Irma Ruckstuhl died peacefully in her North Truro home on June 23, 2024. The author of Old Provincetown in Early Photographs, she was an antiques expert, gift shop owner, and historian, and had served as treasurer and board member of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She was 93.
The daughter of Max Korovin and Sylvia Carol Silverman, Irma was born on March 23, 1931, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she grew up. Her mother died when Irma was 14.
Irma studied journalism at New York University and for a time attended Wellesley College. In 1952, she began spending her summer vacations in Provincetown. In an email to writer David W. Dunlap, Irma described her first summer rental, costing $300 for the season, at 42 Pearl St.
“It was comfortable and mostly up to date,” she wrote, “but still had a large oak icebox where Loring Russell deposited a large block of ice at regular intervals. Munro Moore, who I knew from Wellesley, came to stay for a weekend, camping out on the kitchen floor, with Joan Didion, then an unknown.”
In 1955, Irma married Kurt Robert Ruckstuhl, a Swiss immigrant, in Wellfleet, and the couple settled in to live successively in Wellfleet, Provincetown, and Truro. Irma worked briefly for an upstart newspaper in Provincetown called the New Beacon, owned by Meda and Gus Aust. She and Kurt later made their mark in town as owners of several retail businesses, all gift shops.
In Building Provincetown, Dunlap wrote: “The Ruckstuhls were a prominent couple on the scene. At one time, they operated four shops simultaneously: the Candlemakers, at 220 Commercial Street; the Old Village Store, at 244 Commercial Street; the Corner Gift Shop, at 248-250 Commercial Street, and the Emporium, at 352 Commercial Street.” They opened their first, the Old Village Store, in 1958.
Irma not only ran businesses but also learned the history of the buildings she occupied and of the gift shop business in Provincetown more broadly. In a March 2020 article in this newspaper, Irma wrote: “When my husband, Kurt, and I bought the house at 244 Commercial St., in 1958, it was still a remarkably intact 18th-century building. We always spoke of it as the Pfeiffer house, after its previous owner, the artist Heinrich Pfeiffer, but it should more properly have been called the Chapman house, for Samuel Chapman, the earliest owner I could trace.”
For Irma, shops were not merely vehicles for making money; they were windows into history, preservation, and community. She sold the Chapman House in 1967, and now, “It is lost, sadly,” she wrote, and “there is no way to bring it back.”
In 1987, Irma published her influential book Old Provincetown in Early Photographs, a collection of 107 photographs of Provincetown taken in the early 1900s, including shots of the Marconi Wireless Station before its towers were dismantled, the construction of the Pilgrim Monument, and tourist steamers from Boston.
“A tremendously popular” book, wrote Dunlap in an email, “it seemed to be on coffee tables and bookshelves in town in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Irma’s lengthy, erudite, knowledgeable, and insightful captions on Louis Snow’s photos from the turn of the 20th century amounted to an amazingly rich historical text. All of the town chroniclers who followed are forever in her debt.” The book was reissued by PAAM in 2007.
Irma’s historical interests extended beyond shops and photography. In 2003, she co-curated with Claire Sprague a PAAM exhibition, “The Jeweler’s Art: Four Provincetown Silversmiths, 1940s-1960s.”
In 2014, Lexington Press published Irma’s A Lady Buys, a social history about a woman from one of the founding families of Bridgewater.
Irma was a devoted volunteer and served on numerous boards and committees, including the Provincetown Zoning Board of Appeals, the Truro Historical Commission, and the boards of the Truro Historical Society and the Truro Neighborhood Association.
As a volunteer at the Truro Library, Irma vetted and sold rare books on eBay; she also served as treasurer of the Truro Historical Museum and was on the board of the Truro Conservation Trust. She continued her volunteer work, often online during the pandemic, into her 90s.
Irma led an active social life. “For years,” she wrote, “I’ve been going out to lunch on Mondays with a group begun by Ruth Hiebert; sometimes as many as 20 of us, but sadly over time this has dwindled until the last few of us decided this year that the Monday Lunch Group had come to an end.”
In 1999 she and Kurt sold their last shop, and a year later Kurt died. Irma remained active, traveling with her friend Bob Harrison on tours to India, Burma, Ethiopia, and Cuba. “This sometimes elicited much speculation from fellow tour members,” Irma wrote, “who couldn’t seem to accept our relationship as absolutely platonic. But then I guess the other possibilities were much more interesting.”
In response to being told that she was both adored and revered, Irma wrote: “I love being adored, but ‘revered’ makes me very much feeling my ‘senior’ status! And despite the body saying 90 next March, the brain still thinks 50.”
Irma leaves no close relatives or next of kin.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. A memorial celebrating Irma’s life will be held on a date to be announced.
