Meeting minutes, contracts, financial records, tour records, correspondence, and other materials related to business operations of the Ruth Page School of Dance and the Ruth Page Foundation, including the Chicago Opera Ballet and the Chicago Ballet. Included are meeting minutes, memos, and other documents related to the Chicago Ballet Board of Directors; files documenting Ruth Page’s donations to the Chicago History Museum and the New York Public Library; guest lists and mailing lists; and various other business-related materials. Chicago Ballet materials also include information about the founding and dissolution of the company, and its relationship to the Ruth Page Foundation.

Correspondence details a variety of employee, scheduling, and other business matters, with letters from Ruth Page, Thomas Hart Fisher, Sheila Malkind, Larry Long, and other employees of the school and foundation. There is also considerable correspondence from Chicago law firm Jenner & Block, primarily from the Foundation’s longtime attorney Ronald Reicin.

Financial materials include statements, insurance, payroll and expenses, as well as the estates of Ruth Page and Thomas Hart Fisher, and their joint investments, including real estate. The personal finances of both Page and Fisher were deeply intertwined with those of the Ruth Page Foundation, the Ruth Page School of Dance, and the Chicago Ballet, and there is much overlap. Legal materials include contracts with various dance organizations as well as employee matters and the lawsuit Ruth Page initiated against Knopf books over a misidentified photograph of her.

Page and her employees kept extensive files on other dance companies and arts organizations, and the Other Companies materials include publicity information on these groups, and in many cases, correspondence.

Tour records are not comprehensive, but detail life on the road from roughly the 1940s-1960s and include primarily schedules and expenses of American tours. Of particular interest are the reviews and comments from a 1950 performance in Paris, which describes a conflict Page and her company had with the French dance community, also reported extensively in French and American newspapers.