Ruth Ray Hunt

Ruth Eileen Ray was the youngest of six children of Walter "Sing" Ray, a real estate and insurance agent and the first city clerk of Idabel, Oklahoma, who died in 1919 when she was two. She left Oklahoma A&M in 1940, followed a sister to Shreveport, and became a legal secretary at Blanchard, Goldstein, Walker and O'Quinn. When Claude O'Quinn left the firm for its main client, the Hunt Oil Company, he took her with him. H.L. Hunt told an interviewer that he first noticed her waiting for a bus outside the Shreveport office and offered her a ride.¹

Mrs. Wright

In the fall of 1942 she stopped coming to work. Hunt moved her to an apartment in New York City, and former colleagues received announcements of her marriage to one "Raymond Wright," said to be with army intelligence and studying nutrition at Columbia University. Her son was born in New York on April 6, 1943, and named Ray Lee Wright. "He's gonna be president of the United States," she told the Hunt Oil secretaries in Shreveport. Hunt bought her a bungalow at 7029 Meadow Lake Avenue in Dallas, "less than a two-minute drive" from Mount Vernon, where his wife Lyda and their children lived. Three daughters followed by 1950, Ruth June, Helen, and Swanee. The children attended the Greenhill School as Wrights, and neighbors supposed that their father was an agent of the FBI. Hunt set up the Secure Trusts for them and named as trustees his gambling partner Ray Ryan, an Indiana oilman who kept company with reputed Mafiosi, and Ryan's wife.²

Marriage

Lyda Hunt died in May 1955, and Ruth and her children began to keep house at Mount Vernon. In the fall of 1957, by Hunt's account, the fourteen-year-old Ray came to his office and said: "You will marry my mother." They were married on a Sunday that November at the home of her pastor. The Dallas Times Herald described her as "Mrs. Ruth Ray Wright," mother of four. Her own mother told the Associated Press she had known nothing of it. Hunt gave the children his name. Soon afterward he gave up gambling, as a federal grand jury opened an inquiry into a syndicate at Terre Haute, and on the first Sunday of 1960 he was baptized with her and the children at the First Baptist Church of Dallas by the Reverend W.A. Criswell. She later let it be known that the children were his.³

On November 22, 1963, she was visiting Ray at his fraternity house at Southern Methodist University when Hunt telephoned and told her to keep the children away from home. The couple went to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on the FBI's advice and came back for Christmas. In early 1965 she persuaded Hunt to bring his lobotomized son Hassie home from an institution in the East. She did not go to Shreveport for the trial of Frania Tye Lee's claim in 1978, because the lawyers feared she would be questioned about the birth of her children "out of wedlock and before the death of H.L.'s first wife." Hunt's will made Ray sole independent executor of the estate.⁴