1924 ~ 2024
Susan Finke died peacefully on February 18, 2024, three months shy of her 100th birthday, at The Highlands in Northport, Michigan. Susan was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 17, 1924, to Harry J. Finke, Jr., and Georgia Strietmann Finke. She graduated from the Hillsdale School and, in 1946, from Wellesley College. She then worked for three years as the personal secretary to Dr. Gustav Eckstein at the University of Cincinnati. After leaving Dr. Eckstein’s employ, she attended Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City, after which she moved to Washington, D.C. to take a secretarial position at the Central Intelligence Agency. She was promoted to intelligence analyst and remained in that job the rest of her career.
After retiring from the CIA in 1982, Susan stayed in Washington, taking classes in a variety of subjects and, for the next 26 years, volunteering as a reader for the visually impaired, an undertaking she enjoyed and found especially gratifying. In 2011, she moved to Traverse City, Michigan, near her cottage in Leland where she had spent summers with her family. She moved in 2019 to Northport, where she was living at the time of her death.
