It is said “A tree’s best measured laid down.”

Do you not know, have you not heard? Another great Sunbelt lady has fallen. First, in 1998, Judy Marie DuVall. Second in 2001, Barbara Smith Vance. Earlier in 2006, Patricia Charlene Gardner and now Susan Claire Vance, who I lovingly called Suzzano.

It is Dec. 30th, Saturday night. Tomorrow would be Sunday, Dec. 31st, New Year’s Eve. Written on her yellow paper-lined pad, on the kitchen table, Susan’s listed some common, ordinary, everyday needs to pick up when she goes out again.

She dates the list Dec. 30. Maybe she’ll go out now and purchase the listed goods and stop at Denny’s and have coffee. She doesn’t do that, as often as before, ever since the no smoking-restaurant law was enacted. Susan liked to smoke . . . Nobody wanted her to smoke . . . Everybody wanted her to quit, but Susan liked to smoke. She liked it too much.

Susan passes on the idea of going out, or at least for a while.Instead, she gets up from the table, goes back to her bedroom and lies down--not for the night, just for a nap. She adjusts the pillows the way she likes them, when she sleeps on her right side and she slips off to sleep, thinking the thoughts of a mom, a sister, a daughter, a friend and a wife--whose life was to stand by, stick to, back up, reinforce and sustain, in the name of Sunbelt West and for Sunbelt Sports, or, in other words, the name of the Vance family.

Susan was the “First Administration of Sunbelt, et al.” She was there in the beginning, the startup, the genesis. She was with me, as it were, when we crossed the Rubicon, in 1976, for Sports and 1978 for Sunbelt Truck & Equipment Co., Inc.

I asked Noah Webster to help define, for you, Susan C. Vance. He answered me this way: Susan was our “backup.” She’d move into a position, behind a teammate, to assist on a play (as in stopping a missed ball). Or, if  you prefer, “our backstop,” which bolsters another, who supports another. That was Susan’s special, very special, very, very special gift--her humility, her self-effacing, her unmistakable meekness and modesty in rising to the calls of her family and their business. This strength was so prominent in her identity, but it was also a self-sacrificing weakness.

How? What was a self-sacrificing weakness? What do you say? “Self-sacrificing?

Yes, Susan gave her self short shrift when it came to her considerable personal needs. She was too heavy. She smoked too long and too much. She eschewed looking after herself.

She didn’t avoid her own needs on any moral or practical grounds. She avoided them . . . well, because she couldn’t help herself.

In the obituary, you were told that Susan, her daddy’s little girl, watched four significantfamily members slaughtered by a drunk driver when she was 7. What you weren’t told was that this “daddy’s girl” would go down to the corner from her house and stand, statue-like--looking down the road for Robert French to comehome from Dayton Tire & Rubber, where he was a tire builder.

After the tragedy she witnessed, she stood there day after day, hour after hour,which ripped Peggy’s heart every day. Peggy was Susan’s mom.

Peggy finally had enough. She sold lock, stock and barrel, packed up the household and the girls and left for England. As Jesus of Nazareth said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” The girls could live again, with their mom and Bilkey, their cat, in England and forget the tragedy of Dayton, Ohio.

(Photos of Judy DuVall, Patricia Charlene Gardner and Barbara Vance)

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