Larry Ruttman

Larry Ruttman in his Brookline, Massachusetts office in 2012
Born	(1931-02-08) February 8, 1931 (age 86) Boston, Massachusetts, US
Occupation	attorney and author
Alma mater	University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston College Law School
Notable works	Voices of Brookline (2005) American Jews and America's Game (2013)

Lawrence A. "Larry" Ruttman (born February 8, 1931) is an American attorney and author. He is best known for his two books of biographical cultural history,Voices of Brookline and American Jews and America's Game.

Larry Ruttman was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Doris Grandberg Ruttman and Morris "Moe" Ruttman and moved to Brookline, Massachusetts at the age of two. He graduated from Brookline High School, received a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and earned a J.D. from Boston College Law School in 1958. From 1952 to 1954, he served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, and was honorably discharged as a First Lieutenant. He married Lois Raverby on November 3, 1963.

Larry Ruttman has practiced law in Brookline since 1960. He was an Assistant Attorney General in the civil rights section of the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General from 1960 to 1962. He is a fellow of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation, the charitable partner of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and served on the Board of Governors of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys (MATA) in the 1980s. He was an elected Brookline Town Meeting member from 1958 to 1968, an elected Democratic Town Committee member from 1960 to 1976, and an appointed member of the Brookline Cable Trust from 1984 to 1986.

Ruttman's career as a published writer began at age 67, when he accompanied a friend from a Plymouth, Massachusetts rowing club to the World Pilot Gig Championships on the Isles of Scilly in the United Kingdom. His article about the event, "Row Hard No Excuses," was published as the cover story of the boating magazine Messing About in Boats. The next year, his article about the team's trip to the Dutch Open Gig Championships again made the magazine's cover.

In the early 2000s, Ruttman was chosen as an interviewer by founder and then-director Vivian Perlis of Yale University's Oral History of American Music, which has preserved "audio and visual memoirs in the voices of the major musical figures of our time" since the 1960s. In that capacity, Ruttman interviewed the American microtonalist composer Ezra Sims as well as Guggenheim and MacArthur-winning composer and pianist Ran Blake.