Susanna Matthay

Susanna Matthay was born on June 28, 1936, in Janesville, Wisconsin, to Frank and Elizabeth Matthay. She moved to Southern California with her mother and two siblings after her parents divorced. As a teen, she participated in American Friends Service Committee projects near her home as well as in rural Mexico and Germany.

After graduating from high school in Claremont at age 16, she received a scholarship to the University of Chicago. She later studied fine arts and social work at Pomona College and in graduate school at UCLA. Susanna married Jack Vale in 1961 and gave birth to their son, David, in 1962. After her divorce in 1964, she went to work as a social worker in Watts, California.

After obtaining a teaching credential in 1969, Susanna moved to Mendocino County, where she taught second grade at Redwood Elementary School in Fort Bragg.  She was caretaking her mother’s and stepfather’s property in Gualala, known as “The Farm,” when she met and married Ben Calderon. The couple moved to Point Arena, where they raised animals and gardened, and Susanna sang in local choirs while becoming active in politics.

In the mid-1970s, Susanna and Ben moved to Santa Rosa and became active in Earthquakers, a group of Bay Area Quakers and like-minded friends who dreamt of establishing an intentional community.  Susanna and Ben were two of the founding members of Monan’s Rill. In 1981, Susanna and Ben divorced, and she moved to Grass Valley, where she taught special needs and disabled students at several Schools.

Susanna retired in 1998 and moved back to the coast. She spent her time gardening, reading, doing crossword puzzles, making music, and quilting. Her quilts were displayed in the Oakland Museum, and she was once featured in a documentary about women quilters in the U.S. She delighted in designing new quilt patterns and loved working with fabric and geometry. Susanna enjoyed people, animals, and books. In addition to her many hobbies, she loved beachcombing, going to potlucks, and creating art from recycled materials.

Among the papers the family found after Susanna’s death was  a writing exercise in which Susanna composed her own obituary. Here is an excerpt: “Susanna lived amid the opposites, pulled this way and that by dualities of mind and body, home and career, group and solo. She learned by pursuing one thing vigorously, only to find she really wanted something else. Susanna found a joy in choral music that was perhaps her deepest group experience. She had an unwarranted faith in words and talk, and always hoped that talk could carry the spirit as well as music did. She saw the humor in the complex and the simple. She loved jokes and laughter and regrets having to give up wisecracking now. If she could write her own epitaph, perhaps she would say:  A lot of things don’t matter. Some things do. Hurry and find out which is which.”

Susanna died July 25, 2013, at her home in Gualala.