Her husband had left her. Taking off on his motorcycle -- the one that reminded her of their discovering Bob Dylan together -- he took up with a folk singer with long red hair.Forty years later, Ray still visibly recoils from the memories. It’s hard to say what makes that time so especially raw, whether it’s the heartbreak of his leaving or the facts of what he left behind: She was pregnant.
She had no one to lean on: Her parents had died, and she had grown up an only child in a California home where, she says, “we were really, really poor.” Her father was an opera singer turned B-movie actor. After he got a job with the Census Bureau, the family moved to the Washington area. Ray graduated from the University of Maryland but couldn’t find a well-paying job. It was a time of “stone fear,” she recalls. “That’s when I knew I was in trouble having an English degree.”
But she could work. And work more. And work harder. So she did.
“I had to make it,” she says. Read Tony Ray's story here.
And the question you may ask, "Is she is WPO member?" Not yet. But she could become one real soon.
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