Ralph Gray Hemingray

RALPH HEMINGRAY PASSES.

When death came Tuesday afternoon to claim Ralph G. Hemingray, the Muncie manufacturer, it robbed the community and the world of a gentleman - a gentleman in the finest sense of that much abused term. For Ralph Hemingray possessed all the attributes of one who has a gentle nature, some of which are these:

Unfailing courtesy, consideration for others and insistence upon the preservation of their rights, truthfulness, and absolute honesty.

And although it was wholly foreign to his nature to hate, there was one thing he hated and that was hypocrisy. A believer himself in the right of all others to live their own lives in their own way so far as that was consistent with the protection of society, he detested policies whether public or private, that tended to restrict the privileges of the individual. For that reason he could never be a bitter political partisan, and he never was. He had firm beliefs along political lines but he was tolerant of the beliefs of others on almost any subject and ever willing to admit that they might be right and his wrong.

As a giver he was generous to all worthy causes but he believed in not allowing his right hand to know what his left hand was doing. Publicity was distasteful to him and he disliked ostentation in any form. His fondness for his friends was of the genuine, heart-warming kind. He wished those he liked to understand it. His cordiality was a marked characteristic and it never was misplaced, for about Ralph Hemingray was nothing of the hypocrite.

This death will be mourned with great sincerity not only by the scores of persons here and elsewhere that he considered his intimate friends but by hundreds of others who knew him only slightly but had been charmed by his pleasant manner. The death of Ralph Hemingray is a community loss.