The Main Street WIRE begins its 25th year of publication with a financial boost, thanks to the late Ruth Limmer, who remembered the newspaper in her will with a bequest of about $13,000.

Ruth Limmer was a writer and teacher of writing. For 20 years, she served as a professor of English and writing at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, then became chair of the English Department at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, in 1974. At a December, 2001, memorial event on Roosevelt Island, over 50 people gathered - many of them former students who had maintained contact with her over the years. Without exception, they praised her as a devotee of excellence in writing who worked tirelessly to instill in them her own disciplined attitude about the use of language.

One of her former students at Western College was Donna Shalala, who later became U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Earlier, while serving as Assistant Secretary for Policy Research and Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Shalala invited Limmer to join her in that office, then later made Ruth her assistant when she became President of Hunter College.

In retirement, Limmer continued to work as an editor, specializing in books by historians and English-language scholars. She edited the first biography of Nikita Khrushchev and wrote the foreword to a book by Bella Spewack, among other projects. She was actively involved in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, and edited the museum's newsletter, Tenement Times. In 1997, her Six Heritage Tours of the Lower East Side - a Walking Guide was published.

On Roosevelt Island, she was active in RICLA, the Roosevelt Island Community Literary Associates, which operated the Island's community library until it was taken over by the New York Public Library. She served as President of the Island Library for several terms.

In a letter to The WIRE published a year after Ruth Limmer's death, her fellow Rivercross resident Mickey Karpeles-Bauer noted that her neighbor had given generously to Island organizations, and recalled how many of her students had gathered on the Island for her memorial, many speaking warmly of her no-nonsense wit and demanding discipline in teaching writing.

Of the bequest to The WIRE, Managing Editor Dick Lutz said this week, "Because she was a writer, a teacher of the writing discipline, and a lover of language, Ruth Limmer's gift is particularly meaningful and touching. In some sense, it is the ultimate review of the newspaper, and a recognition of its role in the fabric of our community." Lutz said the Limmer bequest will be used to clear some of The WIRE's accumulated debt, and toward the purchase of a badly needed proof-page printer to replace a slow seven-year-old unit that creates a deadline bottleneck in preparing each issue of the newspaper.

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