Although Susie Roush will always love Richmond, Va., "because it's where we raised our boys," she is excited about moving to Danville. "I am a small-town girl at heart," says the new first lady of Centre. She even promises to keep the cookie jar full for hungry Centre students.

With two athletic sons-Luke, a college sophomore, and Mark, a high school junior-she knows well the importance of food. The Roush house holds Saturday morning pancake breakfasts for the football team, and she enjoys coordinating pre-game meals for the team.

Yet she is more than a "football mom." For one thing, her sons have also been standouts in track and basketball, as well as in the classroom, and she has devoted countless hours to the school system.

"Susie is a tremendous asset," says Dick Mateer '62, a University of Richmond dean. "One year she was a parent volunteer in the school where my wife [Mickey Dooley Mateer '62] works. The next year she was the head of the parent volunteers. And the third year she was president of the PTA. She just rolls up her sleeves and gets involved."

Over the years, she has worked with Scouting, Sunday school and vacation Bible school, and the YMCA board. Her most recent project, a $350,000 collaboration between public and private sources to renovate the high school athletic complex and air condition the school's auditorium, will be finished in the fall.

For fun, she enjoys family trips and gatherings and working in the garden. She's even found time to earn a pilot's license. "She is a very dynamic person," says John Rilling, a University of Richmond history professor who has known the family for years.

Susie Roush grew up in Dover, Ohio, a town about the size of Danville, where her parents still live. Although she and her three younger sisters (including her identical twin) have scattered from Iowa to Virginia, they reassemble on the family farm twice a year.

After graduating from Ohio University, she taught high school for a year, then married and moved to Arizona while her husband was in the Army. Later she earned a master's in counseling at Miami University and worked in Miami's financial aid office until the first baby Roush arrived.

She views life as a series of "stages," each with its own joys and responsibilities. "I had a brief but enjoyable five-year career stage and am now almost at the end of a twenty-three-year child-rearing stage, which is by far the most important work of my life," she says. In fact, because of the importance both Roushes place on raising their children, she will remain in Virginia until next spring, so that their younger son can graduate with his high school friends and teammates.

"With the summer of 1999 will come a whole new stage for me," she continues. "Not only will John and I face an empty nest in our personal lives with Luke and Mark both off to college, but I will be starting a new stage with John at Centre.

"I look forward to it being a wonderful adventure," she says.

- D.F.J.

Centrepiece
Centre College
600 West Walnut St.
Danville, KY 40422

Phone: (859) 238-5717
Fax: (859) 238-5723
E-mail: alumnews@centre.edu
or johnsond@centre.edu