[S]usan Green, a longtime Vermont author and feature writer for publications around the state including VTDigger, has died. She was 76.
Green was found dead Tuesday at her home in the New North End of Burlington. The cause of death has not yet been determined but is believed to be from natural causes.
Bob Green, her former husband, said a friend had seen her at the grocery store Friday and later alerted authorities when she had not been able to contact her.
Susan Green was born on Jan. 8, 1943, in Manhattan, the daughter of Alfred and Esther Zuckerman. Her father, an electrical engineer and avid photographer, had roots in Ukraine and her mother arrived from Poland at the age of 12.
The family lived on the East Side but later moved to Valley Stream on Long Island when Green was 11, according to her friend Anne Geggis.
Geggis, a former reporter at the Burlington Free Press who until recently was on the staff of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, stayed in contact with Green and would often spend time with Green’s mother after she had retired to Florida.
Green’s sister, Ryki Zuckerman of Buffalo, New York, said she was not ready to be interviewed but did speak on the phone Tuesday night with Geggis.
“She seemed to be magical,” Zuckerman, a retired art teacher and a published poet, told Geggis. She recalled that her father had an audio recording of Susan telling a story when she was not much more than a toddler. And telling stories became her lifelong passion.
And she had many stories to tell, whether it was meeting movie stars or living in a free-spirited community. Zuckerman said her sister was an activist from an early age and participated in desegregation demonstrations with the Congress of Racial Equality while in high school. And she saw Buddy Holly perform at the Brooklyn Paramount when she was just 13.
Green first arrived in Vermont to attend Goddard College in the early 1960s. “People were folk dancing on the lawn — it was very artsy,” recalled Zuckerman, who was 12 when they dropped her sister off at college.
Green recalled her time on the Plainfield campus in a 2002 article in Seven Days. She later moved to Boston, where she became a social worker with the city housing authority, a role that suited her activist tendencies. Her former husband said Green helped place a building under the successful supervision of the Black Panther Party while living in a group house called “Wasted Lives for Peace.”
Green returned to Vermont in August 1971, and was employed at the Chittenden County Office of Economic Opportunity. During that time, she also began working as a freelance writer covering music and the arts.
She eventually joined the Burlington Free Press as a full-time feature writer, often profiling artists and entertainers who came through town, and reviewing films and live concerts. She later served similar roles with the Vanguard Press and Seven Days.
One performance she was drawn to was a 1975 University of Vermont appearance of Rolling Thunder Review, led by the legendary Bob Dylan and joined at various times by such icons as folk singer Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.
Green had known Dylan since her first year at Goddard when she met him during an Easter break trip back home in Greenwich Village. She later traveled through the South with the group for several weeks in a role that she described as its “official itinerant herbalist.”
In the mid-1980s, Green moved to City Hall, where she spent several years as co-director of the Mayor’s Arts Council during the tenure of Bernie Sanders, now Vermont’s junior U.S. senator and 2020 presidential candidate.
Green was also the author of a number of books, including the first major work about Vermont’s own Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, called “Bread and Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith from Central America.” That effort took her to Nicaragua during a visit there by Cuban President Fidel Castro following the Sandinista revolution.
She also was the co-author of “Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Unofficial Companion.”
Never one to let her literary work get entirely in the way of her political advocacy — or vice versa, for that matter — she was arrested in a 1977 Clamshell Alliance protest at the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which she was covering as a freelance writer.
Green often wrote about the 1960s back-to-the-land movement, including a 2015 story prompted by an influential Seattle blog that ranked Vermont as the state with the highest number of hippies per capita.
Melinda Moulton, CEO at the Burlington Waterfront redevelopment company Main Street Landing, was one of the people Green wrote about. “I’m proud of being a hippie,” Moulton declared. “Those are my roots and it is what drove me to do what I have done and drives me to still fight for the issues that we fought for 40 years ago.”
In a Facebook post Tuesday, Moulton remembered Green as a “Vermont treasure.”
Moulton said: “She was a magnificent journalist and contributed a tremendous amount to the fabric of the arts, music, literature, and community in Vermont.”
Jym Wilson, a former Free Press photographer and later a photo editor at USA Today, said he was shaken by the news of Green’s death.
“Her spirit seemed destined to go on,” said Wilson, who now lives in Washington, D.C. “I spent lots of hours in my cars with Susan on assignment and I can’t think of anyone more enjoyable to spend a day with.”
During the past several years, Green was a regular contributor to VTDigger, writing on such topics as the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” moving to online publication, Vermont’s Red Scare and civil rights activists who traveled from the state to the South in the 1960s.
VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway said that although she and Green had not met, she “enjoyed our email conversations about stories.”
“It’s heartbreaking to hear.”
Green also leaves a daughter, Jennie of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, a massage therapist who — Susan proudly noted to this writer recently — also “coordinates rock ‘n’ roll festivals such as Bonnaroo in Tennessee during the warmer seasons;” and a brother, Steven Zuckerman of Hudson, Florida.
Bob Green said he expects plans for a memorial service to be announced shortly.
Disclosure: Jim Welch and Susan Green were colleagues at the Burlington Free Press.
