Marquette, MI – May, 2014 – This month on STRAIGHTtalk: Conversations With People You Should Know, Brian Cabell sits down with Sue Kensington, community activist, former City Commissioner in Marquette, and all around interesting woman about town…
BC: When you were a little girl downstate back in the Fifties, what did you want to be when you grew up?
SK: I wanted to be a doctor. I loved the doctor we had but at that time I was told I couldn’t be a doctor because girls weren’t doctors. So then I wanted to be a nurse.
BC: What’s the most vivid memory you have from your childhood?
SK: That’s easy. Visiting my grandparents in Marquette. They were such strong influences in my life and so was Lake Superior. There was a sense of place here. We moved a lot when I was a child but my grandparents’ house here was a constant. We were here every summer, every Christmas. And the lake…I can’t describe it. It’s a feeling. If you live here, you get it. We’d drive up here and when I’d first see the lake, I’d just be so excited to be here. That energy just flows right through you.
BC: What were you like as a teenager? Wild or sedate?
SK: Oh God, I wanted to be wild. I was firstborn, kind of rule-bound. But then civil rights came, Kennedy’s assassination came, all of that, and I became an activist. Which was not what my parents would have wanted. I was involved in women’s rights, anti-war demonstrations. Those are the things that shaped me.
Read the full interview here: http://www.marquettemagazine.com/straighttalk-conversations-with-people-you-should-know-2/