"I didn't think I would ever want to be a librarian," Reed laughs. "What I wanted to be was a radiologist and work with cancer patients."
But nothing like that happened. After high school she went to work for the Journal newspapers as a graphic artist. She wanted to earn enough to buy herself a good riding horse. There were two problems with her desire to ride. Although already an accomplished horsewoman in her teens, who rode before she could walk, she was small - too small for a full-sized saddle - and she had a disease of the spine.
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"I can't remember a time when I didn't ride," she said.
As she grew up, she watched her father Harry "Dean" Kimble, a night watchman at Purina Farms in Gray Summit, train horses in his free time.
Kimble was a master with horses, along the lines of a horse whisperer. As a child Reed watched him work the young horses through the series of gaits and commands. In her teens, she knew exactly what a horse could do if given the right commands by its rider.
One of her first purchases as a young adult was Blaze, a registered quarter horse, the last horse that her father trained.
In 1961 she married James Millar Reed, who she describes as a life mate. The marriage was a match that would complement her love of gardening, country life and horses.
When they married the couple lived in an apartment in Pacific for one year then moved to the Reed family farm north of Pacific.
The couple created a second-floor apartment in the house where Jim grew up. His mother and brother lived on the first floor.
"At that time the farm still had the original log house on it," Reed said. "But when the family moved out from St. Louis so Jim could grow up in the country, his mother refused to live in the log house. She designed a house in the arts and crafts style and her father George Millar built it."
Millar lived with his daughter, who was widowed in 1950, until his death in 1962.
"Jim bought me a beautiful white stallion," Reed said. "But no one could ride him so we sold him."
Her brother-in-law Tom owned a registered Tennessee walker named Count, a blue roan, that was his graduation present from Coleman Elementary.
"But I kept falling off because the saddle was too big for me." Reed laughs as easily at falling off a horse as she does at losing her place in a book. "I only weighed 95 pounds and I had a hard time riding that big horse."
Jim found her a three-quarter, or junior, saddle and bought her a Welsh pony so she could ride to her heart's content.
In 1964 Sue was hired by the Scenic Regional Library and gave up all thoughts of being a radiologist or artist. She found she was at home among the books.
"It was a wonderful place to connect community service with the library," Reed said. "To me it was more than a job."
Jim managed the Pacific Refrigeration Company - or icehouse. The couple would have two daughters, Susan Heather Frey, who with her husband and three children lives in the house her grandmother built on the farm. Their second daughter, Jennifer, lives at home and has become an accomplished horsewoman. A graduate of Missouri State University in Springfield, the younger daughter was a member of the college riding team.
Riding took a wonderful turn when Jim joined the Moolah Mounted Lancers and began the demanding process parade drill on horseback. The avocation would take the family through 30 years of training horses to remain in line with people milling nearby on foot. Horse training and parade practice takes up much of the couple's free time. They provide horses and Jim rides in annual events like the Veiled Prophet Parade in downtown St. Louis. Last year, the Moolah Lancers rode their horses in 2008 Pegasus Parade at the Kentucky Derby.
"Actually I'm a better rider than he is," she said. "But ladies don't ride with the Lancers."
The couple own seven horses now, four that are used for the Shriners. Work with the Lancers has been a joint affair with Jim riding and Sue handling much of the paperwork.
As a library assistant Sue found time to complete the ECC masters course of Dr. Helmut Laymon Haupt, professor emeritus of the University of Missouri, and attend UM's Library Institute.
Sue and Jim eventually built a home on the family farm, a 20-year project that included rescues of historical windows of landmark buildings. The dining room and living room contain the windows from the old Pacific railroad depot that has since been demolished.
"Jim was downtown and he called me on the phone," Sue said. "He told me they were tearing down the depot and demolishing the windows. We could buy them for all $25 if he would haul them away and did I want them." The couple painstakingly stripped the wood of several coats of paint and varnish. "They fit exactly the space we had allotted for windows," Reed said.
In a similar incident, they bought windows for their solarium, which was added to the house later. Wesleyan University was demolishing a building which had high arched windows, 7 feet wide and 12 feet high. The couple bought the windows and stacked them on the farm until they had time to strip them and install them in the solarium. They face south offering a spectacular view of Reed's garden and the sweeping panorama of a treeline and high meadow in the distance.
Reed retired from the library in 2004, after 40 years.
"It was a great life," she said. "I had great relationships with my superiors and my assistants."
She thought she would travel and work in her garden but she found herself with a health problem so debilitating that she could do little more than think. What she found herself thinking about was a Franklin County family that had intrigued her for decades. The name Jeffries seemed to be everywhere in county history and Reed had collected snippets of dates and anecdotes about the family, some stored in file folders and some in her prodigious memory. In retirement she began to catalogue the facts, sorting them by geography and time. And an astonishing parallel with the history of Franklin County emerged.
"They actually came into the county before Missouri was a state, part of the Virginia plantation families who brought slaves with them," Reed said. "Over the decades they entered county government and started businesses in the Labadie, Pacific, Gray Summit and St. Clair area. I knew about all of them but hadn't tied them together."
As Reed's health improved and she was able to work in her garden, she also worked on a manuscript detailing 100 years of the descendants of Achilles and Susan Jeffries. It was Reed who rediscovered that the Bascom House at Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit was built in 1879 by Col. Thomas W.B. Crews for his wife Virginia Jeffries Crews.
In 2007 some 50 or 60 Crews descendants from all over the country were allowed to hold a family reunion at the Bascom House and they called Reed to help them with their family history.
In 2008 Heritage Bookstall published Reed's second book, "Jeffries, Sifting Through Time, the Achilles Jeffries Family in Franklin County."
The elements of Reed's life were so intertwined it is impossible to separate them chronographically. While working full time as a librarian, she created a world class garden. Jim rescued a discarded photo booth at Six Flags and rebuilt it into a garden shed, creating a small enclave on the family farm. In her day job, Reed used her position at the library to nurture a love of reading in patrons of all ages.
It was an unexpected book and the country's 200th birthday in 1976 that catapulted the tiny librarian into author, historical expert and civic organizer. In 1975, artist Eloise LeSaulnier asked Reed to write a series of articles on Pacific places and people in preparation for the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial. LeSaulnier said she would do the illustrations.
"She really pushed me to do it," Reed said. "I didn't even know I could write." But the persuasive illustrator collaborated with Reed to create 52 articles, which were printed each week in the Tri-County Journal newspaper. The articles were later published in Reed's first book, "In Retrospect."
The book "Roots," by Alex Haley, created an interest in family history that crossed all cultural and age lines. Reed found her patrons increasingly looking for local history.
"Suddenly everybody was looking for information on their own families," Reed said. "Before that no one seemed to think that personal history or hometown history had any value."
Reed and five other local history buffs formed the Meramec Valley Genealogical and Historical Society in 1987 and Reed created a corner in the Pacific library's research section, to keep obituaries and other family histories. Original members were Neil Brennan, Orton Lynch, Eloise Mayle, Roger Jarvis and Janet Daniel.
The early work has grown into an extensive family history collection in the library where members of the genealogy society Reed formed still meet each Tuesday morning to clip newspaper stories and file information by family name. The archive is open to the public. The books cannot be removed from the library, but patrons are welcome to read and copy material.
Through the years Reed has been recognized for her contributions to the community.
Her awards include the 1970 Boy Scouts Appreciation Award;
In 1972 the Jaycees named her among Outstanding Young Women for her work with the Arts Council; in 1989, the Scenic Regional Library 25 years service award; 1989, City of Pacific 25 years service award;Ê 1990, City of Pacific Pride Day Award - Outstanding Citizen; 1990, Eagles Auxiliary Library Service Appreciation award; 2003, Chamber of Commerce Pioneer of Pacific Award; 2004, City of Pacific 40 years service Appreciation Award; 2004, Scenic Regional Library 40-year service award; 2004, Meramec Valley Genealogical and Historical Society Lifetime Membership and Service Award.
All the awards were nice, she said, but what she really wants to do now is to ride in the Sesquicentennial Parade in downtown Pacific May 2.
