Sue Morrow Flanagan was a woman ahead of her time, which makes her untimely death earlier this month even harder to take.
Her smiling face, framed by shoulder-length hair with a faint wave, graced the front page of the Business Journal back in 1999. I had written an article about her plans to launch the Kitchawan Institute, a nonprofit focused on educating Westchester and the world about issues ranging from environmental protection to human rights and peace, knit together as only she could.
By the time I revisited her last February, at her lovely home on Whidbey Island, Wash., the institute was long gone from Yorktown. So was she. Gone, too, was her hair, stolen from her by the breast cancer that claimed her life. Yet as much as her body faltered in her last few years, Sue”™s mind was as sharp, her spirit as strong as ever. She continued to write for the Financial Times and several blogs. She followed the news intensely. And she continued to voice the views she hoped to advance through Kitchawan.
At a time when gas was $1.80 a gallon and SUV sales were flourishing, Sue insisted America and the world needed to expand their energy pallets beyond petroleum. Unfortunately, “beyond petroleum” became BP”™s ad slogan, accompanying several cute TV commercials we haven”™t seen since the oil disaster in the Gulf forced the company to shift gears.
And well after 9/11 and the Iraq war revived the issue of human rights for some, as long as America was the bad guy, Sue”™s journalism focused on victims of communism well beyond Hollywood-chic Tibet. In a 2008 story for the Financial Times, she described how cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was so worried about KGB retribution after leaving the Soviet Union in 1974 that he built a mansion in upstate Jordanville, with 4-foot-thick foundation walls and a concrete safe room with a two-ton vault in the basement.
What made Sue stand out from other energy or peace activists was not so much her ideology, but her consistency. She was hardly a conservative, but she also had no room for typical liberal bromides. That independence is sorely missed at a time when our governments, our culture ”” and especially our journalism ”” have become increasingly infected with left-vs.-right politics.
So too has the funding world, which could not fit Kitchawan or Sue into a neat little ideological box. That, plus what even she admitted were many management mistakes, helped end the institute. It was forced to sell its Yorktown office, the old Brooklyn Botanical Garden field research station on Route 134, which it converted into the state”™s smallest energy-efficient “green” building, complete with geothermal heat and thermal window panes ”” all this years before most Westchester architects knew what LEED was.
Sue hoped to continue Kitchawan as a virtual, Internet think tank, but that didn”™t happen. Instead, she found a saintly new husband with a sharp sense of humor, Tom Laurenson. The couple left Westchester in 2002. That year, Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer, the same disease that killed her mother and grandmother. Years of treatment began, and in 2006 Sue and Tom settled in Whidbey Island to be closer to the source of her treatment, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
When I heard that Nancy Gold of The Gold Standard had already written her obituary, I ached to see Sue one last time, to say the goodbye I hoped would be premature. I lined up two days of interviews with Seattle research institutes for my current employer, biotech publisher GenomeWeb, before riding the hour-long bus from downtown to the ferry, then to another bus that took me to Sue and Tom. We shared pizza, then prepared for her trip to SCCA for chemo the following morning.
Before toddling off to bed, Sue urged me to get out of Westchester and its caviar cost-of-living, and its champagne, tax-aholic politicians and their lackeys, who are ruining this county (there are exceptions, but not many). I told her my wife and son had lived in White Plains practically all their lives, and could not foresee them, let alone me, making such a move.
But family expenses, especially taxes, are rising faster than our household income these days. Is Westchester even worth it any more? Now, that”™s a timely topic for a think tank with a sense of independence you won”™t find from business groups, civic groups or even most academic institutions. What a shame Sue won”™t be the person to run it.
