In England, Susan’s sister Rita, who meets an American Air Force tech sergeant, Hugh Loesche, from McAlester, Okla., engages and weds Hugh and moves to Oklahoma to await his return from Vietnam.

Susan, in time, follows Rita across the big water to Oklahoma and settles in Tulsa. She works for a temp service and, after being sent to Skelly Oil, she excels in her work and Skelly offers her a full-time role in their invoicing department.

She serves and becomes a lead over several other girls. This is where Susan is working when I meet her on a blind date, in 1967-68. She is a friend of a girl, who is dating a friend of mine in the University of Tulsa, Bill Goben, whom we would call Charlie.

It was here, in time, that I came to know her sincerity, her humility, all the attributes I was quoted as saying in the obituary. We became involved immediately. The quintessential college-boy fantasy . . . the younger student and the older working woman, at the very time “Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson” was a national rage, as “The Graduate,” with  Simon & Garfunkel in the background.

I’ve always described Susan, whom I called Suzzano, as the person everyone knows about but most don’t know--the person who cups their hands for your foot to help lift you out of harm’s way. The person behind you who inspires you when you lose heart, and pushes you through a tight spot.

In Sunbelt, Susan had an alter-ego whom we lost last June 18th, Charlene Gardner. In Charlene’s eulogy, I wrote that she was “the type that seeing a brother or sister draw back discouraged, Charlene would plunge ahead, so they’d have someone to follow, to regain their confidence.”

That was the Charlene type and that was Suzzano’s type too.

Consider these two ladies, bonded together in so many ways, in character, loyalty and conviction, in and for their family, and Sunbelt West, and Sunbelt Sports, and their coworkers. They never wavered, stumbled or quit. They never gave half measure or partial or qualified participation. They were there through thick or thin, flush or famine, win or loss. Christ once spoke of the “laborers who are few.” It was the Susan and Charlene type, that we honor today.

Is that important, you ask?

What did Christ say?

“No man or woman, having put their hand to the plow and looking back, is fit . . .” The Filipinos have a proverb: “Loyalty is more valuable than diamonds.” Yet the English, from whom Susan also sprang, have a proverb too: “Praise no woman till she is dead.”

Well, we’re here today because Susan is dead and to praise her wholeheartedly. Susan’s Skelly Oil supervisor told me that her work product was so superb that her error rate was less than 1 percent.

We marry in early 1973 and in late September our son, whom I call G2, is born, and, along with Penny, our dog, we buy our first house in 1975 in Candlestick Beach, beneath the Keystone Lake Dam.

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