Jim
& Ruth
Hall

TAKING THE REINS

Honored October 1984

Jim & Ruth Hall

Jim Hall Jr. remembers his father as a giant of a man. He had a "forty-six inch chest and a thirty inch waist," and "looked like a cowboy."

Jim Hall Sr. was a Presbyterian minister, deeply involved in Christian education in the Southwest in the 1950s. He inherited his looks and his calling from his father, Ralph Hall, a cowboy missionary who "rode the countryside on horseback and then in old cars, bringing the word of God to the ranches and outlying areas in the New Mexico territory."

With his father on the road all the time, Jim Hall Sr., the oldest of three children growing up in Albuquerque, "took on a lot of responsibility pretty early. When he was twelve," his son relates, "he took a schoolteacher out to the Navajo Reservation and drove back, a round trip of 250 miles." He studied for two years at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He married Ruth Hall, of Fort Davis Texas --who shared his birth date, May 3, 1918-- and whisked her off to Ketchikan, Alaska, where he was pastor of a mission church for three years.