Ruth Dunfey ’83

Ruth Dunfey always believed that traveling or living abroad can be life changing. She herself was a fearless adventurer. After she graduated from Dracut (Mass.) High School, Ruth worked as an operator for the telephone company in Hyannis and traveled alone to visit her sister and brother-in-law, who were stationed in France — somewhat unusual for a woman to do at the time.

The family also believed strongly in education: In 1974, Ruth earned an associate’s degree at UNH at the age of 46, and nearly 10 years later, taking one or two classes at a time, she earned a bachelor’s degree in history at the age of 55.

“My mother went abroad on the Cambridge program one summer, and she continued to talk about it for years,” says her daughter Julie Dunfey. She studied history, literature and theatre while there.

Ruth and husband William (Bud) Dunfey shared those passions. For Bud, a college degree came after his service as a Marine in World War II, when he attended UNH on the GI Bill. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a masters, in political science.

Bud was well known as the founder of Dunfey Hotels, a family business that grew into an international hotel chain beginning in the 1960s. But he was also just as well known for his role in state and national Democratic politics, having served as regional coordinator for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, among other roles, and having served as a UN ambassador under President Jimmy Carter. He also founded several newspapers.

Topics in the Dunfey household, says Julie, focused on current events, politics and history. “My history love started early,” recalls Julie, who is an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer best known for her work with Ken Burns on films such as “The Civil War,” “Country Music” and “The Dust Bowl.”

Ruth and Bud traveled extensively around the world — Tokyo, Beirut, Buenos Aires, and Beijing were among their destinations — with Julie joining when she could. “Their travel continued right up until my dad got ill,” Julie recalls.

The belief in travel and education — or travel as education — inspired the Dunfey family to create the endowed fund in the History Department in honor of William Dunfey. The goal is to “widen the world of UNH” by bringing in scholars from other places, as visiting professors or one-time lecturers, and to create conferences and events around those visits.

“This fund was meant to bring that international experience here to Durham for students who might not be able to travel,” says Julie. For her parents, “two kids from Dracut and Lowell,” the chance to be in so many different places, learning from a variety of cultures as they traveled, was an amazing opportunity.

In recent years, the fund helped the UNH History Department host USC professor Edgardo Perez Morales (historian of Latin America and the Caribbean) and Dartmouth professor Maurice Crandall (historian of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands). Each gave public talks, visited classes and met with graduate students. MIT history professor Chris Capozzola gave a lecture in October 2021 on citizenship and military service among Filipinos, and Iowa State University professor Michael Bailey spoke in March 2022 on ideas about witchcraft in the medieval period.

Ruth Dunfey passed away on September 14, 2022, at the age of 95. She’s survived by Julie, three grandchildren, a brother and several nieces and nephews.

The family encouraged memorial gifts be made to the B. Thomas Trout Scholars program at UNH, which provides funding for students to study abroad.

Julie says her parents lived “the trajectory of what I could call the 20th century life — they lived through the Depression and World War II and were part of the boom of the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. “Through it all my mother always had a good sense of adventure.”

She notes that both parents were always proud of their lifelong connection to UNH and the paths they took to get here.

“By the time I got my master’s [at Stanford], she had earned her bachelor’s at UNH,” Julie recalls. “She was pretty proud of that degree, and so were we.”