a painter and sculptor whose work was a regular centerpiece at the All-Island Art Show. Among many other things, she was active in the Friends of Oak Bluffs, was a renowned cook and devoted to the earliest conservation efforts on the Island.

After Ms. Bogan died of cancer in 1980, Ms. Redding decided to make a permanent bequest that would honor her friend’s legacy to the Vineyard. The fifty-thousand-dollar gift helped found the Permanent Endowment Fund for Martha’s Vineyard. Ms. Redding died in 2002.

A copy of her two-page “letter of gift” sent to the Martha’s Vineyard National Bank which administered the fund, has been preserved in the Gazette archives. “It is hoped that these funds will preserve and nourish what she exemplified: beauty — love of it, creation of it — here on the beautiful Vineyard, this precious stone set in the silver sea, and to help the present inhabitants to realize the value of their treasure,” Ms. Redding wrote in part.

The fund was expected to generate income of five thousand dollars a year, which would be divided among fifteen Island charities, including the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, Hospice of Martha’s Vineyard, Felix Neck and the Vineyard Conservation Society. In 1983 the fund began an annual honorarium that would go to a Vineyard person who best embodied the spirit of Ruth Bogan. It was called the Creative Living Award.

Since then, many other awards have been established to honor Islanders for various contributions to the Vineyard way of life. But the Creative Living Award remains the original award and by far the most prestigious one.

In a ceremony held at the Grange Hall yesterday Steve Ewing, an Edgartown dock builder and poet, took his place among the many distinguished Islanders who have received the Creative Living Award since its inception.

And just as Ruth Redding wished, the legacy of her friend Ruth Bogan shines on.