WESTON: Susan (Wing) Klumpp passed away on Friday, October 27, 2017, at her home and surrounded by her husband and their four children.
Sue was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on September 17, 1932, to Joe Wing and Frances (Elliott) Wing.
Sue’s childhood was spent in Port Washington, New York, where she excelled as a student, was a leader at school, and participated in many clubs and sports teams. She graduated from Port Washington High School in 1950, earning the William B. Fearon award for her achievements in athletics, citizenship, and scholarship. She attended Oberlin College for two years and then graduated from Pembroke College in 1954. With Masters’ degrees in guidance counseling from Boston University in 1970 and in school psychology from Cal. State L.A. in 1978, she led a fulfilling career, first as a guidance counselor at Littleton Middle School in Littleton, Massachusetts, from 1970 to 1976, and later as a school psychologist at Paradise Canyon Elementary School in La Cañada, California, from 1978 until her retirement in 1998.
Sue was civic-minded, well-read, and engaging, and she enjoyed a daunting number of pastimes and interests including tennis, swimming, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, canoeing, architecture, contemporary art, poetry, novels, book clubs, play reading groups, the New Yorker, classical music, the symphony, cooking, PBS, Downton Abbey, gardening, travel, genealogy, education, and playing the flute. She was a member of the Elderly Housing Committee for Brooks School and served as board member for the El Mirador Ranch
Association, the Dickson Meadows Condominium Association, and the
Pembroke Center Associates. A lifelong churchgoer, she was, in her final years, a parishioner at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Weston,
Massachusetts.
She provided the institutional memory and served as communications director for her family. She was a woman of honesty and integrity. Sue met Allan in 1952 at a party that he had crashed looking for a wife, and they were married in 1954 in Port Washington. They skillfully raised four children, with good outcomes. At the same time that she pursued her own academic and professional goals, Sue supported Allan and managed the family and household, thereby enabling his distinguished participation in the Apollo project and many subsequent NASA space endeavors. Tracking Allan’s career as an aerospace engineer, they have lived in Falls Church, Virginia; Tujunga, California; Natick, Massachusetts; Wayland, Massachusetts; La Cañada, California; and Pasadena, California. They built
two houses, in Wayland and Pasadena. In retirement, Sue and Allan moved to Weston, Massachusetts.