Year Honored: 1995
Birth: 1935 - 2021
Born in: Milford, Delaware
Biography
Ruth Ann Minner was born to sharecroppers in Milford, Delaware in 1935. She left school at 16 to help support her parents and siblings by working on their family farm. At 17, she married Frank Ingram. Frank died when Minner was 32, leaving her with their three young sons to raise and support. Minner took a job as a statistician with the Maryland-Delaware Crop Reporting Service, while she worked on earning her GED. She briefly attended Delaware Technical and Community College in Georgetown, before she landed a job as a clerk in the Delaware House of Representatives and became invested in State Government.
Minner worked for several years as an attaché in the House of Representatives before she was offered a position as a receptionist in the office of Governor Sherman Tribbitt. A year later, in 1974, she was elected to the House of Representatives from her Milford district.
In 1982, Minner was elected a State Senator. She served three successive terms, until 1992. During her time in the Senate, she was instrumental in passing the Delaware Land and Water Conservation Act which has preserved more than 30,000 acres of land. She then ran for Lieutenant Governor alongside Governor Tom Carper, and became the first female Lt. Gov. She chaired the commission on Government Reorganization and Effectiveness, known as the Minner Commission, which was charged with “making state government more user-friendly through structural and operational change.” She also chaired the interagency Council on Adult Literacy and the Governor’s Task Force on Workforce Quality and Personnel Reform.
Minner was elected Delaware’s first female Governor in 2000. Her administration focused on the improvement of the school system, support for families, economic development, protection of the environment, more efficient government operation, and creating and keeping jobs. Minner created the SEED Program, which was “the first scholarship program in the nation to offer free college access to students who kept their grades up and stayed out of trouble.” She also enacted full-day kindergarten. One of her greatest legislative accomplishments was the indoor smoking ban in Delaware, which was a part of her initiative of health care and a clean environment.
For her work, Minner was awarded the Small Business Advocate of the Year Award from the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce, Mother of the Year Award from the Delaware Association of American Mothers, and an honorary degree from Delaware Technical and Community College. Governor John Carney, who served as her Lt. Gov., called her “a leader who had a real common touch. [Having grown up in economic hardship] she brought that perspective to her job every day, and she never lost her attachment to those roots.”
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Sources and Additional Readings
Boyer, William W. (2000). Governing Delaware. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. ISBN 1-892142-23-6.
Delaware ephemera collection related to politics, policy, and government. Manuscript and Archival Collection Finding Aids . (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://library.udel.edu/special/findaids/view?docId=ead%2Fmss0733.xml%3Bquery
Governor Ruth Ann Minner. Delaware Public Archives - State of Delaware. (2018, October 29). Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://archives.delaware.gov/executive-orders/governor-minner/
Hoffecker, Carol E. (2004). Democracy in Delaware. Wilmington, Delaware: Cedar Tree Books. ISBN 1-892142-23-6.
Martin, Roger A. (1995). Memoirs of the Senate. Newark, Delaware: Roger A. Martin.
Ruth Ann Minner Obituary (2021) Delaware State News. Legacy.com. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/newszapde/name/ruth-minner-obituary?id=31329247
Ruth Ann Minner. National Governors Association. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://www.nga.org/governor/ruth-ann-minner/
Seelye, K. Q. (2021, November 10). Ruth Ann Minner, down-to-earth governor of Delaware, dies at 86. The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/ruth-ann-minner-dead.html
- Collections: 1995