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| Sara Willis Parker (center left) welcomed Jane Alfandre (left), Mary Jane Ruth Webb (center right) and Ashley Webb (right) into her home in 2022. Behind them are portraits of Sara and the sister she lost in the 1946 Winecoff fire, Maxine Willis. |
When Ashley Webb was growing up in metro Atlanta, she knew that her grandmother’s younger sister—16-year-old Ruth Powell of Bainbridge, Georgia—had been killed as a teenager. Like so many relatives of Winecoff Hotel fire victims, Ashley didn’t know much else.
“Growing up, I knew Ruth existed but no one would ever talk about her,” Ashley said. “I guess it was instinctively in me never to ask my grandmother.”
Ashley eventually learned Ruth, her great aunt, was killed in hotel fire in Atlanta but even those details were murky. “I was always told she was there on a church choir trip,” Ashley said.
Despite naming her daughter after Ruth a dozen years ago, Ashley did not see a picture of Ruth until after her grandmother passed away a couple of years ago. “That’s how much we did not talk about her,” she said.
Ruth’s picture was in a batch of old photos her grandfather passed on to Ashley. When she came across a picture of someone she could not identify, she asked her aunt who it was. “Oh, that’s Ruth,” her aunt replied,
With Ruth now alive in her mind, Ashley started looking for information about the Winecoff Fire. When she discovered www.winecoff.org, she contacted its editor, Allen Goodwin, co-author of The Winecoff Fire.
“When Allen said he could put me in touch with someone who knew Ruth, it just brought tears to my eyes, that there was someone out there who still remembered her,” Ashley said.
In October 2022 Ashley traveled with her mother and daughter to meet Sara Willis Parker, the person Allen had in mind. Sara’s younger sister, Maxine Willis, and Ruth Powell were best friends. They were also roommates on December 7, 1946 in Room 920 at the Winecoff Hotel.
They were two of the seven YMCA Youth Assembly delegates and one faculty adviser from Bainbridge High School killed in the fire, all staying in rooms on the back side of the ninth floor, where there was no means of escape. “We lost eight people and we were such a small town,” Sara said.
Three days after the fire, a joint funeral for Ruth and Maxine was held at Bainbridge Baptist Church.
Sara was only 14 months older than her 16-year-old sister Maxine and was with Maxine and Ruth so much that Maxine’s mother called them “The Three Musketeers.”
“We were always together growing up, the three of us,” Sara said. “We were so close in age that I was with Ruth about half the time Maxine was, and I really got to know her so well. She was such a precious person. She was the sweetest, funniest, and always in the best mood. And fun.”
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| Ruth Powell (center right) and Maxine Willis (right) died in the Winecoff fire |
“I don’t want her (Ruth) to be forgotten,” Ashley told Sara. “I don’t want her to be just a name. I want her, and her memory, to live on. I named my daughter after her.”
When Ashley told her grandmother, Lori Powell, that she was naming her daughter after Ruth, she was surprised by Lori’s reply. “She said, ‘Well, that’s nice,’ and that’s all she said,” recalled Ashley.
Lori’s unemotional response was a product of how many Americans handled overwhelming grief at the time of the Winecoff fire. Family members either chose not to talk about tragedy or were discouraged from doing so by others – with common messages being “just try to forget it” or “it’s best not to talk about it.”
Sara knew Ruth’s mother, Cleata Powell, and described her as being “very stoic and showing no emotion.” That was the best way Cleata knew to cope with her pain, and Lori, her daughter, apparently adopted the same approach to Ruth’s death. As a result, Lori did not talk about Ruth’s death with her own children, perhaps not to scar them. Such an approach was not unusual within the families of Winecoff victims, but it left Ashley’s own mother not able to answer Ashley’s questions about Ruth.
Like many people, Ashley began to look inward as she grew into adulthood and started her own family. “I have become very in tune to where I came from, who I am, who came before me, and a big part of that is Ruth. So I have been on a journey to find out who she was,” said Ashley.
