BY DION DRISLANE | Susan Myers Richardson, a longtime Bank St. resident, died in Nashville, Tenn., on Aug. 14. She was 92.
She was born in 1924 in Taizhou, China, a small village in Jiangsu Province, the first child of Robert Price Richardson and Agnes Rowland Richardson, who were stationed there as Presbyterian missionaries.
Her formal schooling began at the Shanghai American School. She spent her final year of high school in the U.S., graduating from Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. She then returned to her family’s home state of Georgia, graduating from Agnes Scott College.
Susan was a talented athlete. Swimming, diving, tennis and sailing are some of the sports in which she excelled. Her lifelong love of baseball must certainly have originated with the diamond her father installed in the yard in Taizhou for Susan and her three brothers. She also took flying lessons and flew small propeller planes as a young woman in Georgia.
In 1960, Susan moved to New York and into the basement apartment on Bank St. she lovingly referred to as “Troll House.” She lived there for more than 50 years and loved the Village through all its changes and incarnations.
Susan’s theatrical career started with a job as the business manager for the Augusta Players in Augusta, Ga. In New York she produced several Off Broadway plays, including “The Death of a Well-Loved Boy,” at the St. Mark’s Playhouse; “A Scent of Flowers,” at the Martinique Theater; “One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger” at the Actors Playhouse; and Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound,” at Theater Four. She also produced the tour of “In White America” and the horror film “Dear Dead Delilah.”
For 15 summers, Susan was the business manager for her dear friends Pat and Fred Carmichael’s Caravan Theater at the Dorset Playhouse in Dorset, Vermont. She even acted when called into service, playing Christopher Robin in “Winnie The Pooh” in the 1960s. The summer theater in Dorset was where she designed and implemented a box office system that a number of New York Off Broadway houses continued to use until the advent of computer systems.
Susan was also a picture framer and opened her first shop in the basement of 80 St. Mark’s, where she became fast friends with Howard Otway, who owned the revival house upstairs, Theater 80. She became the bookkeeper and program designer for the theater, as well as hostess of the theater’s charmingly quirky New Year’s Eve parties.
Act Three of Susan’s career found her keeping the books under the sign “Wise Men Fish Here” for Andres Brown at the Gotham Book Mart until it closed.
In 2012, Susan left New York for Nashville to be near her family. She spent the last four years of her life in an assisted-living residence, The Blakeford, where she died last month.
Susan is survived by her brother, retired General William Rowland Richardson, and his wife, Mary Bailey Richardson, of McLean, Va.; her sister-in-law, Kathleen Fjone Richardson, of Cincinnati, Ohio; three nephews, five nieces and numerous great-nieces and great-nephews.
A memorial service celebrating Susan’s life was held Aug. 26 at The Blakeford, at Green Hills in Nashville. Her remains will be buried at Maple Hill Cemetery in Dorset, Vermont.
