Susan Peyton, Rest In Peace

#96 / News Extra

We woke to sad news this morning: the death of Susan Samuels Peyton, one of our oldest and dearest friends.

We will always think her as the smiling face at the end of this beautiful drive.

Since her marriage to David Peyton in September 1969, Susie had lived with her beloved husband in the house that her father-in-law built on Huntington’s Mount Union Road.

It was a haven for the two of them. There they reared their son and loved their dogs and cats, and the birds and squirrels that came to their feeder and the deer that crossed the creek to breakfast on their lawn.

After David’s death in the fall 2020, Susie’s health began to fail. On Facebook this morning, David Jr. sadly reported, “It is with the heaviest heart I announce that the best mother I could have ever been blessed with has passed on.”

The Witness

There was never a time in The Flood story when Susan Peyton was not there. In fact, she was there before The Flood was there.

One of our earliest memories from those antediluvian days was in late April 1971 when a bunch of us piled into cars to head out for a May Day Eve party in the hills just outside Huntington.

Penniless, Charlie and Pamela Bowen — just getting started in their new careers as Huntington newspaper reporters in the same newsroom where David and Susie already had been working since the mid-‘60s — also were car-less in those days, so they hitched a ride to the party with the Peytons. What a comical sight they were! Four of them squeezed into the Peytons' little Volkswagen Beetle, Dave and Pamela along with an always-too-tall Charlie and a seven-month pregnant Susan.

Susie was a happy witness to the entire Flood story. She was front and center on New Year’s Eve 1973 in the Mount Union Road house, where David and Charlie played their first tunes together.

She also was at all the parties we called “the Bowen Bashes,” where in the smoke and dust of late night jam sessions the band was born when Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs came into the circle.

And 25 years later, when David, Joe and Charlie re-invigorated “the Flood thing” for its second wave, Susie was often the only audience, smiling from a chair in the Bowens’ library. In fact, on those late 1990s Wednesday evenings, we always asked Susie to call the final tune. It was almost always a lovely French Canadian melody she liked, “Un Canadien Errant.” Click the button to hear it.

Actually, though, Susie had lots of favorites, especially just about anything that Joe Dobbs fiddled. Here’s a sample, a Christmas Eve memory at a jam session at the Bowen House when Joe dedicated a rollicking fiddle tune just to Susie:

In the Beginning

Of course, all these tunes have our thoughts drifting back again nearly 50 years to that New Year’s Eve party.

We can still see it. By now it’s the first hours of 1974, and the drinking and the smoking and the singing, laughing and storytelling have left us hoarse and happy. It’s a sleepy Susie who requests the final tune of the night. Can you see it? Her red eyes smile through the haze as she says to her gallant young husband, “David! Do that Donovan song that I like. The one about the windy beach….”

On the windy beach the sun is shining through with weather fair.
White horses riding on the seas pasture onto the sand…

Our fingers by now are too numb to work a camera, so there are no pictures of that moment; however, the old wobbly reel-to-reel tape recorder is running and will catch and save it for us. David looks to the ceiling to remember the song that the mother of his child is calling for, and then he begins:

Over the Dunes came a traveling man,
Sack on back, wild flowers in his hand…

Rest in Peace, Dear One

We will never forget you, Susan.

Mentor. Devoted champion who in an instant could go from soft and loving critic to proud and boisterous cheerleader.

Keeper of songs, of secrets, of stories.

Such a wise and willing fellow traveler over a half century of shared adventures, rest in peace.