Ruth Lang had a special honor bestowed on her earlier this year, an honor she never imagined would happen to her.
The Agriculture and Food Fair board named the 2013 Agriculture and Food Fair grounds, the “Ruth D. Lang Fair Grounds.”
“It was quite a big surprise that they chose to honor me,” said Lang, who volunteered at the fair 30 years while raising children and working. “I never expected it. I’d been off the board and not a director or working for Agriculture for so long. I thought, ‘Who’d remember me?’ I’m thrilled they did this while I’m alive and let me enjoy it.”
Lang, who will be 80 in October and still volunteers in the community, said her 98-year-old mother, Elfreda Falson, is also thrilled by the honor.
“I’m truly blessed that my mother is alive to see this.,” Lang said with a big smile. “Every time we pass the fairgrounds she mentions how happy and impressed she is with the honor given to me.”
From 1965 to 1994 Lang was an AgFair board member and the director of the food pavilion. She worked for the Department of Agriculture in personnel and as an office manager from 1964 until her retirement in 1995.
She said the food pavilion director position fell into her lap in 1967 and she was director there until 1993.
The biggest change that took place over the years was allowing all sorts of vendors to sell alcohol and products other than all locally produced items, she said.
Lang was born on St. Croix in 1933 to Elfreda and Elmo Falson. Her mother was a nurse and influenced Lang with her caring ways. At the age of five, the family moved to New York. She recalls she always loved fashion and as a child she cut out pictures of people from magazines and pasted on clothing she had created. She attended the Central Needle Trades High School in Manhattan, where she learned the vocational side of fashion, making patterns, sewing clothing, doing smocking and fine needle work. She still enjoys crocheting and knitting, she said.
Lang attended the Pratt Institute and earned her bachelor’s degree in fashion from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and she holds a master’s degree in sociology from New York University.
She returned to St. Croix in 1962 to raise a family because it had wide open spaces and was a safe and friendly place.
“Back then it was so safe we didn’t have to lock our doors,” Lang recalled.
She has one biological child, Chainie Lang, who is the program director at St. Croix Mission Outreach. She said there are more than 10 children she took under her wing, including two brothers Ricardo and Romardo Guadeloupe, who came to her when they were six and four-years-old. Lang said she fostered, loved and mothered the boys as if they were her own children.
She has nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
She said when the Guadeloupe boys come home they always have a huge get together.
“I look forward to those occasions,” Lang said. “We’re a close-knit family.”
Lang, her mother and daughter all live in their own homes on the same property.
She said she is always busy doing things.
“I’m not one to just sit and look at TV,” Lang said. “I love to keep going. It keeps me healthy and strong.”
When she isn’t spending time with her family she’s volunteering at St. Croix Mission Outreach, which she has done since 2003. She volunteers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily as a receptionist and office manager, helping homeless addicts get straight with faith-based treatment. She travels with clients to Atlanta, Ga., to the Atlanta Union Mission, Inc., a nonprofit Christian drug and alcohol residential recovery program. She shares love and the word of God to help them stay focused on changing their lives. She thinks of them as her children and she said most call her “Mom.”
She also served on the board of Lutheran Social Services, Synodical Board, Lord God of Sabaoth Church Counsel, and Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. And she has served as a minister and she sings in her church choir.
Lang wants to do more sightseeing in the United States with her traveling friend, Ruth Beagles. She said she has seen Europe, but even though she lived in New York she never visited the Statue of Liberty. She also wants to spend time on St. Eustatius with her companion of 24 years, Hubert A. Richardson.
“This all makes me feel like I’m fulfilling a calling,” Lang said. “It’s a path the Lord has sent me on. I feel really blessed the Lord has made my path easy to go through. Thank God I feel good and I’m always able to help somebody. With God and a little love all things are possible.”
