Susan Perry; Alexandria (VA) Centenarian (Wonderful)
Hyfler/Rosner
August 1, 2004 Sunday
Final Edition
BYLINE: Joe Holley, Washington Post Staff Writer
Susan Emily Risheill Perry, a lifelong Alexandria resident
whom friends and family knew as Sue, was a child of the 20th
century. She died June 6 in the handsome, two-story
townhouse on Columbus Street her father built in 1910. On
the same block, 75 yards away, was the rowhouse she was born
in a hundred years ago.
The Alexandria centenarian was a living repository of local
history, her vivid memories a valuable resource for
historians, genealogists and preservationists.
Memories of her beloved city ranged back to the days when a
cobblestoned Columbus Street echoed to the sound of horses'
hooves and carriage wheels. Those memories encompassed
modern times, when bargain hunters heading to Ross's Dress
for Less scurried along the timeworn red-brick sidewalks in
front of her house.
Mrs. Perry's maternal grandfather, Thomas Van Buren
Risheill, owned a lumber mill and from 1871 to 1885 was an
alderman representing the city's third ward.
Her paternal grandfather, J.R.N. Curtin, owned Alexandria
Iron Works at Wilkes and Royal streets, where the Old Town
Safeway is. He, too, was involved in local politics, serving
as president of the board of aldermen from 1896 to 1910. A
short time later, her father operated a lumber mill on the
same site as the ironworks.
The Alexandria of Perry's youth was a small town where, as
she recalled in interviews and oral histories over the
years, "you'd walk down King Street and you knew
everybody -- everybody would speak."
She recalled accompanying her mother on Saturday mornings to
the farmers market at King and Royal streets. Farmers
brought ducks, chickens, eggs and, at hog-killing time,
fresh pork. At Christmas, fresh-cut trees went for a dollar.
She recalled being with her father and occasionally dropping
into Edgar Warfield's drugstore on the northwest corner of
King and Pitt streets, and how Warfield, Alexandria's last
surviving Confederate soldier, would whip up a chocolate
soda for her.
She knew all the early-20th century businesses along King
Street, from the ferry wharf on the Potomac to Shutter's
Hill on the west. She knew the families, knew who married
whom. Her only son, Frank "Bim" Perry III, a retired Fairfax
County judge, recalled the time not long ago when T. Michael
Miller, a research historian with the Office of Historic
Alexandria, showed her a picture of her second-grade class.
She knew the names of nearly every child in the picture.
Perry graduated from the old Alexandria High School and went
to Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. After
graduating, she taught for a year at Alexandria Academy, the
city's oldest school. She was a third-grade teacher during
the 1924-25 school year, but it was not a happy experience.
Her class of 40 pupils included several late-blooming boys,
12 and 13 years old, who occasionally brought pistol bullets
to school and delighted in tossing them into the fireplaces
and wood stoves of the old building.
"It was too hard to control all those children when I was so
inexperienced," Perry told a reporter for the Old Town Crier
in 1999. She learned typing and shorthand and found a job as
a secretary with C&P Telephone Co. in Alexandria. It was
easier on the nerves.
Perry also was a singer. "Alexandria's Kate Smith," as she
was known, was a frequent soloist at the city's Downtown
Baptist Church and performed in church choirs, clubs and
operatic ensembles in the city. She liked to say she was the
first person to sing live on the radio in Northern Virginia,
on the station WJSV.
In 1931, she married Frank Perry Jr., a railroad man from
Orange, Va. He played the violin, and the couple often
duetted at various public venues. He died in 1990.
Short and stout all her life, as well as outgoing and
optimistic, Perry could be a formidable woman, particularly
when she believed that modern-day Alexandria wasn't properly
attentive to its venerable past. When she was 96, she took
it upon herself to make sure that the valuable reference
collection at Alexandria's Barrett Library on Queen
Street -- the city's first public library -- stayed there
instead of moving to the new central library. In 1937, she
had known Mr. Barrett, who built the library in honor of his
mother, a physician.
She protested to the Alexandria City Council and, afterward,
was quoted in the Old Town Crier as saying, "They're going
to do what they want to do anyway. That's politics, but at
least I made the effort."
That effort was to no avail, though some years earlier, she
and two friends were successful in preserving one of
Alexandria's most historic churches. In 1952, when the
city's First Baptist Church outgrew its century-old building
on South Washington Street, Perry and two friends, Charlotte
Henderson and Augusta Taylor, began a campaign to ensure
that the building was preserved as a church.
They obtained a loan from the Baptist Board in Richmond,
borrowed folding chairs from a funeral home and helped
midwife Alexandria's Downtown Baptist Church. The
congregation thrives today, 50 years after its founding.
"If it hadn't been for Sue Perry, they would have razed the
most significant piece of Romanesque architecture in
Alexandria," Miller said. "That property would have been an
ugly parking lot."
At a memorial service, Miller spoke for many Alexandrians
when he described his old friend, who died of a stroke, as
"a real treasure."
He added: "When you lose somebody like her, it's like losing
a whole encyclopedia of Alexandria's history."