"Ruby" (Or the dangers of eating in a jail kicthens and other misadventures of a jail cook)

It is the people who are often referred to as “characters” that seem to be the ones we remember most in our lives. It isn’t the most beautiful or handsome ones. It isn’t the cleverest or the most intelligent or the wealthiest. No, it doesn’t seem to matter what other traits a person may have, if he or she is a real “character” they seem to end up being remembered by those people who have the fortune or misfortune to cross their lives’ path.

I had a neighbor once, some years ago, who happened to be the owner of the local radio station. In most ways he was a fairly normal, middle-aged man who enjoyed playing elevator-type music and a bit of country out over the airwaves of Big Bear Valley, where I called home. For purposes of this writing, we’ll call him Frank.

Frank loved Hawaiian music, Hawaiian food, Hawaiian shirts, just about anything Hawaiian, and so, once a day, every day, for one hour in the afternoon, Frank would play Hawaiian music over his radio station’s airwaves. He owned the station, he was the boss, so who was there to stop him? Don Ho, Hula Hattie, the Kamioke Brothers, the list of singers was long and distinguished. Most people enjoy a bit of Hawaiian music now and then and the choices Frank made to air on his radio station were excellent selections. That was not the problem. The problem came in because Frank always sang along.

There is a time and a place for singing duets with the radio. I’m famous for doing just that. Over the years I have sung some really fine harmony with John Denver, Neil Diamond and even the Kingston Trio while buzzing along in my car. I’ve never received a penny in wages for this, even though my rendition of Rocky Mountain High exceeds that of any highway singer known today. I am even very good at humming in the places where the words escape me, or taking the plunge and making up lyrics of my own. But this was where Frank ran into trouble.
Had he confined his vocalizations to times when he was alone in his car, no one would have cared. He could have sung in any key and made up all the Hawaiian words he wanted and it would have gone unnoticed. But Frank did not do that. Frank sang right along with the music from his little studio office, live, over the airwaves, at the very top of his lungs. Whether or not he knew the words did not matter to Frank. Who understood Hawaiian anyway? And the fact that he could not carry a tune in a bucket was no deterrent to Frank either.

It got so that people in the Valley would tune into the little radio station at three o’clock every afternoon just to hear Frank singing along with his Hawaiian talent line-up. It soon became not so much an annoyance as it did a comical interlude to the day. Frank was a “character”: one of those people that other people laugh at and chuckle about but inevitably remember just about forever. I have not heard Frank sing along with Don Ho for almost 20 years now but I cannot hear an Hawaiian song without thinking briefly about Frank’s off-key baritone coming across my car radio in sync with the song he was playing. That’s what “Characters” do. They stick in your memory, good or bad, and turn up throughout your life at the oddest places.

Our resident Character, Ruby, the jail cook, had come with the building, or so it was said. Initially the Federal Government had constructed the building that now is home to the Yavapai County jail in Prescott, and when they no longer needed the use of the facility they turned it over to the county for a jail. Ruby had been hired by the Feds to run their jail kitchen and so when the county inherited the building, they also inherited Ruby...