In the true spirit of Lent, Susan Martin Ely of Califon, NJ died with grit and dignity on Tuesday, March 18 at the St. Clare Home in Newport, RI. She was 88 years old. She lived and died with a fierce and relentless determination that shone throughout her life as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, equestrian, teacher, friend, antiquarian and advocate for her beloved Norfolk Terriers.
Raised on the north shore of Long Island as a twin with her older sister Jill, Sue was the daughter of Eleanor Sparks Davison – a woman of iron will and Sue’s role model as equestrian, gardener, and curator of English antiquity. She was the granddaughter of British Industrialist Sir Thomas Ashely Sparks – knighted by King George V for his service to the crown during WWII as the American representative for the Cunard Lines. Her father, John Stuart Martin, who lost his left arm to a hunting accident when he was a boy, was an accomplished sportsman, author, and early managing editor of Time Magazine. With a brilliance matched only by his temper, he was cut from the pages of a Hemingway novel. Proficient at golf, fly fishing and wing shooting – all with one arm – he would teach Sue the be a crack shot, gifted dog handler and avid hunter. From an early age her parents instilled in her the value of tradition, perseverance and hard work that would guide her throughout her life.
Though divorced when she was young, her parents’ respective presence in Sue’s life loomed large and she cared for each of them throughout their final days. She took great care to safeguard the remnants of each of their legacies, from photos and letters to the art and antiques that surrounded them, thus forming the roots of what would become her own passion. She wrote, “My parents are both dead and I am still making my peace with them. These days I fancy that the two red-tail hawks that sit in the tulip tree at the end of my field are the two of them come back in some sort of rare amity never true in life. There’s comfort in that.”
At the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, VA, Class of 1954, Sue excelled at both academics and equestrian events – fostering her adherence to discipline and sportsmanship. At Wellesley College, Class of 1958, she honed her double-edged mastery of the written and spoken word. Her sisters from these two sororities of exceptionally strong women remained an important connection throughout her life and offered a loyal and understanding audience for very deep and vulnerable self-reflection. At the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, she learned the value of rolling up her sleeves, getting dirty, bloody, if necessary, to tend to a living soul in need. Earning her Masters in 1987 from Middlebury and Lincoln College Oxford, she found herself in search of balance and understanding within the false dilemma of man’s fate and free will.
As she would relate to her Wellesley sisters on her 35th reunion, “I’ve come through the years with an abiding faith in something like God. I go to church, sing in the choir, and do yard work in the memorial garden where someday my own ashes will be put under a brick.” The center of gravity for that faith was the Episcopal church of St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville, NJ, only a few miles from her home of 30 years. With some quick back-of-the envelope math one day, she calculated that she had easily spent the equivalent of more than 13 years’ worth of days in service to this community.
After a brief marriage and painful divorce, Sue embarked on a journey to find and make peace as a single mother of two young kids in a community she was not born into. In 1970 she settled into what would become the centerpiece of her existence for the next three decades and, until her dying day, her favorite plot of land on God’s green earth. Located at the end of a private road once home to an early 1900’s estate, she set out to build the life of her dreams – a place to house her growing collection of antiques and artwork, raise her kids and teach them the same life lessons she had learned at their age and, of course, a home for her growing pack of terriers. There she would entertain family, friends and students with laughter, meals, and a never-ending cycle of projects. To Sue there was no greater joy than to arrive at the end of a day’s hard work, back warm with the sweat of labor, perhaps an iced tea, glass of wine or cold beer and admire the fruits of her efforts. There were stone walls and terraces, gardens for flowers and vegetables, rapier thickets of wild blackberry, grape vines, feral fruit trees left over from prior generations, fields, and lawn to mow – it was her paradise.
Sue’s first few years of work were a return to her past of riding and caring for horses – first at Happy Rock Stables on the edge of the campus where one day she would find her love for teaching and then at the storied barns of the Essex Hunt Club in Peapack, NJ. By her count, some days she would exercise up to 18 horses – riding over the hillsides with a horse at lead on either side of her mount. She was in her element – atop a misbehaved horse, dusty jeans under well-worn leather riding chaps.
In 1974 Sue got a call one night that would change the course of her life – leading to her greatest joys and most enduring heartbreak. Asked by a friend from church who was the headmaster of the Gill St. Bernard’s School to substitute teach for a stricken lower school faculty member – she immediately stepped into the classroom on a moment’s notice and never looked back. Borrowing from her kids’ curriculum at another local grade school she would put her own spin on their prior day’s lessons and soon found her stride.
The next year she moved to the upper school campus in Gladstone, NJ, to teach high school English – driving each day by the stables where she had once worked. The immersive curriculum at Gill allowed her the time and space to engage with students in a manner very much in line with the depth of her character. There she led trips to England to read Shakespeare and Milton at Stonehenge, to Ireland to read Yeats and James Joyce among the rolling green hills and stone walls and, her favorite, to Greece to read mythology amidst the ancient ruins.
In 1983 she moved on to the Berkeley Carroll Street School in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Undaunted by the commute back and forth to New Jersey she bought an old Brownstone providing a well-needed outlet for her overflowing collection of antiques. Over the course of her tenure, she garnered awards for her dedicated teaching from the University of Chicago and Clark University as voted on by their students. Her most prized reward was the many friendships she formed with her students that remain intact to this day. As she would say, “When I was teaching, I think I made a difference, rearranged adolescent molecules, polished language here and there.”
After 25 years in the classroom, she moved back to her home in Bernardsville and a chance to turn her love of antiques into a business. With a partner she established Ludlow & Ely Antiques in the 4-store town of Peapack, NJ, as she would relate to her Wellesley sisters, “between the hair house and the flower shop, a psychologically strong location.”. She reveled in combing elements of her Modern British Literature lectures when talking to a customer about a painting she’d recently taken on consignment. She could socialize puppies in the shop and as she put it, “learn about the idiosyncrasies of collecting.”
A constant in Sue’s life was the presence of Norfolk Terriers – a feisty, reddish brown or black and tan-haired canine, afraid of nothing and nice sometimes too. They were a perfect match. When manning a shop and hauling furniture became more labor than love, Sue turned to her dogs and, as with most things, gave them her all. In 2005 she moved to a wooded hillside in Long Valley, NJ, turning its old stone house and abundant grounds into her base of Earth Dog operations. She would train, hunt, trial, teach, rescue, and breed terriers for the next decade, winning awards with her dogs for both trials and obedience – no small feat with terriers. She quickly became a force for the breed and its devotees. Comprised mostly of yet another sorority of strong-willed women, with the occasional man thrown in for good measure, the Norfolk world became her life and its members, two-legged and four, her family.
In 2016 Sue moved one town west to Califon, NJ. Though a far cry from the old stone houses and accompanying grounds she so loved, it had all the requisites – a fenced in yard for the dogs, enough room (barely) for her many beautiful things and a red-tailed hawk or two on the distant edges of her horizon. She would drive about in her trademark Subaru wagon that had a sign on the door proudly announcing, “I may be a bitch but, at least I’m the pick of the litter!”. With her daily rounds for coffee, lunch, a slice of pizza for dinner and perhaps a bottle of wine now and again, she was soon known to all as simply “Miss Sue” The locals quickly took her in as one of their own. Her mere presence in the doorway as she greeted people with her innate sarcasm and humor was all it took for her “usual” to be waiting when she got around to it.
Cruelly aware of her fading cognition, quick wit and determination were her crutch. Her walker was the myriad of chairs, tables, desks, and sideboards lining the hallways of her house. She often resembled a free solo climber as she made her way from the couch to the kitchen and back, always three points of contact, even with a glass of wine on the return trip. Intensely proud and stubbornly independent, she lived on her own terms – in her own home, a dog by her side, surrounded by her beautiful collection from over the years, and a view of the western sky to admire and say goodbye to the day and from which to see it start again.
Sue is predeceased by her sister, Jill Martin Ives, her half-sisters Barry Martin Osborn and Jane Mott Watts, her half-brother David Briton Martin and her last terrier and best friend to her final days at home, Harry. She is survived by her niece Debbie Wooddell, eight nephews, Rob Watts, Beau Watts, Andrew Watts, Kim Ives, Michael Ives, Chris Ives, George Ives and Edward Ives, her daughter Jane Ely Balaguero and her husband Miguel of Salisbury, CT and her son Tim Ely and his black labs Ripple and Echo of Middletown, RI.
A Service in Thanksgiving to God for the Life of Susan M. Ely will be held at 11AM on Saturday, May 17, 2025 at the Church of St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville, NJ.
In lieu of flowers, a gift can be made in Sue’s name to the Raptor Trust in Millington, NJ (https://www.theraptortrust.org/) or The Raritan Headwaters, Bedminster, NJ (https://www.raritanheadwaters.org).
