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Brennan credited his time in the army with shaping his deep suspicion of government. While he was fighting at the front, his draft board sent a letter to his home stating he would be fined and imprisoned if he did not turn up for his physical. “Just goes to show how much the government knows about what’s going on,” he said. On April 4, 1919, Walter Brennan was one of six thousand returning troops that Governor Calvin Coolidge saluted as their ship docked. Six days later, while the demobbed Brennan was marching in a Swampscott parade, he spotted Ruth Wells, the daughter Lynn’s local sheriff, crossing the street. Walter’s and Ruth’s families knew one another, but Walter, three years older than Ruth, had not paid that much attention to her until he went away to war and began writing letters to her. When Ruth was six, she broke a bottle belonging to Walter’s mother, and nine-year-old Walter teased her to tears by telling her, “she’d get it when they got home.” During the war, she attended Simmons College, graduating in 1919 from a three-year program in secretarial studies, having taken courses not only in shorthand, typing, business practices, commercial law, and economics, but also in English, History, French, and German. Her yearbook entry in The Microcosm gives the impression of a lively and sociable personality with interests in the theater, parties, and dances. She was not one to sulk or spend much time worrying. “He kind of discovered you,” Ralph Edwards said to Ruth. “Oh, I did that,” she explained. “We were invited by Walter’s mother to dinner, my mother and my two sisters . . . Walter
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Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))