Sue's Life and Times
February 28, 2021
by Karen Ivy
Since I'm writing this, I'll write it in the first person. I am Susan's older sister Karen, and these are my memories of her life. This is a work in progress for me, and you may come back and find new entries.
Susan Carol Ivy was born in 1948, in Vallejo, California, to Lestle Warren Ivy and Mary Jean Henderson Ivy. They met during World War II through Mare Island Naval Shipyard. He was originally from Missouri; she was originally from Ontario, Canada. The family lived in Vallejo until 1950, when they bought a house in Napa and moved there. Susan and I grew up in Napa and attended school there through high school. I don't have many memories of Sue's friends, we generally moved in different circles, although we got along pretty well. I do remember that at one point in our teens, we both went up the Napa Valley and got our first horseback rides. I was mildly interested. Susan was totally hooked, and horses were as much a part of her life as she could manage, from then on.
Susan followed me to the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1966. She graduated 4 years later, but I don't know what her undergrad degree was in. While she was doing all that, I was taking my own B.A. and Master's in Library Science from Berkeley, and then getting my first job; I was kind of out of touch. After Berkeley, she attended graduate school at what was then Hayward State University (now California State University, Hayward), from fall 1970 to spring 1975, when she graduated with a Master's in Public Administration.
Sometime in 1975, Sue moved to Mountain View, closer to Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. She shared an apartment with a roommate named Polly (I forget her last name) - and with a dog. In addition to the horses she loved, I don't think Sue was without a dog from the time she was a teenager in Napa. I've uploaded photo of Sue with Rufus, the coon hound, in the Mountain View apartment in 1975.
Rufus was a friendly but largely untrainable dog (I'm told coon hounds are untrainable); the only command they ever got him to obey was, "Stay out of the kitchen!"
The interesting thing about 1975 is that she started work with what was then Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in 1974 - she must have been an intern while in grad school. SRI tells me she worked there until 2013. It was the only permanent job she ever had. They couldn't tell me what divisions she worked for, but I have some memories of her early stories. I was told she worked on the first 911 installation, in San Jose. I do know she did an extended consulting stint with AT&T, in New York City, in the late 70's. She told hilarious stories about it. Apparently, pre-breakup AT&T had a very rigid dress code for its executives, who were all men. Low ranks wore gray. Next rank up could add a chalk stripe. Next rank up could add a pinstripe. Next rank up could go navy blue, and so forth. And in the middle of all this rigid masculinity was my sister, visibly female, 5' 11" in her sock feet, wearing heels which put her over 6', wearing what I'm sure was an elegant green business suit. They had trouble dealing with her, and she had trouble dealing with them - she said they complained that she "fidgeted" in meetings. (I bet she did.) I never heard the outcome of that consulting gig, just the stories about clothes and culture clashes.
After a few years of corporate and civic consulting, though, she moved to a new division and began consulting for the Department of Defense, which I believe she continued for the rest of her working career at SRI. I remember a number of years when she was in China Lake, where there's a Naval Air Station. I remember her telling me stories, early in her career working with the military, of working on a bombing range in (I think) Arizona or Nevada, doing some kind of instrumentation monitoring, as aircraft were dropping bombs around her! I also remember a story of her sitting in the cockpit of a military airplane, I think a fighter jet, and doing work on the AWACS system. And later in her career she was doing quality control on the software for a pilot training simulator at Naval Air Station Fallon (Nevada). She used to tell stories about drinking in bars with military pilots. She also worked at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, Nevada; and I think it was at Nellis that she met James David Allen, known universally as J.D., an Air Force fighter pilot, stationed at Nellis. She married him on May 28, 1989 - the wedding was in the Napa Valley at a well-known resort. At that point she moved to Las Vegas to live with J.D. At some time around the marriage, he retired from the Air Force rather than be "promoted to a desk," so they stayed in Las Vegas, bought some land in the west valley, and built a house.
At some time in the middle 90's, Sue started having trouble climbing the stairs at the house where they lived; she had to pull herself up by the rail. This was one of the reasons they decided to build a new house, with no steps. In 1997, she was diagnosed with polymyositis, a very rare autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the muscles, in her case on the left side of her body. This was confirmed around 2001 or 2002 by a visit to the Mayo Clinic, for a second opinion. She continued to ride horses until around 2004/05. In early 2006 she had a couple of bad falls which damaged her good right foot and was persuaded to get a walker, which reduced the falls. She was still driving a small amount. But over the next years, her condition gradually deteriorated. I forget when she finally became unable to walk assisted, but she did, and required 24 x 7 care-giving and a Hoyer lift to get her from the bed to the wheelchair. At sometime in the late teens her polymyositis actually went into remission, but she still couldn't walk. She began exercising at home to try to build up her leg muscles, and by 2019 had actually bought leg braces.
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Sue did not catch it, nor did any of her caregivers. But she had glaucoma, and around May 2020 her glaucoma suddenly spiked. She lost the sight in her right eye, and the glaucoma made her doctors hesitant to replace the cataract in her left eye. This left her basically blind; her primary recreation was reading and watching television. At this point I think she gave up. Over the next few months she became increasingly inactive and unresponsive, and her health deteriorated even more. She died at home, in hospice, on February 16, 2021.
Susan Carol Ivy was born in 1948, in Vallejo, California, to Lestle Warren Ivy and Mary Jean Henderson Ivy. They met during World War II through Mare Island Naval Shipyard. He was originally from Missouri; she was originally from Ontario, Canada. The family lived in Vallejo until 1950, when they bought a house in Napa and moved there. Susan and I grew up in Napa and attended school there through high school. I don't have many memories of Sue's friends, we generally moved in different circles, although we got along pretty well. I do remember that at one point in our teens, we both went up the Napa Valley and got our first horseback rides. I was mildly interested. Susan was totally hooked, and horses were as much a part of her life as she could manage, from then on.
Susan followed me to the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1966. She graduated 4 years later, but I don't know what her undergrad degree was in. While she was doing all that, I was taking my own B.A. and Master's in Library Science from Berkeley, and then getting my first job; I was kind of out of touch. After Berkeley, she attended graduate school at what was then Hayward State University (now California State University, Hayward), from fall 1970 to spring 1975, when she graduated with a Master's in Public Administration.
Sometime in 1975, Sue moved to Mountain View, closer to Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. She shared an apartment with a roommate named Polly (I forget her last name) - and with a dog. In addition to the horses she loved, I don't think Sue was without a dog from the time she was a teenager in Napa. I've uploaded photo of Sue with Rufus, the coon hound, in the Mountain View apartment in 1975.
Rufus was a friendly but largely untrainable dog (I'm told coon hounds are untrainable); the only command they ever got him to obey was, "Stay out of the kitchen!"
The interesting thing about 1975 is that she started work with what was then Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in 1974 - she must have been an intern while in grad school. SRI tells me she worked there until 2013. It was the only permanent job she ever had. They couldn't tell me what divisions she worked for, but I have some memories of her early stories. I was told she worked on the first 911 installation, in San Jose. I do know she did an extended consulting stint with AT&T, in New York City, in the late 70's. She told hilarious stories about it. Apparently, pre-breakup AT&T had a very rigid dress code for its executives, who were all men. Low ranks wore gray. Next rank up could add a chalk stripe. Next rank up could add a pinstripe. Next rank up could go navy blue, and so forth. And in the middle of all this rigid masculinity was my sister, visibly female, 5' 11" in her sock feet, wearing heels which put her over 6', wearing what I'm sure was an elegant green business suit. They had trouble dealing with her, and she had trouble dealing with them - she said they complained that she "fidgeted" in meetings. (I bet she did.) I never heard the outcome of that consulting gig, just the stories about clothes and culture clashes.
After a few years of corporate and civic consulting, though, she moved to a new division and began consulting for the Department of Defense, which I believe she continued for the rest of her working career at SRI. I remember a number of years when she was in China Lake, where there's a Naval Air Station. I remember her telling me stories, early in her career working with the military, of working on a bombing range in (I think) Arizona or Nevada, doing some kind of instrumentation monitoring, as aircraft were dropping bombs around her! I also remember a story of her sitting in the cockpit of a military airplane, I think a fighter jet, and doing work on the AWACS system. And later in her career she was doing quality control on the software for a pilot training simulator at Naval Air Station Fallon (Nevada). She used to tell stories about drinking in bars with military pilots. She also worked at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, Nevada; and I think it was at Nellis that she met James David Allen, known universally as J.D., an Air Force fighter pilot, stationed at Nellis. She married him on May 28, 1989 - the wedding was in the Napa Valley at a well-known resort. At that point she moved to Las Vegas to live with J.D. At some time around the marriage, he retired from the Air Force rather than be "promoted to a desk," so they stayed in Las Vegas, bought some land in the west valley, and built a house.
At some time in the middle 90's, Sue started having trouble climbing the stairs at the house where they lived; she had to pull herself up by the rail. This was one of the reasons they decided to build a new house, with no steps. In 1997, she was diagnosed with polymyositis, a very rare autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the muscles, in her case on the left side of her body. This was confirmed around 2001 or 2002 by a visit to the Mayo Clinic, for a second opinion. She continued to ride horses until around 2004/05. In early 2006 she had a couple of bad falls which damaged her good right foot and was persuaded to get a walker, which reduced the falls. She was still driving a small amount. But over the next years, her condition gradually deteriorated. I forget when she finally became unable to walk assisted, but she did, and required 24 x 7 care-giving and a Hoyer lift to get her from the bed to the wheelchair. At sometime in the late teens her polymyositis actually went into remission, but she still couldn't walk. She began exercising at home to try to build up her leg muscles, and by 2019 had actually bought leg braces.
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Sue did not catch it, nor did any of her caregivers. But she had glaucoma, and around May 2020 her glaucoma suddenly spiked. She lost the sight in her right eye, and the glaucoma made her doctors hesitant to replace the cataract in her left eye. This left her basically blind; her primary recreation was reading and watching television. At this point I think she gave up. Over the next few months she became increasingly inactive and unresponsive, and her health deteriorated even more. She died at home, in hospice, on February 16, 2021.