Services set for author Ruth Moore BASS HARBOR - Private funeral services will be held next spring for Maine author Ruth Moore, 86, who died at a Mt. Desert Island hospital Saturday. Between 1943 and 1979 the Gott's Island native produced 14 novels and two volumes of verse about the peo- ple who live along the Maine coast. Her works were distributed by ma- jor book clubs, condensed by Reader's Digest and published in six languages. In the mid-1940s, 20th Century Fox Studios purchased the rights to her novel "Spoonhandle" and changed the Bass Harbor writer's life forever with the presentation of a $50,000 cashier's check. "It set me free," the author told a Bangor Daily News reporter in 1987. "It freed me from those $45-per- week secretarial jobs in New York. I really felt like the sky was opening up and that I could do what I wanted to do." "I didn't want all the money in the world," she said in the 1987 inter- view. "I just wanted my freedom." Moore was a graduate of New York State College for Teachers in Albany and held an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the Univer- sity of Maine. Her early career in- cluded a year of teaching and work as an associate editor of The Reader's Digest. Moore is survived by two sisters, Esther M. Trask of Bass Harbor and Louise M. Dow of West Tremont, as well as many nieces and nephews. BDN 12/5/1989