Susan Lowe
Susan Lowe was born Susan Potter Staffler, August 21, 1941 to Jean and Potter Staffler in Santa Cruz.
She spent most of her early childhood in the redwoods of Bonny Doon, free to roam the woods and pastures of her grandparents’ ranch in the hills overlooking the Pacific. This storybook property was populated with horses, cats, geese, bulls, ducks and dogs, all of whom she adored as much as any of her extensive human family, and they loved her in return – especially Pinocchio, her near-inseparable donkey playmate.
She and her younger sister, Candace, attended the Bonny Doon school, an old, one-room relic, and from her earliest time there Susan displayed a remarkable talent for drawing.
Her maternal grandparents lived in Culver City where she and Candy would vacation from time to time and mix with the constant stream of Hollywood luminaries of the day who all wanted their homes built by Frank “Butch” Hellenthal, a formidable contractor who coordinated San Simeon for W.R. Hearst. She remembered sitting on Henry Fonda’s knee, meeting Gary Cooper and talking with Norma Shearer, for whom Butch had built a sizable house in just a single week!
Potter and Jean moved to Casper in 1948, where he, ravaged by polio during WWII, was signed on as a lumberjack in nearby Fort Bragg, a sawmill town nestled in the redwoods on the coast. Like Bonny Doon, children walked unaccompanied to school and wandered all over town, free from the agitation of life today. Potter became an executive at Union Lumber Co., they moved to Fort Bragg, and Susan blossomed there, great friends with all her classmates and a favorite everywhere she went – as indeed she was throughout her entire life. As Susan’s artistic capacity and startling beauty matured, her grandmother, Wilma Halstead Staffler, a Hamlin’s alumna, urged that she board there so that her burgeoning talent might be refined.
After graduation from Hamlin’s in 1960, Susan worked variously as a secretary and model during the day to afford her night classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and simultaneously at the San Francisco Academy of Art, until deciding – after some thirty or so different marriage proposals! – that she might become Susan Staffler Lowe in 1964, and she and Steve moved to Marin to build a family in Greenbrae.
Following the devastating crib death of their daughter, Katheryn, sons Garrett and Ollie where born, and a “fixer-upper” in Ross became their home. Even though that creaky house in the redwoods was always a jumble of construction projects, her parties and other social events in it were always the epitome of elegance, filled with her gourmet offerings, the best of friends, wild flowers and imaginative decor – always reflecting her uniquely sweet, loving and artistic personality. And with her ancient gas stove always filled with bubbling pots and the sink piled high, she’d flee to art class – or French, or Greek – with her “Housework Rots The Mind” bumpersticker irritating practically everyone she passed in that pre-road-rage era.
Always delightful, empathetic, intelligent, sensitive and funny, her wit, alternately demure and outrageous, informed her serene yet radiant beauty. And, at every turn, Susan strove to improve her skills, including her passion for language, animals, gardening, knitting, skiing, cooking, weaving and most of all sketching, either in a formal classroom or with the select group of mostly Marin-based artists and models she admired most. Such an over-ambitious agenda – which later included flyfishing! – contributed to her decision not to turn professional, and she gradually became more reclusive than engaging, more so with each passing year, until finally moving to Monte Rio and her beloved Treehouse – away from the multitudes and safely back among the redwoods. There she passed away peacefully on January 28, 2016.
At her insistence, there will be no service – though there may be a loophole in that mandate, and a champagne-infused remembrance will likely occur later in the year, most probably around what would have been her 75th birthday.