Susan St. John Mook of Reston died Monday, Dec. 22, 2003 in the house that had been her project and her home for almost a quarter century.
Born June 3, 1913 in Ironwood, Mich., Suzy St. John was the daughter of a hotelier. She grew up in a series of hotels throughout the midwest. When her father lost his own hotel at the onset of the Great Depression, he got a job as a management troubleshooter, moving his wife and daughter from one hotel to the next as he kept a series of small establishments afloat during those lean times.
St. John Mook met her future husband, John Russell Mook, in the late 1930s. They courted in Green Bay, Wis., where he was teaching high school and coaching wrestling, before going on to graduate school and a career as a college professor.
St. John Mook, who had begun her education at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, moved with her new husband to Appleton, Wis. and Lawrence University. Her husband worked as a college recruiter and took his master's degree in education; she finished her undergraduate degree in intellectual history.
The couple moved to their first faculty community at Shepherd College in West Virginia. They loved Shepherdstown but left when Mr. Mook accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
In Oshkosh, St. John Mook was active in both the League of Women Voters and the Faculty Dames Club. When a son Jonathan was born in 1951, she began organizing window displays at the Oshkosh Public Library and ended up as head of the reference department. She earned a master's degree in library science over weekends and summers in the mid-1960s at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She was honored by the American Library Association with an invitation to serve on the Documents Round Table, where she actively worked to combat censorship and make government records accessible to the public.
In 1979, the couple moved to Reston. In Reston, she joined the morning unit of the League of Women Voters, served as secretary for the Mediterranean Cluster Association and helped her husband in his stint as editor of the Rotary Club newsletter.
Susan St. John Mook was preceded in death by her husband in 2000. She is survived by her son, Jonathan Richard and her three grandchildren, Benjamin St. John, Nathan Frederick and Galen Moran. She is also survived by daughter-in-law Sarah Larson.
There will be a memorial service on Saturday, Jan. 10, at 4 p.m. at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, 1700 Wainwright Drive, Reston.
Donations in her memory may be made to St. Anne's, dedicated for use in the church library.