Sue Severin

     Sue Severin, 83, a San Anselmo and Marin County, CA mainstay for 42 years, passed away peacefully from Alzheimer’s Disease on Tuesday, November 17th, 2020, in Grants Pass, Oregon. Her son and his wife were by her side as she passed, singing her songs and Quaker spirituals.

     Born in San Francisco, CA on June 17th, 1937, to Beatrice Lucille Lang and Rudolph Henry Severin, Sue was a woman ahead of her time, and she challenged the times to catch up to her. She was one to always say yes to new experiences and new adventures. She was not bound by the expectations of her generation, and as an adult she worked to expand and improve the reach and effectiveness of women’s rights and social justice work. She worked on the early political campaigns of Barbara Boxer and Lynn Woolsey, and was active in many organizations, including the Marin Women’s Commission, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas, the Marin County Alzheimer’s Association, and the Marin Death Penalty Moratorium Movement. She was able to turn intention into real, effective action in her pursuit of justice. In recognition of her international work, she received the Marin County Human Rights Commission’s MLK Humanitarian Award in the early 2000’s.

     Growing up in Burlingame and then Atherton, CA, with her older brother Gerald, she attended Atherton High School, graduating in 1955 with the first full class of the new school. Instead of heading straight to college, as was the norm, she opted to go to Paris for a year to live with her aunt, take art classes, study sauces at Le Cordon Bleu, and explore Europe. Returning home to attend Stanford, she intended to study medicine, but was discouraged by her advisors because they assumed she would soon get married and abandon her studies. Majoring instead in Political Science, she graduated in 1960 and moved back to Paris, intent on joining the U. S. Foreign Service. Passed over again due to her perceived nuptial risk, she instead took a job with the CIA on the Cuba desk, working out of the American Embassy in Paris. Reportedly, some of her duties included monitoring reel-to-reel tape recorders connected to bugged hotel rooms, then dropping the tapes in a dummy mailbox, or in a passing car. She sometimes carried a purse with a hidden camera, and her Embassy-supplied apartment doubled as a casual debriefing room for agents.

     Returning home to California again, she worked for the 1960 Nixon/Lodge presidential campaign (a fact she always laughed at later in life) before going back to school to get a Masters in English from San Francisco State. She started to pursue a Doctorate in Medieval Literature from Cal Berkeley, but ultimately left school because she felt that, as a woman in that time, she would not be hired for a university professorship.

     In the Bay Area in the late 60’s she attended some of the early Grateful Dead psychedelic light shows, one time even prodding her pre-law date to raise his hand when a young Bill Graham asked if there were any lawyers in the house, as the Fire Marshall was shutting them down due to overcrowding. The four of them went in the back room and hammered out a capacity deal so that the show- and many more after it- could continue.

     In 1969 a mutual friend introduced her to Walt Barney, a New Englander transplanted to California. They went to the rock concerts at the Fillmore and at Altamont, protested the war in Vietnam, attended the Free Speech rallies in Berkeley, and though older than the hippies of the day, generally fell in with the hippie/activist activity of the time. In 1970 they bought a small house in San Anselmo, CA, and for a couple of years they practiced yoga, grew sprouts, fixed up the house, and baked bread. They had one son, Ezra, in 1971. A little over a year after Ezra’s birth, Sue & Walt decided to split up, yet they retained a close personal and parental relationship for the rest of Sue’s life. Sue raised Ezra mainly as a single mom on food stamps and stockpiled farina, teaching English classes at SF State, editing local newsletters, and freelance bookkeeping. She also taught childbirth classes to many expectant Marin mothers.

     In a quest to find some spirituality for her and her son that was more in line with her increasingly progressive world views, she discovered the Society of Friends (Quakers), whose  tenets of peace, equality, good works and speaking truth to power would inspire much of her later life choices.

     Trips with her were always educational, such as visiting all the California Missions in one loop, or seeing the great pyramids in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, or touring nearly every castle and museum in the British Isles- with researched background context about the cultural experience available to any lucky companion.

     As an alternative to traditional summer family camp, each summer she pitched in with other Friends to renovate a Quaker boarding school, sleeping out under the stars for a week and making lasting connections with like-minded folk over several decades of attendance.

     She was always on the lookout for ways to educate where she perceived a lapse. At a B&B in Scotland in 2003, Sue, opening up the door of the host’s car on her way to professionally inspect the acceptability of their baby seat, aroused the attention of the co-manager, his wife, who shouted up the stairs, “she’s into the back seat!” Sue’s attention was often laser-focused on the task at hand, and while she occasionally ruffled some feathers, her ego-less interest in helping people usually balanced the scales.

     She never let her short stature affect her ability to get brash men to listen to her. In her capacity as co-manager of Wilbur Hot Springs, she once ousted rowdy bathhouse crashers with a judiciously-shone flashlight.

     In 1985, when her son went to live with his father in Berkeley, Sue decided to get further involved in social justice work. She joined Witness for Peace, a newly formed organization whose mission at that time was to bring U.S. citizens to Nicaragua and document the conflict between the governing Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed Contra rebels. She spent the majority of the next two years in Bluefields, on the east coast of Nicaragua. Gregarious and endlessly curious, she quickly became well known in the area, earning the nickname “Chela” for her fair hair. She worked with the local people there to gather information on what was happening in their country, and regularly sent reports to folks back home on the real effects of U.S. military policy to counter the misinformation being put out by the U.S. State Dept. She reported being close to the fighting only one time- but said she was never fearful. She was there to do a job that she believed in passionately- helping people find a path toward peace and justice.

     Back stateside in 1987, she again went back to school to get her Masters in Public Health from San Jose State. She moved back to San Anselmo and became the Public Health Educator for the County of Marin, working in tobacco cessation, breast and prostrate cancer prevention, and HIV testing. She developed the Marin County Car Seat Program, which provided seat safety education to the county and up-to-date car seats to low income families.

     Sue had a strong conviction to help others if she was able. She not only talked the talk, she walked the walk. Upon meeting a woman in her neighborhood who was homeless and sleeping in a car, Sue opened her home to the woman for several months until she could get back on her feet.

     Sue had her own experience with Alzheimer’s before it inhabited her own mind. She was closely involved with her mother’s end-of-life care, and spent many weekends traveling between San Anselmo and Atherton to help care for her declining mother and her loving but increasingly vexed father. Looking for resources and finding little, she was instrumental in starting the Marin County Alzheimer’s Support Group.

     In the 1990’s she began a series of trips to observe elections and train delegates in countries around the world. Starting with the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador in 1994, she continued joining and leading delegations to Chiapas, Guerrero, East Timor, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Already fluent in French and Spanish, she was learning Arabic in her 70’s as she traveled with Bare Root Trees for Afghanistan to plant trees in conflict worn areas. She even managed to obtain some red wine there by calling a shopkeeper’s bluff, telling him she knew from a reliable source that he had some, now go in the back, please, and bring it out. He did.

     She was at times a scholar, a spy, an activist, an educator, a devoted mother, a health nut, a political campaign manager, an international election observer, a dedicated walker and talker, and a ruthless recycler. She believed in peaceful resolution of conflict, and worked tirelessly towards social justice for all people. She was committed to creating a world where everybody could have equal access to food, shelter, health care and education.

     She is survived by her son Ezra and his wife Manda, Ezra’s father Walt (Cliff) Barney, and her cat, Maya. 

     Memories or stories of Sue may be sent to ezraseverin@gmail.com. If you wish to give something in her name, she would approve of donating to the Alzheimer’s Association or any social justice oriented charity.