School Story:
[From 50th Reunion Yearbook...]
BA Boston University; Nurse Practitioner associated with Massachusetts General Hospital
Remembered by Estella Loomis Lauter:
Known as Susie at Northfield and Brooksie at Middlebury, Sue was one of our most generous, fun-loving, spontaneous and centered classmates. Instigator of many after-hours parties on the roof of Hillside in 1955-56, she was also a serious student of Biology and French. When she found out that I did not have the resources to go home for Easter break, she took me home with her to Manchester, NH, and her family introduced me to Boston, from the Commons and Filene’s Basement to that famous ice cream store (Brighams?) in Cambridge. We shared everything that year and planned to room together until we were both invited to be cops’ roomies and a fit of responsibility possessed us.
Sue met Tom Franklin at Middlebury; they married and moved to Boston, where he became a lawyer and she raised their three children. She continued to study, however, finishing her degree at Boston University, and eventually becoming a highly respected Nurse Practitioner. We saw each other once a year or so until I moved to the Midwest in 1969 and then we lost contact. In the spring of 1992, our 35th reunion year, she called and asked me to go back to Northfield with her. I couldn’t resist. She and Tom had divorced by then and she had found a new partner. Her daughter Sarah had become a well-known women’s studies researcher and theorist in Manchester, England. As we drove to and from Northfield, remembering and filling in the stories of our lives, she seemed so alive that her battle with breast cancer seemed to have been won. Her attention was turned outward, toward her children, and a current Northfield teacher whom she had known. She was so much “herself,” so free of airs, responsive to the present, attuned to healing as a way of life. Still hopelessly naïve about death, I believed that we would continue to meet well into our eighties. We kept in touch at Christmas but did not see each other again, and she did not tell me when the cancer returned. She remains a model for me, a touchstone, of realism, pleasure, proportion—practical wisdom. I can still see her “petite derriere swinging down the hall and hear her cheerful but also ironic greeting: “Hey bird!”
