Larry Ruttman, a longtime attorney and author, has won awards for biographical cultural histories about his famous hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, Voices of Brookline (2005), and Jews on and off the field in Major League Baseball, American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball (2013), which was chosen the best baseball book in America for 2013 by Sports Collectors Digest. It also serves as a cultural history of American Jews since the Great Depression. He has recently written on his lifelong passion for classical music and its musicians in a book entitled Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians.

 

Educated at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Boston College Law School, Larry served as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force in the Korean War. He was elected a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His papers on his first two books have been collected by the The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center (JHC), formerly of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), and now in collaboration with and at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society (NEHGS) in Boston, Massachusetts, and collated, digitized, formatted, indexed, and published worldwide online.

 

Larry has lived in Brookline since the age of two and has been married to Lois Raverby Ruttman for sixty years. He is going strong at ninety-two. He began a weekly podcast in 2021 focused on what life has taught him about the values one should live by. Larry is amazed that Providence has granted him the privilege to “live his life backwards” in this late-coming and deeply satisfying labor of love, which he has recounted in his memoir, Larry Ruttman: A Life Lived Backwards - An Existential Triad of Friendship, Inquisitiveness, and Maturation.