Coming of age as lesbian in the bad old days of the 1970s — as did Collingswood author Ruth A. Rouff — meant living a closeted life. There were no role models and no people in the public eye who admitted to being gay, because no laws existed to protect homosexuals from being fired from their jobs or otherwise discriminated against if they were “outed.”

Though not a wonderful era to live through if you yourself were gay, Rouff was able to store experiences from that time to later inform her fiction writing, memories that came in handy when she decided to reimagine a lesbian life for possibly the greatest female athlete of all time, Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, the subject of Rouff’s latest novel, Lone Star, published earlier this year.

Zaharias earned two Olympic track and field gold medals in the 1932 Games, and later became a legendary golfer who co-founded the modern-day ladies’ professional golf association (LPGA) before her untimely death at age 45 from canby cer. She married professional wrestler George Zaharias soon after meeting him at a celebrity golf tournament, but there are enough hints in factual accounts of her life that, as part of her reimagining, Rouff was able to infuse Lone Star with scenes of domestic normalcy and romantic intimacy between Babe and a fellow golfer. Betty Dodd met Babe through a mutual friend and eventually came to live in Babe and George’s home for the last six years of Didrikson’s life, caring for her through her final illness.

“I wanted to write this book because I wanted to read a book like this, and there weren’t any,” Rouff said. “The true story of Babe Didrikson’s life wasn’t out there.”

Even in Babe’s own autobiography, written with a ghost writer after she was diagnosed with colon cancer, she referred to Dodd as her “protégé,” and a 1985 movie about her life portrayed her husband as the great love of her life with no mention of Dodd.

“Babe very carefully and purposely cultivated a public image of heterosexuality,” Rouff noted. Not surprising because being a homosexual, or labeled as such, in America in the 1940s and 1950s was far worse during the Eisenhower years than during Rouff’s era.

Newly graduated with a degree in English Literature from Vassar College in 1976, Rouff, who grew up in Gloucester County, went to work for a Philadelphia book publishing company. On the weekends, she would hit the city’s popular lesbian bars, Sneakers in Old City and Mamzelles in Center City, to meet other lesbians.

“If you didn’t go out to the bars then, you didn’t have a social life,” she said. But she acknowledged she was fortunate to have been raised in “an extremely liberal family,” and felt comfortable bringing romantic partners home to meet her mother and others in her family. “My mother was somewhat disappointed (when I told her I was gay), but never made a big deal of me choosing female partners,” Rouff added.

The author said she didn’t dream of becoming a writer as a child, but always liked history and researching. A young readers’ biography of Babe introduced her to Didrikson’s unsurpassed athletic exploits; years later, after she became a writer of young readers’ books herself, she recalled that first book and decided to dig into the sports’ star’s life more closely.

Five long research years later, she was ready to start writing, a process that took two more years. A scholarly biography completed in 1996 by Susan E. Cayleff provided firsthand accounts of Dodd and Didrikson’s relationship that she relied on a great deal, said Rouff. “Once my research was finished, the novel fell together pretty well, as far as structure.”

Though not an athlete herself, Ruoff says she’s always enjoyed sports as a spectator, rooting for all the Philadelphia teams and taking in the summer Olympics, especially the track and field events Didrikson excelled in. But she knew almost nothing about golf. “I had to read Golf for Dummies,” she admitted with a smile.

Lone Star takes the reader back to 1911 in Beaumont, TX where Babe was born to first-generation Norwegian immigrants, the sixth of seven children. (Initially called Baby by her family because she was the youngest, the neighborhood boys picked up the nickname because she could hit a baseball as far as New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth.)

Rouff follows the young star through her high school years where she experiences catty teenage girls who dressed and applied makeup to attract boys, and the yearning she feels but doesn’t understand, for one particular girl. Through her Olympic exploits, barnstorming with a men’s baseball team, and the beginning of her golf career, Babe is often derided for acting “mannish” though she dressed as stylishly as her fellow competitors. The reader is drawn into every scene by Rouff’s descriptive settings and authentic dialogue.

By the time Babe is introduced to Betty Dodd through one of her longtime Texas friends, Rouff has transported her audience into her celebrity’s world, and there isn’t a moment that doesn’t feel genuine.

“Although her deep feelings for those who inhabit her works are obvious, she never sentimentalizes,” wrote one reviewer of Rouff’s earlier work, and indeed the many instances of the two women’s affection in the novel are candid yet never sappy.

“With the novel, I also wanted to shine a spotlight on American celebrity culture, the often enormous difference between a person’s public image, and who they truly are. What you see in the media isn’t always true,” said Rouff.

Lone Star has already sold out its first printing by Bedazzled-Ink, a small feminist press based in California, and the publisher has ordered a second printing. Rouff’s other published work includes three other books — a developmental reader’s biography of the 19th-century African- American activist, writer, and educator Ida B. Wells in 2010; Great Moments in Sports History, also a developmental reader, in 2012; and Pagan Heaven, a collection of contemporary narrative poems and short stories, in 2016.

She has published poems, short stories, and essays in numerous literary journals, writing in her spare time while she worked as an educator after she earned a master’s degree in education from St. Joseph’s University in 1999. She first taught in the Philadelphia public school system, calling it “extremely difficult,” then moved across the river to teach at-risk 16-to-23year-olds who had dropped out of high school in Camden’s Youthbuild program.

In 2002, Rouff moved to Collingswood, mainly, she says, “because even then, it was known as an up-and-coming place for gay people,” though at the time it was principally gay men who were moving in from Philadelphia and renovating homes.

“The best thing I ever did was buy a house in Collingswood,” she mused. “A good friend had bought a house here, and she took me for a walk around Knight Park one of the first weeks after she’d moved in and told me if she could afford to live here then I could. And I just loved the park, and I hadn’t even seen the other two parks (Newton Lake and Cooper River).

“Of course, the downtown is fabulous, it’s great to walk down there, and there’s always so much going on; I also love the community spirit we have,” Rouff said.

The popular annual book festival was another draw to select Collingswood for her permanent home over similar towns, and she later was a featured author at severalfestivals.In2013,Collingswood made headlines for being one of the first towns in New Jersey to permit gay couples to apply for marriage licenses, three days before then-Governor Chris Christie signed an executive order making it legal for gay couples to marry.

Rouff also volunteered as a promoter for the now-defunct Collingswood Shakespeare Company that used to perform in town at the Holy Trinity Church and the American Legion Tatem-Shields chapter, indulging her love of the bard. Now retired from teaching, her next writing projects are narrative poems focusing on the events of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Red Bank, inspired by the recent discovery of Hessian soldier remains, and the lives of the Keats brothers, the famous English poet John, and his less-famous brother George, who came to America to seek his fortune and succeeded handsomely.

Fast-forward 50 years from the bad old closeted days of the 1970s, and Ruth Rouff is glad to be able to bring her reimagined life of a legend to the masses, because as she says, “back then, people’s sexuality just wasn’t talked about.” Betty Dodd, who lived long enough to see gay rights watershed moments like the Stonewall uprising and later the million-strong March on Washington in the late 1980s, would have surely approved of Rouff’s account. As Rouff writes: “New women athletes were coming along, Betty was pleased to see, who didn’t care so much about what the world thought of them. These women stars, like tennis player Martina Navratilova, would be damned if they girly-ed themselves up the way Babe felt she had to. And though no LPGA member had yet to come out as gay, Betty suspected it was just a matter of time.”

“I feel fortunate because I could identify with Babe, with the press questioning her femininity at every opportunity,” Rouff summed up. “I felt what she was going through, with absolutely no role models. I want readers of today to know about the accomplishments of our lesbian heroes.”