The bulk of the file is Ruark's "Recollections Bearing on the Development of Physics, 1920-1926," which discusses his early life and education; his undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University (which occured via his enlistment in the army during World War I) where he worked with Lorain Sherman Hulburt, Herman I. Tomsen, Abraham Cohen, Frederick Musselman and Francis D. Murnaghan in mathematics, and Joseph S. Ames, A. Herman Pfund, and Robert W. Wood in physics; and his work with the Bureau of Standards in spectroscopy under Paul Foote and Fred L. Mohler. He also discusses the general atmosphere and conditions of physics research in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Washington D.C. and Baltimore; the Naval Research Laboratory, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the beginnings of "real physics" in America; work at Yale University, Gulf Laboratory in Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of North Carolina; the founding of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society; and his work in Alabama, at Oak Ridge, and in Washington. The file also contains a collection of various materials including a crriculum vitae and a list of publications; explanatory remarks on the publications; and a carbon typescript copy of a Johns Hopkins newsletter profile.