INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — When Ruth Ann Holt gets into decorating the turtle sculptures auctioned off by the Mental Health Association, it doesn’t take much to transport her. Attaching her trademark sculpted mermaids to a fiberglass turtle form, Holt has had an artistic hand in several of the bale of turtles (yes, that’s the word) found around Vero that for the past five years have helped fund a walk-in mental health clinic.
The clinic, offering counseling and psychiatric services at low or no cost, served 8,600 people last year.
On Feb.17, a half-dozen more will be auctioned off at the MHA’s annual fundraiser at Maison Martinique. Three of those turtles, “table-top” size this time instead of the towering 6-foot specimens, will be Holt’s creations.
“I kind of go into a fantasy world,” she says, describing the effect on her own happiness quotient of sculpting the doll-like, pastel figures, the sort that would send a little girl over the moon.
The real world, though, had a similar effect on the toddler mermaid perched on the turtle’s back, when the sculpture, displayed on the grassy lawn of a downtown office building, got smacked in a traffic accident in the middle of the night.
The six-foot-tall sculpture she calls “Turtle Tot,” with a shell-collecting baby mermaid on its back, got smashed when two vans slammed into each other and jumped the curb in front of sponsor David Croom’s office building at State Road 60 and Old Dixie Highway, knocking the little mermaid in a sailor cap off her perch.
“We hadn’t even had the auction yet,” recalls Holt of the 2007 incident. “The turtle went flying and the mermaid went flying.”
She says she was “just devastated.”
The little mermaid had already been through its share of problems, when its epoxy sculpting medium cracked in the drying process when it was first being made.
This time, the damage was more dramatic.
“I had to redo the fin on her tail and the fiberglassing and redo the rebar in the turtle structure. It was like putting Humpty Dumpty together again.”
She wrapped up repairs just in time to go on display with the rest of the turtles at Riverside Park.
Just as she was setting up the huge creature, a truck hauling an inflatable bounce house was parked and left in gear without its brake set, Holt says.
Suddenly, Holt heard yelling: the truck had begun to roll, and backed directly into the turtle.
“The lady ran to the truck to try to stop it but what stopped the truck was my turtle,” says Holt.
Holt says she burst into tears “like an idiot.”
The husband of the truck’s driver quickly brought her a beer, a cold Corona.
It was 8 a.m.
“He told me, ‘It’s 5 o’clock somewhere,’ ” she said. “I think they were afraid I’d sue.”
Eventually the turtle was repaired again, and eventually, it sold; although Holt doesn’t recall the dollar amount it raised; her first large turtle went for $24,000.
Today, Holt has become known as “Ruth the turtle doctor,” called on to repair a number of turtles around town in her garage, what she refers to as the “turtle hospital.”
“Everybody asks me, ‘Aren’t you sick of it?’ But I just love it,” says Holt, who also creates life-size Santas for Riverside Children’s Theatre’s holiday benefit, the Festival of Trees.
For those, she typically uses PVC pipe to build a skeletal frame, building a skull from aluminum foil and a Styrofoam ball, and covering the exterior with “skin” made from felt and thinned Elmer’s glue.
She adorns the faces with beards of angora wool, and dresses the characters in vintage clothes she finds in thrift shops, including furs.
Though she sometimes takes an honorarium, the balance of the money goes to charity.
“It makes me feel good,” she says.
A Vero Beach resident since 1992, Holt, a native of Annapolis, Md., first lived on her power boat at the Vero Beach Marina.
She came here largely for the arts community, she says. Right away, Holt joined the art museum and the art club, and for a while was a member of the Artists Guild when it had a gallery on the beach.
“I know there are a lot of artsy towns in Florida,” she says. “But I feel I’ve done more here in my art than I could have done anywhere else. It was more conducive to getting involved here.”
Though her field was marketing, she eventually went back to school to become a home health care practitioner, working mostly in hospice care.
When she met her husband, John Holt, who was living on his sailboat, he eventually joined her on her boat.
Today, they live in an elevated house they found in 2000 after reading an alluring advertisement: “Tarzan, bring Jane and live in the treetops.”
She uses the garage space below for her turtles and Santas.
She also has a thriving business decorating people’s homes for Christmas – she calls herself the Mistletoe Miss.
Since then, she has been involved in a number of community projects, always with her art or decorating skills. It was Holt who painted the pink flamingos on the wheelchairs in the Indian River Medical Center reception area, and built giant figures of the Harry Potter characters Dumbledore and Hagrid for a party for the teenage volunteers there.
Recently, she came up with the idea of decorating boot forms instead of turtles and auctioning them at the annual Cattle Baron’s Ball.
She also does paintings on wood inspired by local vintage photographs, one of which won honorable mention at a juried show at the A.E. Backus Gallery in Fort Pierce.
Holt sees the series of calamities of her own turtle and the wear-and-tear on the others she repairs as a metaphor for the mental health clinic itself.
“It couldn’t be more appropriate,” she says. “You don’t go through life without things happening to you. It may be overwhelming at some point, but then you get professional help and you survive it. Things happen in our lives, and you’ve just got to pick yourself up, get help, and you’ll get through it.”
