They had a lot of fun together. They talked about boys, although later Linda couldn’t remember Susie ever dating. They went to movies, played badminton, the only competitive sport that seemed to interest Susie. They swam at nearby Crystal Lake, hiked, canoed, and rode horses at Tanglewood Park (Susie had a gentling touch with animals, especially horses). Susie loved hunting Indian artifacts and attending antique auctions, and they regularly pursued those passions. They also frequently spent nights at one another’s houses.
Linda enjoyed staying with the Newsoms. She thought them warm, gracious, welcoming, and she liked the sense of openness she found there, the constant exchange of ideas that seemed so much a part of their family life.
Susie had been a bit shielded by her parents, Linda thought, but not overprotected. Nor had she been overindulged or pampered. Linda knew that Susie’s upbringing had been strict, but she detected no resentment about it. She knew, too, that both Susie and her mother were strong-willed, but she was never aware of any conflict between them. Although occasionally she saw Susie flash anger toward her mother, she never saw it returned by Florence. The Newsoms, she knew, were not the type to indulge emotional displays in front of others.
Susie had a direct manner, tended to view things as black or white, harbored a strong sense of right and wrong, and was quick to form an opinion and was unbending in her views. But even when her mother disagreed with her in Linda’s presence, she encouraged Susie to express herself.
“I never saw her mother trying to dominate or control Susie,” Linda said. “I always saw her encouraging her daughter to develop herself. The Newsoms were a very reasoned, logical family. They talked about things. There was no ‘This is the way it is and that’s it.’”
Chris Severn, who became close to Susie a few years later and spent time at the Newsom house, saw the situation between Susie and her mother a little differently.
“I always perceived there to be a cautiously respectful relationship,” she said. “Her mother hesitated to maybe be critical of Susie because of the reaction she would get.”
Family members knew that to be the case, for they were well aware of Susie’s propensity to anger quickly—and her unwillingness to forgive. They knew that the least thing might set her off, and she would retain resentment about it forever. They remembered a family friend who angered Susie by teasing that she was too pretty to be her father’s daughter. She stalked from his presence and never spoke to him again.
While Susie was in high school, Bob decided that his family needed more space. Florence’s mother, Annie Britt, was staying with them frequently, and the house offered little privacy. Bob bought a new, much larger house in a small, private subdivision called Green Meadows, two and a half miles west of his parents’ home. The ranch-style brick house, with a stone entranceway, looked to be single-story from the front, but because of the steep lot on which it was built, it was actually on two levels. The glassed back of the house looked onto a small pond at the edge of the lot. Florence moved reluctantly. She loved Rob-Su Acres and later said that some of the best years of her life had been spent there.
At the beginning of Susie’s senior year of high school, in the fall of 1963, she suffered the trauma of having to attend a new school filled with strangers. A consolidated high school, North Forsyth, had been built near Winston-Salem to accommodate students from three other schools, including Northwest. There Susie took part in but one extracurricular activity, the Anchor Club, a community service club for girls of strong character who displayed evidence of leadership—the club for girls at the school. That Christmas, when the club president drew up her traditional list of Christmas wishes for members, she made this one for Susie: “Biographies of royal families Susie would never dodge. Make her a history teacher somewhat like Mrs. Hodge.” Susie didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but teaching, her mother’s profession, was an option she was considering.
When the 422 seniors who made up the first graduating class of North Forsyth High walked to the front of Wait Chapel at Wake Forest College to receive their diplomas on June 4, 1964, Susie was among them, but she was not among the 32 honor graduates. When many of the graduates left on chartered buses the next day for a traditional class trip to New York and the World’s Fair, Susie was making ready for an outing at White Lake with friends. Riding a crowded, rowdy bus to New York was not her idea of fun.
Appropriately, Susie chose Queens College, a small, expensive, private school for young women in a wealthy area of Charlotte. She had been taken with the place when she visited with other family members to see her aunt Su-Su receive an honorary degree.
She liked Queens at first, joined her classmates in talking about the boys at nearby Davidson College, but eventually she began to feel uncomfortable and restricted. Too many of her classmates were frivolous, she complained, too concerned with clothes and cars and hairdos. She called them butterflies. Although many were from wealthy families, they clearly weren’t from “good families,” and good families didn’t necessarily have to be wealthy. “She never felt that was something you based on money,” her brother later explained. “She felt there was such a thing as genteel poverty.” As the family of her grandmother, Annie Britt Sharp, no doubt would attest. Susie said that she wanted a more serious, academic atmosphere for her studies, and after her sophomore year, she returned to Winston-Salem and enrolled as a history major at Wake Forest College, just a few miles from her home.
For 122 years, Wake Forest had been a small college supported by Southern Baptists in the village of Wake Forest, sixteen miles north of Raleigh. But in 1946, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation offered the college a perpetual endowment to move to Winston-Salem. Members of the Reynolds family donated six hundred acres of the huge Reynolds estate for the campus, which was built over the next ten years at a cost of $20 million. The college moved to its new home in 1956, and ten years later when Susie enrolled, it was growing fast in size and prestige and was just a year from changing its name to Wake Forest University.
That fall, shortly after Susie began classes, she went to the library to study and struck up a conversation with a basketball player, a quiet freshman, new to the state. His name, he told her, was Tommy Lynch.
20
Tom Lynch had a toothy smile, sun-bleached hair, and a quiet, easygoing nature. Except in stature, he was much like his father. At an inch under six feet he stood eight inches taller than his father and weighed 175 pounds. But he shared his father’s love of sports and possessed the self-confidence of the natural athlete. He realized early in childhood that he was better at physical activities than most other kids.
At Morgan Park Academy, his prep school in Chicago, he played football, baseball, basketball, and was a member of the swim team, but it was basketball at which he excelled. In his senior year, he averaged thirty points a game and was named one of the top twenty high school players in Chicago. With college scouts sitting in the stands, he scored fifty-three points one night, buoying his dreams of being recruited by major universities.
Those dreams did not pan out, but Duke University and Davidson College, both prestigious institutions, both in North Carolina, expressed interest in him, and in the spring of his senior year his mother went with him to visit those campuses and talk to coaches. His grades kept both schools from offering encouragement. Since he was in the area, Tom wanted to stop at Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem, where Horace “Bones” McKinney had built a winning basketball program with an assistant named Billy Packer.
Wake Forest had a new coach and a losing season in 1966, but Tom showed his newspaper clippings to Packer and came away feeling good about the possibilities. Wake Forest might find a spot for him, Packer told him, but he would have to play his way into a scholarship. First he must prove himself on the freshman team.
Tom enrolled as a pre-med student. Encouraged by his mother, he had long talked of becoming a doctor. Although his grades were not so good in his first year, he ensured his scholarship by a
veraging six points a game on the freshman team, and in 1967, the year Wake Forest became a university and got yet another new basketball coach, he became a substitute guard on the varsity team. To his disappointment, he never would rise above substitute, averaging less than a point a game for his college career.
His athletic abilities were not what attracted Susie Newsom. She was drawn by his wholesome good looks and medical ambitions. She always had been impressed by doctors, and some of her friends predicted she would marry one. She and Tom began seeing each other frequently on campus. She was always vivacious and happy to see him. She had a car, too, and offered rides to him and his friends. Soon they were attending campus events together.
Susie was two years older than Tom, from a prominent family, one of the most beautiful women on campus, and he was flattered by her attentions. He was teased by his fellow players when Susie was featured in a photo page of fraternity sweethearts in a campus publication, posing by a fountain in a striped minidress, looking demurely over her shoulder from beneath her long bangs.
By her senior year, Susie and Tom were dating regularly, and she wore his fraternity pin. Her friends were seeing little of her anymore. Linda Crutchfield, Susie’s best friend in high school, was a day student at Wake Forest, but she was attending her dying mother, was engaged and soon to be married, and had little time for Susie. She had met Tom and wasn’t impressed. She knew that Susie never had been attracted to jocks and wondered at his appeal to her. She knew, too, that Susie had dated little and never had a serious love affair, and that worried her.
“In this area she was inexperienced,” Linda said years later, “so she had no basis for comparison.”
Susie’s family had similar concerns. They didn’t quite know what to make of this quiet young man who was two years their daughter’s junior. He appeared to be a nice, stable boy, but his drive and ambition seemed no match for Susie’s, and his disposition seemed just the opposite of her effervescent, sometimes almost frantic boisterousness.
“He’s a lot like Gary Cooper,” Paw-Paw observed after Susie brought Tom to meet him and Nanna. “Don’t have much to say, does he?”
The family hoped the relationship a passing fancy, but Susie clearly was in love, and nobody was willing to caution her about it.
Chris Severn became one of Susie’s closest friends that year. She roomed next door in Bostwick Hall and they attended the same church, St. Paul’s. Chris, whom Susie nicknamed Christabel, couldn’t understand Susie’s attraction to Tom.
“Tom just was not a real dynamo,” Chris said. “I never thought Tom amounted to much.”
She knew that Susie didn’t like any of the fraternity brothers who were Tom’s friends and that she loathed Bob Brenner, his close friend, who was on the football team.
“She had her heart, mind, and soul set on marrying Tom,” Chris said. “I never thought that was a match made in heaven. I don’t think anybody ever tried to convince her otherwise.”
In the spring of 1968, only a few weeks after a curfew had been clamped on Winston-Salem, the city’s streets patrolled by National Guard troops because of rioting in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Susie received her degree in history. Shortly thereafter, on June 4, she wrote to her aunt Susie Sharp to thank her for a cash graduation gift.
Dear Su-Su,
This afternoon while I was lying in the sun, I thought over the exciting things I remembered in the last 19 or so years. My conclusion was quickly drawn: the sole unifying factor was you. My first walking doll, my turquoise bracelet, my first pair of pierced earrings, which are still my best, and all the countless little things (trips to the train station and getting to go to a grown-up restaurant on my birthday) which made my childhood exciting. And now you have given that special graduation present—special because without it, I could never have bought the pearl necklace I’ve wanted for so long. But more especially I want to thank you for being a constant guiding force, for being someone I could always trust and depend on, for being that one person whom I knew no matter what happened I could always turn to. I am and will always be proud to be your niece and namesake.
Love, Susie
Big changes lay in store for Susie’s family that summer. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company had been growing rapidly, diversifying, buying up other companies, particularly food companies. New management had begun shifting executives, lest they become stale and complacent in their positions. Bob Newsom, who’d been the company’s chief industrial engineer for eighteen years, was targeted for a move. He was asked to become chief industrial engineer for R. J. Reynolds Foods in New York.
Bob was not particularly pleased at the prospect. He liked the tobacco business and didn’t want to leave it. Neither did he want to leave Winston-Salem, where he and Florence were deeply rooted. They loved St. Paul’s Church, where Bob not only was bass soloist in the choir but a member of the vestry. They loved Forsyth Country Club, where they had many friends and belonged to bridge groups. They loved the madrigal group they had formed that met regularly at their house. Both had involved themselves deeply in community activities that they didn’t want to abandon. Bob had been chairman of a committee studying what needed to be done to improve Winston-Salem’s schools. He worked with the Boy Scouts, served on the board of the North Carolina School of the Arts, headed the city’s Goodwill Rehabilitation program, and was three times elected president of the Singers’ Guild, the choral arm of the Winston-Salem Symphony. He worked for the local Republican Party. Florence, who had given up teaching before Rob entered junior high, was a member of the Library Commission, active in Scouting and PTA. She served on several committees at church and delivered hot meals every day to sick and elderly people in the poor, black areas of East Winston where many volunteers feared to venture. Neither relished the idea of leaving their families. Bob’s parents were getting on in years and Florence’s mother, now living back at the big Sharp house in Reidsville with Louise, who had retired from the navy to look after her, was in poor health.
Bob’s loyalty to the company was strong, however, and he reluctantly accepted the new assignment. That summer, he sold the house at Green Meadows and he and Florence settled, far from children, family, and friends, into a big house in Silver Mine, Connecticut, where they began to try to adapt to a new life-style, with Bob joining the daily hordes of executives commuting to the city by train.
Susie stayed behind to enter graduate school at Wake Forest that fall, living at first with Nanna and Paw-Paw, later moving into an apartment of her own. In an era of war protests, flower children, easy sex, and drugs, Wake Forest, with its conservative Southern Baptist traditions, was an island of middle-American values and stability. Susie scorned hippies, war protesters, and civil rights activists, strongly supported the war in Vietnam (she later said she didn’t know why Nixon didn’t just end the war by dropping “the bomb” on Hanoi), and she was comfortable in the sedate, conservative atmosphere at Wake. Her main reason for remaining there, however, was Tom.
That year, their relationship became so close that he took her home to meet his parents. Delores and Chuck Lynch had moved to Louisville a year after Tom started at Wake Forest, and Delores had grown progressively unhappier. The weekend visit did not go well. Later, some who knew the strong wills of both women suspected that each recognized herself in the other. Susie, the daughter of privilege and “good family,” and Delores, the hardscrabble child of the Depression, disliked each other instantly, instinctively.
“My mother was a little sensitive about her origins,” Tom said later. “She would get upset if she thought somebody was looking down at her. She always thought that people should earn what they got, that that was much more noble than being born to it. She never felt family name means anything. It’s what you make on your own that counts.”
Tom was unaware of any conflict between his mother and Susie that weekend, but on the flight home, when he asked Susie what she thought of his mother and she was noncommittal, he realized that n
o bonds of affection had formed.
Soon after the visit, Susie told family members that Delores was overbearing and domineering. Delores told her friend Marjorie Chinnock that Susie was snooty and pretentious.
Susie had no intentions of letting her feelings about Delores interfere in her relationship with Tom. By then she had made clear to her family that she and Tom would marry, and after a year of graduate school, she got a job as a research assistant at R. J. Reynolds and settled in to wait for Tom to finish his final year of college.
In 1969, Tom gave Susie a diamond engagement ring he had ordered from a catalog, and the wedding date was set to follow his graduation in June of 1970.
Delores was distressed. Susie had resisted all of her efforts to get close to her, she told her friend Marjorie.
“I just have a gut feeling about that girl,” Delores said. “I’ve talked to Tom until I’m blue in the face, and he won’t listen.”
As Delores went on and on about Susie and Tom, one message emerged to Marjorie: as far as Delores was concerned, no woman would ever be good enough for Tom.
Delores had, indeed, made her feelings known to Tom. “She kept asking me if I really wanted to do this,” he recalled. “I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. I thought at the time it was just a matter of, you know, mothers don’t want their sons to go off with somebody else. And maybe I was too young or something. She thought people shouldn’t get married until they were older.”
Susie wanted a big wedding, and that spring she was giddy with plans for it. She was overjoyed that her mother was back to help her with it.
Bob had been very unhappy with his work in New York. From the beginning, his relationship with the chief operating officer of Reynolds Foods was not a good one. He felt thwarted at every turn and undermined by company headquarters in Winston-Salem. He longed for the old days in the tobacco business. Florence didn’t like his having to travel so much, leaving her alone. Although they liked their house in Connecticut and had made friends, they still were homesick for North Carolina, their families, and old friends.
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