Later Years
Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970. She had a modified radical mastectomy, which was often used at the time to combat the disease, and because of difficulties in finding a good breast prosthesis, she decided to make her own. Handler went on to found a company, Ruthton Corp., formed by her and Peyton Massey, which manufactured a more realistic version of a woman's breast, called "Nearly Me".
Though the Handlers took a more hands-off approach to their company's business practice after resigning, they still kept creating more ideas. One project Handler took on in the 1980s was Barbie and the Rockers. She was credited as a writer of the 1987 film Barbie and the Rockers: Out of this World. Handler was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1997.
She died in California from complications of surgery for colon cancer on April 27, 2002, aged 85. Her husband Elliot died nine years later at the age of 95.
Read more about this topic: Ruth Handler
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Jim Wilson: Cops have no friends. Nobody likes a cop. On either side of the law. Nobody.
Captain Brawley: Is that what you want? People to like you? Then you’re in the wrong business and you ought to get out.
Jim Wilson: It’s the only job I know. Has been for eleven years now.
Captain Brawley: Then make up your mind to be a cop. Not a gangster with a badge.”
—A.I. (Albert Isaac)
“A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farmhouses.... This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)