Spaghetti for the Cure

Tonight is Paulette Rickard's spaghetti feed at her good-home-cookin' restaurant, Paulette's Kitchen. It's to benefit cancer research, and she and 21 other Relay for Life team members are serving up spaghetti, salad and garlic bread for $10 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at 875 Sutton Way, Grass Valley.

"The girls are making homemade desserts," Paulette added, and you can buy those for $5. Coffee, soda, beer and wine also cost a bit more.

Plus, Paulette will have raffle prizes including a beautiful pink-and-gray quilt.



From one Mom to many

Wendy Hartley, of Nevada City, wanted to share a story about her mother and a beautiful gift - just in time for Mother's Day.

Ruth Hartley was born in 1910 in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants. She grew up working in her family's boarding house in a tiny Catskills town, but Ruth was smart and loved school. Her parents decided to educate her - instead of her brother - and sent her to live with relatives in New York City.

Ruth attended high school and earned a scholarship to Cornell University, coming home to the boarding house between terms. She went on to earn her master's and doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University's Teachers College.

She married Eugene Hartley, also a Columbia Ph.D. They did groundbreaking research in their fields of social psychology and child development and achieved a successful middle-class life - but never enough to indulge Ruth's love of the arts.

They retired to Arizona, where Ruth invested in stocks and finally could satisfy her collector's desire for art and jewelry. She became a connoisseur of late 20th Century Navajo, Hopi and Zuni jewelry.

Ruth's daughter, Wendy, inherited the collection in 1998. "I'm not a jewelry person, and my mother knew that," Wendy says.

So Wendy is selling the collection at the Magic Carpet, in downtown Nevada City. The proceeds will benefit the cultural survival projects of owners Eileen and Paul Jorgenson, including Solutions Benefiting Life, a low-tech water purification system in rural Nepal and northern India, Wendy says.

"This money sets up a micro business that makes clay water filter jugs, teaches the community about basic health principles of using clean water and covers the costs of making the first 1,000 water filters," Wendy says.

She thinks her mother would be grinning about the sale, knowing it will benefit other mothers who, like she did, are working hard to raise their families.

So stop by the store at 406 Broad St. for a visual treat, and maybe a treat for Mom.

Readers' Corner is compiled by The Union staff. To submit items, e-mail them to readers@theunion.com, and put "RC" and your topic in the subject line, or call 477-4230.