A plea on Twitter reconnects a once at-risk Bay Area youth with a woman who cared

Heather Ringo was 12 years old when her father died in 2001. Devastated and stunned, she didn’t attend his funeral. But a woman who’d gone on a few hikes with her in the preceding year did show up, hoping to see the little girl and perhaps offer her some comfort. After scanning the gathered mourners and not seeing the preteen, though, Nancy Frumkes left.

Twitter: can you help me find this woman? She was my “Big Sister” (from Big Brothers Big Sisters) in early 2000s in Marin County, CA. She saved my life when I was an at-risk youth enduring extreme trauma and abuse.

I want to tell her thank you. pic.twitter.com/q9ie5LrjRs

— Heather Ringo (@FeralHeather) August 14, 2022

It would be 21 years before they’d meet again.

The program that brought Ringo and Frumkes together more than two decades ago was Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS). The platform that facilitated their renewed contact in 2022 was Twitter.

In August, Ringo had been going through old photos and letters from her childhood and came across a picture of her as a tween. In it, she is a tiny child, almost swallowed up in jeans, a black sweatshirt and a large hat. She is sitting on a plaid couch next to a smiling woman also in jeans and a black shirt. Ringo could not remember the woman’s name. But she had never forgotten the quiet support this person gave her during one of the hardest periods of her difficult early life.

Ringo’s father, Ian Stewart, grew up in Marin and worked for the Marin Parks and Recreation Department. He and Ringo bonded over shared time in the outdoors, whether it was searching for red-legged frogs in Point Reyes, camping in the redwoods up north, or fishing in local lakes. “He would take all of his vacation time and save it up so we could spend a week or two camping,” she recalls. He taught her outdoor skills, including foraging for edible plants, and they’d even get up early some mornings to try their hand at surfing.

Ringo’s mother struggled with addiction and mental health issues.

“I want to express this in a way that’s empathetic to my mother, yet recognizing that her behavior has harmed me,” Ringo says. The health problems “made her not the best mom, even though it’s very clear she wanted to be.” Escapes into nature with her father were his way of taking her “out of a kind of sketchy home life.”

Entering the system

When Ringo was 9 years old, the police arrested her mother for attacking her father. “That’s when I officially entered the system,” she says. Her family moved into low-income housing in Corte Madera, and then the bottom fell out completely.

Shortly after the move, Ringo’s father was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, an almost invariably fatal neurological disease that destroys the nerves used for movement.

At first, he couldn’t button a shirt. Then the lifelong athlete began falling off of his bike, a major signal that something was wrong. Stewart had been one of the original mountain bikers in Northern California, part of the “Larkspur Canyon Gang” in the 1960s and 1970s. Group members were known for blasting down Mount Tamalpais on their “clunkers,” bikes modified for hurtling downhill at terrifying speeds.

His illness put an end to outdoor adventures. It also put an end to Ringo’s ability to flourish in school, in sports and socially. After he became ill, “I started skipping school, running away, I didn’t care about schoolwork — my grades went from As to Ds and Fs,” she recalls. Her mother was not available to support or help her.

Ringo can’t remember exactly how Big Brothers Big Sisters got involved, but at one point, she was hospitalized for malnutrition. And some social service or community organization must have connected her with BBBS, which in turn connected her with Frumkes.

The pairing proved to be quiet but tenuous. “At the time, I wanted to have kids and I couldn’t,” says Frumkes, which motivated her to sign up as a Big Sister. “I really want to have a nice relationship and give back to somebody in the neighborhood.”

“After we matched, we met and talked about the things we both liked, hiking in Marin, going outdoors, that kind of thing,” Ringo recalls. So that’s what they did.

“We basically did a lot of hiking, just getting out in nature,” says Frumkes, who still lives in Marin. A tenet of BBBS is that mentors don’t focus on material gifts, so that “it’s really about the experiences,” Frumkes remembers. “So I would make some treats, some cookies, and we’d try to go out and enjoy nature. She was a really sweet girl, kind of quiet, shy.”

Outdoor connection

The outdoor connection sealed Ringo’s attachment for Frumkes. “I was inside a lot because my dad was sick, and I was in this place that was full of sickness and literally dark,” she says. When Frumkes took her on hikes, “I remember feeling the sun shining through the madrone or manzanita trees, the air smelling good, like fresh outdoor air. I remember her baking me things and I was eating things that tasted good that somebody made for me.” With these simple acts, “this person treated me like I had potential … like I was worthy of love and kindness.”

It’s something Ringo hopes others see in “really any person exhibiting unpalatable behaviors, that they are often the result of trauma,” she says. “Often it’s the folks who are acting out who need more love than anyone.”

Frumkes met Ringo’s father at least once. “I remember coming to her house and her dad being disabled and trying to communicate through the computer, writing things down.” As for Ringo, “we had a nice little bond, although she would flake on me a lot.”

Ringo uses the same word. “I had flaked a bunch of times, I’d run away, I didn’t want to leave my room,” she remembers, “but it wasn’t because I didn’t like Nancy. I loved Nancy. It was just that I was so depressed.”

Things only got darker. The day Ringo’s father died, she was going on a summer camp trip to Six Flags. Just before departing, she’d become upset and told her father that she hated him. He still gave her $20 for snacks. At the amusement park, she went to the gift shop and used it instead to buy him a silver necklace with a surfer dangling from it, homage to their early morning outings at Bolinas Beach. On her return home, she learned he had died.

“I had the necklace in my hand to give to Dad and apologize, and I freaked out and yelled ‘Dad! Dad!’, and someone came up and hugged me and said, ‘He’s gone.’” Ringo locked herself in her father’s bedroom and refused to leave for several days. And she couldn’t bring herself to attend his funeral.

Frumkes did. “I remember going to the funeral,” she says, “and tried to look for her, and that was really it. I never heard from her ever again.”

Downward spiral

The spiral of Ringo’s life continued downward for the next several years. She was sent for “wilderness therapy” in rural Montana, a cog in the wheels of the notorious “troubled teen industry.” Ringo stayed for a few years in what she describes as “cult-like Christian all-girls facility.” After she left, she completed high school in Montana, where supportive adults finally started reversing the spiral.

Her music teacher made an especially powerful gesture. In planning a program, he selected a composer who had died recently of ALS. “He announced it on stage and turned to look at me, talking about the legacy of people, of this guy who had ALS,” she says. “I felt so seen in that moment, the way I felt seen when Nancy was feeding me and taking me hiking.”

The memory of Frumkes’ influence drove Ringo to sign up as a Big Sister herself when she reached adulthood, after earning an English degree at the University of California at Berkeley and while completing a master’s in English at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska.

One day, going through those old photos, Ringo found that picture of the two of them, and “suddenly it all just flooded back, that feeling of someone believing in you when you don’t believe in yourself and how huge that was.” But with memory gaps widened by trauma, she couldn’t even remember Frumkes’ name.

So she turned to Twitter, posting the photo and asking for help finding the woman in the picture. She had “saved my life when I was an at-risk youth enduring extreme trauma and abuse,” Ringo tweeted. “I want to tell her thank you.”

‘Nice Nancy’