Jim Ruby

For Hays businessman, success came quietly

Buda man who was killed in plane crash developed much of county years before population boom.

By Miguel Liscano
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, June 02, 2005

SAN MARCOS — He was a successful businessman who built many of the subdivisions now studding northern Hays County, and a year ago — in his mid-70s — he learned to fly a plane.

"Jim Ruby was fully alive," said the Rev. Lex Breckinridge, rector at Ruby's church. "He had a humor, a sense of fun and mischief, a twinkle in his eye. He just lit up every room he was in."

Ruby, 76, died Friday night after his ultralight aircraft crashed at his ranch off of RM 967. His funeral was held Wednesday in Austin.

His friends remember a man who raised axis deer and black buck antelope on his ranch just west of Buda and traveled throughout the United States and Europe with Peggy, his wife of 51 years.

He was the son of Cecil Ruby, the contractor who built much of Interstate 35. Cecil was a legendary "outsized Texas character," said Bill Cunningham, who met Jim Ruby in the late 1970s when Cunningham worked for the Hays County Commissioners Court.

Although Jim Ruby shared his father's business sense, Cunningham said, the son didn't have the outsized personality.

"To meet him you would never guess he was someone who obviously had a great deal of business success and probably a large amount of money," Cunningham said of Jim Ruby. "Unless you knew him, or knew about him, he wasn't going to promote himself."

And he didn't want others promoting him, either, Breckinridge said.

"The only time, in all the years I knew him, that he ever got agitated with me was one time when I . . . a little too profusely, thanked him for some generous gift he'd given us up here," Breckinridge said. "He pulled me aside after this meeting and he said, 'Don't thank me like that in public. It embarrasses me.' " Cunningham said Ruby realized, perhaps years before anyone else, the potential for growth in northern Hays County. He built numerous subdivisions in the area, and sold part of his ranch in the 1990s to a developer who created the Ruby Ranch subdivision.

"He was way ahead of the curve on that," Cunningham said.

Years later, Ruby accomplished another personal goal.

He bought an experimental aircraft a couple of weeks before the crash and put it together himself. Ruby was practicing touch-and-go landings shortly before 8 p.m. with his 49-year-old son, Cecil Ruby III.

During their third round of landings, they clipped a tree and crashed, a Texas Department of Safety trooper said. His son escaped with sore ribs and an ankle injury.

"In some ways it's neat and right that he died doing something he was so passionately engaged with," Breckinridge said. "He wanted to wring every drop out of every second of life."