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The Inglenook Book Club met in July at Lakeside Senior Living Community with Geneva Johnson and Shelia Rogers serving as hostesses. The book club was saddened by the sudden death of Russell “Rusty” Newman, son of our Book Secretary, Mary Newman.
The club unanimously voted to donate a book to McKenzie Memorial Library in Rusty’s memory. Club members also attended the funeral service for Rusty held the next day.
After refreshments and the business meeting, President Ward introduced our speaker, Jean McKinnie, whose subject was Sue Grafton, author best known for her “Alphabet” mystery series featuring Kinsey Millhone.
Sue Taylor Grafton was born in 1940 in Louisville, Kentucky. Both her parents were avid readers and encouraged their children to explore all types of literature. Sue’s father was also a mystery writer and had four well-received novels to his credit under the name of C. W. Grafton.
Her father was a municipal bond lawyer who wrote his novels on the side; her mother was a high school chemistry teacher. Her father joined the Army in World War II, returning two years later when Sue was five years old, after which her home life started to fall apart.
Both parents became alcoholics, and from the age of five Sue Grafton was basically left to raise herself. Her mother committed suicide in 1960 after returning home from surgery to remove esophageal cancer brought on by years of drinking and smoking. Her father died in 1982 just a few months before Sue’s A is for Alibi was published.
Sue Grafton graduated from the University of Louisville in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and minors in humanities and fine arts. Prior to her graduation she had married James Flood and had two children, but the marriage ended quickly.
She married Al Schmidt and followed him to California living in a succession of cities before eventually settling in Santa Barbara in 1964.
During that period she worked as a hospital admissions clerk, a cashier, and a medical secretary. In the late 1960s her second marriage ended in a protracted divorce and custody battles over their daughter when she would jot down notes of ways to kill her husband, which later found their way into her novels.
Grafton married her third (and last) husband, Steven F. Humphrey, a philosophy professor, in 1978, with three children from her previous marriages and four granddaughters. They divided their time between Santa Barbara and Louisville.