Suzanne Latimer Eastburn

Suzanne Latimer Eastburn was born Donna Suzanne, named after her aunts, Donna, Sue and Ann, in Odessa, Texas, to Taffy Hartsfield, and had the good sense to leave just days later. Her mother and birth father, Curtis Holly, remarried prior to her birth but then divorced again not long after. While Suzanne was still a toddler her mother married Donald Latimer, who would come to be the only father she knew for most of her life. Don adopted her and they began their adventure which would include a baby sister, Linda. They lived in Fort Worth and Phoenix, but after her mom pointed out a spot on a US map with her eyes closed, they moved to Boulder, Colo. 

When she and I met, her family was living in Northglenn, Colo., and mine was living in nearby Arvada. Growing up there she made two lifelong friends, made straight A’s and graduated high in her huge class. She saved her babysitting money and had more savings than I did. Her parents were worried about her becoming too close with an older boy she was seeing and conspired with her dad’s work buddy, my dad, to get us together. I was invited on an outing with her, her parents and several learning-disabled residents of their group home to a circus, Shiners’ I think.

I sat next to Suzanne but with everyone else there, I did not consider it a date. She did, and after several days without hearing from me she had her mom call mine. We soon were on the first of many long phone calls we would share over the next nearly 49 years. After nine months of not so much dating as just spending a lot of time together, we married.

For our first year the two of us managed Alpine Boarding kennels that my family had built and operated. From there we went to managing her mother’s group home where we were blessed with Matthew. We relocated to Windsor, Colo., for my job at the Kodak plant. Suzanne stayed at home, raised Matt, cared for a series of foster children and spent a good deal of time saving us money on groceries and such to the extent of it being like a second income.

We loved and enjoyed each other and our delightful boy, bought a new home and remained until ‘83 when I had had it with rotating shift work and became a welder. We moved to the Oklahoma oil fields for about 18 months and then back to Windsor.  Soon after, we traveled to Juneau, Alaska, where Suzanne helped her mom recover from cancer surgery.

During our years in Windsor, Suzanne joined the Carpenters union and apprenticed on several large projects in the state and got an associate’s degree in accounting. Our life together would take us back to Northglenn while I was employed at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant where we both took schooling to learn refrigeration to prepare us for our HVACR career in Eureka Springs on the advice of her parents who were running Riverview Resort. Brother, were they right about that. She once again had better grades than I.  

In 1987 we showed up in Eureka Springs and went door to door introducing ourselves. We worked together for many years, until Matt came on board. She continued to prepare our income taxes every year and joined Grandview Extension Homemakers Club where she was treasurer for several years. 

 Together, with her doing the arrangements, we traveled to England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Turkey, Canada, Jamaica, Mexico, Belize and RV’d extensively in the US. What we recently came to realize is that we always felt at home wherever we were together.

It was my pleasure and privilege just to have known her, let alone a miraculous delight to have spent most of my life with her, my beautiful, brown-eyed girl.