Ruth Clifford Engs is Professor Emeritus, Applied Health Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Since the mid-1990s she has been engaged in research on social movements related to health and public health issues with a focus on the Progressive Era. Early years Although born in Pennsylvania, Engs spent her formative years in the small town of Bethel, Vermont. She went through the local schools until her junior year in high school when she went to Cushing Academy, Ashburnham, Massachusetts Upon graduation in 1957 she entered the University of Vermont and graduated in 1961 with a B.A. in Liberal Arts (chemistry major and minors in biology and English literature). After college graduation she worked as the laboratory assistant in the Bacteriology Department of Harvard Medical School for two years. Deciding she did not like “bench research” and having the wanderlust, in the fall of 1963 she traveled to Australia on a freighter and returned a year later to San Francisco. She had noticed on her travels that registered nurses were able to get jobs anywhere, so she entered a two-year nursing program. In the mid-1960s she married her first husband, Bill Engs, whom she had met on a backpacking trip. After living in the Bay Area for five years, they went to Eugene, Oregon for graduate work. Although she like nursing she found she liked teaching better. At the University of Oregon she completed two master's degrees: counseling psychology and health education. After graduation and a divorce, she taught health education and nursing courses at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia for a year. While there with the help of medical and nursing students, she organized the “Med-Aid Station,” a street clinic, for the many youth who were coming to Canada during this era. Realizing the need for a doctorate, she went to, and graduated from, the University of Tennessee. For her dissertation she studied the "Personality traits and the health knowledge of telephone crisis intervention volunteers in the state of Tennessee." When she graduated from Tennessee, she started working as an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Health Science, Indiana University. She was tenured and promoted to associate and then full professor. She retired from teaching in 2003. During most of her first twenty years, Professor Engs explored factors for the determinants of behavior focusing upon university student drinking. This focus on alcohol originated from an invitation by the Dean of