In Memory of Susan Judd, My Courageous Mother

The oldest of 6 children and the only girl, Sue learned early on how to raise kids and then went on to raise 4 kids on her own after a devastating divorce.

My mother, Susan Rojean Judd, passed away on Friday the 13th of December, 2024. She was 91 years of age and suffered from diabetes and other serious medical conditions. She lived her final years in an assisted living facility in Laguna Niguel, California, where she loved to tell stories about her dad (my maternal grandfather, Merrill Flood, PhD) who was a mathematician and neighbors with and a protege of Albert Einstein at Princeton in the 1930s. He was also a top-ranked tennis player (my inspiration for the sport I love), grandmaster at chess, ballroom dancer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan where he published many papers, pioneer in Management Science/Operations Research, head of the Manhattan Project (Oppenheimer’s boss) during the War, and coined the terms “software” and “cost-effective”. If you are interested in learning more about my grandfather, you can read the biography of him that I self-published on Amazon, Mastermind: The Life and Times of Merrill Flood, PhD.

My mother, whose maiden name was Susan Flood, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, where her dad got his start in Mathematics at the University of Nebraska. When she was about 2 years old, they moved to Princeton where he worked toward his PhD. My mom fondly remembers those days growing up in Princeton and seeing Dr. Einstein on campus. She remembers seeing him one day when she was about 5 years old and he asked her what time it was. When she looked at the clock tower, she could see that it was 12 noon and told him so. His response was “well then it’s lunch time so I must be hungry”.

Another story that Mom liked to tell was the time that she remembered Einstein playing her dad in a game of ping pong (table tennis). Her dad was very athletic but Dr. Einstein was not. When her dad smashed the ball over the net to win the point, they looked everywhere but could not find the ball. It was in Albert’s hair!

My mother met my Dad, Harold Judd, when she was about 20 years old. They got married a short time later and my older brother Kevin was born in 1955 in White Plains, NY when Mom was 22. Dad worked for IBM as a Systems Analyst and we moved a lot as a family because IBM used to mean, “I’ve Been Moved”. I was born 4 years later in San Diego and then 2 years after that, my sister Lisa was born in New York. We moved to Sydney, Australia for about 2 years after Lisa was born and then returned to California where Dad bought a big house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula (which is now sliding into the ocean).

We lived there for about 10 years and my youngest sister, Jodi, was born 11 years after me. About that time shortly after Jodi was born, Dad left his job with IBM and tried to start his own consultancy business but began drinking heavily and quickly degenerated into a severe alcoholic. When I was about 14 years old, Mom had to kick my drunk Dad out of the house because he got angry and hit her and that was the end of the marriage after 17 years.

Suddenly, Susan had to learn a trade and transition from being a stay at home housewife to being a single, working Mom with 4 kids to raise and no help from my father who disappeared into an alcoholic haze that left him homeless and hapless with no source of income (or at least, very little). Immediately, Susan enrolled in night school to learn bookkeeping and accounting and got a job during the day selling tow trucks!

Turned out that she was pretty good at selling them and made enough money from sales and commissions to support 3 kids (my older brother was out on his own) for a while. Then she got offered a bookkeeping job at the Wonder Valley Dude Ranch east of Fresno, CA (near Yosemite). She packed up me and my two little sisters and we moved to the Dude Ranch, which was a boys and girls summer camp and also hosted the Cathy Rigby Gymnastics camp in the summer. That only lasted a couple years though and I think that it was my fault that the owner of the resort fired my mom for unspecific reasons (I was a teenage boy and he had 3 young daughters - you do the math).

After that, Mom did a series of odd jobs including selling cancer insurance policies for Colonial, which continued to pay her commissions up until she died, long after she quit that job. She also worked for a while for a man who imported goods from China and he once invited her to travel to China with him back in the late 1970s, long before any Americans were visiting the Communist country.

Susan made enough money selling tow trucks and insurance to afford to buy a nice 3-bedroom townhome in the Turtle Rock neighborhood near the University of California Irvine campus in about 1992. She lived by herself in that townhome for nearly 30 years before her diabetes got worse and we had to make the difficult decision to move to her to an assisted living facility in 2021.

She lived out her remaining years being “chased” by younger men and telling her stories to the staff and residents. My mother was a strong, independent, courageous woman who proved that she could do just as well as any man could do given her lot in life. She raised 4 healthy children under extremely adverse circumstances and was able to generate enough income from her various endeavors to support herself until 91 years of age without help from anyone else, and still leave a substantial estate to her heirs (which will be the subject of another post).

I loved my Mom and am very grateful to have the good memories as well as some bad ones of course, but mostly appreciate what she did for me even when I was not very nice to her. She could be difficult and never got over her anger at my Dad, even though he was really just sick (alcoholism is a disease, after all). But even though she could be emotional at times, she maintained her sense of humor right up until the end. In one of the last photos that I took of my Mom, she is a wearing a tee shirt with a clever saying on the front, “Never trust an atom. They make up everything.”

Thank you, Mother, for teaching me about life, how to be independent and to trust myself to make the best decisions in my own life, and to care for and be kind to others, even if I do not always agree with them. I love you and appreciate you now more than ever and I wish you peace.