Biography
Ruth McKay was arrested December 4, 2000 for trespass / disorderly conduct at the British Aerospace plant in Nashua, New Hampshire during the long-running weekly anti-war vigil. Sentenced to 10 days. Age 81; refused $260 fine.
A February 2005 account describes McKay, then 85, on dialysis and using a wheelchair, after more than twenty years of vigils at the BAE Systems plant in Nashua. The December 10–11, 2004 event was a thirty-hour sidewalk vigil explicitly held without civil disobedience that year. Thirty hours measures the vigil, not confinement. Mary Kate Small recalls earlier holding-cell, shackling and padlock actions, but the relative chronology does not independently resolve the conflicting December 2000 arrest dates in this record. Source: https://www.merrimackvalleypeopleforpeace.org/NewsFeb5.pdf#page=4
Birth-year source
Merrimack Valley People for Peace newsletter quoting her December 5, 2004 statement.
Separate December 2003 BAE arrest and March 2004 disposition
The March 2004 Merrimack Valley People for Peace newsletter individually names this participant among the eleven Chain Reaction Affinity Group protesters taken into police custody at BAE Systems in Nashua on December 22, 2003. Police separated their linked chains with bolt cutters and charged criminal trespass, with disorderly conduct applying to some participants. At the March 4, 2004 court proceeding the group entered no-contest pleas and received community service, between twenty and forty hours. The report does not individualize every charge or community-service total, nor give a jail-admission day, release day, or multi-day confinement. The December arrest and March court appearance must not be treated as continuous incarceration; community-service hours are not jail time. Ruth McKay is described as eighty-five, while Clare Gillam is separately described as eighty-nine. The unnamed eighty-nine-year-old given forty hours is therefore not used to assign Ruth that sentence. The age is compatible with, but does not refine, the existing year-only birth date. This 2003 action is separate from the older 2000 case.
Merrimack Valley People for Peace, March 2004, original pages 2–4 and February 24 minutes on page 6.