The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Susan Kimbrough Joined Marc Hunt Live On “A Life, Unedited” On The I Love CVille Network!

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Susan Kimbrough, Mother, Wife, Teacher, Fashionista, joined Marc Hunt live on A Life, Unedited! A Life, Unedited airs live Wednesday from 10:15 pm – 11:00 am on The I Love CVille Network. “A Life, Unedited” is presented by Martha Jefferson House.

Good morning. Welcome to A Life Unedited. In this podcast, we sit down with remarkable people to talk about their lives, their perspective, honestly without the filters of hindsight. Today, I am so honored to have Susan Kimbrough. Susan is a very special woman. Her life was defined by love and her family and the things that surround that. which are sometimes loss. Susan, you grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. I did. You take me there? It's known as the sparkling city by the sea. It's a beautiful city.

I had lots of friends in elementary, junior high and high school. We would in high school often go to the beach on the weekends. I heard it's gorgeous. You heard? I heard the beach is gorgeous. The beach is gorgeous. It's a part of South Padre Island, so yes, it's very pretty white sand. Nice.

What do you remember most about your childhood? My childhood was very carefree. I had an older sister, three years older, Barbara, and it was the two girls with my mother and dad. My dad owned an refrigeration company. and my mother was his bookkeeper. Oh, nice. So it was just a happy childhood growing up. My grandmother, my paternal grandmother, lived in Corpus Christi, also not with us, but in a retirement facility.

Nice. So I was close to her. Nice. Was she pretty influential in your life as a kid? She was very influential. I would spend a great deal of time with her. growing up I had lots of fun designing clothes for my dolls

and then it grew into designing clothes for myself that my grandmother would so lovingly sew for my sister and I in high school it got to be dresses to dances and we would describe spaghetti straps they weren't called spaghetti straps back then but she knew she could make them and ruffles and all that goes with a girls high school dress. So that was fun.

That's incredible. So you said your mother and your father, your mother worked alongside your father for his air conditioning business. Yes. That's incredible. So they must have a really good relationship for them be able to work together. They did. She was his bookkeeper as well as she answered the phone to take calls. for him. And in the summer, my sister and I would do that as well, fill in. So that was

interesting. What was your dynamic like with your sister? My sister was very studious, where I was more at the social butterflies, so to speak, and of course her grades reflected her studio. We're mine didn't always, but I did fine. Well, you're so smart. I'm sure you did well. So what was your grandmother like? Did you spend a lot of time with her? I did spend a lot of time with her on weekends. And she was very philosophical. Okay.

And while I was dating in high school, she would always give me little snippets to take with me as I was going to. a dance or date the next weekend. And most importantly, she always said to think through your decision, Susan, don't jump into something. Think through it. The ramifications, how it would affect your life going forward. And I was at that time just superficially thinking about it.

And it kind of flew over my head until I got older and thought she really had something there. So that she was a big influence as well as my mother. Do you ever hear her voice in your mind? I do, and I've been clearing out my permanent house as I've moved to Martha Jefferson, and I came across her candy dish that I could not get rid of. And I was telling one of my friends at Martha Jefferson House that my grandmother always kept lemon drops in it. She said, well, you've got fine lemon drops and put in the candy dish.

So I'm now looking. I don't know if they're even still made. So, yes, she was very influential. Nice. So high school, what was high school like for you? High school was great. Was it in Corpus Christi as well?

It was in Corpus Christi at the W.B. Ray, my graduating class had 700 people in it. So it was a big school. I can remember a distinct memory. read from high school is the assassination of John Kennedy. Wow. My sister was a freshman at SMU at that time, and it's gone out to Lovefield to meet them as they got off their plane.

So in the documentaries about JFK and his death, my sister's there shaking their hands, which is kind of remarkable. That is really remarkable. Yes. And I think, you know, everybody that saw the death, my parents that can always tell me exactly where they were, you know. Yes. When they found out, it's kind of like 9-11 for us, I guess.

Exactly. Wow, that's incredible. So after high school, what? After high school, I went 250 miles north from Corpus Christi to Austin, Texas, to begin my education at the University of Texas, Hookham Horns, and had a great time. I was in the same sorority as my sister was in. And living in the sorority house reminds me a lot of living at Martha Jefferson where you can open your door and have instant friends.

And if you're lonely, you can just open your door and there they are. So it does remind me a lot of college. My junior year of college, I was in charge of matching for match parties with fraternities. So one fraternity came over. and they sent their match person. And we sat and matched 50 people. Oh, she's tall. She's quiet.

He's, you know, funny. We matched at the end. This person said, you and I don't have a date, so let's go. And that turned out to be my husband. Oh, wow. So that was a great beginning. Unfortunately, he was only there for one year. We dated often.

he made the best grades. I made the worst grades of my college career, and then he was accepted to dental school in Dallas after three years of college. So he moved even further north to Dallas. I had to finish my education in elementary education, and then as soon as I graduated from the University of Texas, we married, and I moved to Dallas, and he had another five years. three years of dental school and two years of orthodonic school. Wow. So I taught for about a year and a half, and then we decided that we wanted to have a child.

So I got pregnant with Lance, a son that lives here in Charlottesville, and my husband waited tables at a restaurant at night. Even though he was a dentist, he could not practice because he was still in orthodontic school. So he was a waiter, and that seemed a little frustrating at times that he would come home and say, you know, here I am taking all this back talk from clients. And I could be practicing dentistry, but he was so devoted and knew from a young age,

he wanted to be a dentist, and then as he got into it, he really loved orthodontics. So he was very good at it. We ended up buying a practice, which was unheard of. in Odessa, Texas, after he finished his degree, moved out there. And that was an interesting experience. When we moved there, we started meeting friends, and most of them, husband, wife, and kids would eat three meals a day at the country club. And the men never worked.

They were out on the golf course every day. And they were like, come on, join us on the golf course to my husband. And he was like, well, I've got to work. And then we found out a vast majority. of these people had a high school degree, and they lived so lavish. The town of Odessa and Midland are 30 miles apart, but Odessa was known as more the blue-collar town, Midland, the white-collar. The oil companies were in Midland versus Odessa. And between the two towns, when oil was up, when it was getting a good price, things were booming to the point that there was a Rolls-Royce

dealership between the two cities. It was most, not most, but several of our friends had lear jets that they would, you'd fly to Austin with them to get your hair cut in Dallas. I mean, not to Austin, you'd fly to Dallas and are veiled for a vacation for the weekend. It was quite the life coming out of college with very little funds. Right, sure.

So it was exciting to be a part of it and fun. You're coming out of college and then all these people with high school degrees. Exactly. Exactly. Wow, that's incredible. I guess we went into the wrong business. That's right. Exactly.

And when Lance was in ninth grade, we sent both of our boys to a private school in Midland, an Episcopal school. And when Lance was in eighth grade, he came home one day and said, we had a lot of schools come visit us. college prep schools and I think I might like to do that and we were like what is it? We'd both gone to public schools and felt like we had a fine education

and he was like well they're in different parts of the country most along the East Coast and we were like you would live there in ninth grade you know so we went along with it met an educational counselor in Dallas

who interviewed him to see what he wanted out of school and then interviewed us to see, well, we wanted out of school. And after touring four different schools, our last school was Woodbury Forest in Orange, Virginia. It was April. The trees, we lived in a very desert area location. The trees were in full bloom, flowers blooming,

in addition to it being an all-boys boarding school. It was a perfect match. So Lance spent his last three years, years of high school in Orange, Virginia, which we came out. Is that Blue Ridge? The name of the school? No, it's Woodbury Forest. Woodbury, sorry, said that yet.

And then Kevin, our younger son, who was three years younger than Lance, he also, he went four years to Woodbury Forest. So anytime we'd come, we bring the boys to Charlottesville and stayed at the Omni Hotel and ate at the Angus Barn along with the other parents. You would see all the other kids and their parents. and their parents at the Angus Barn. Little did I know that Lance would then end up in Charlottesville. He married Abigail McConnell, and they moved to Charlottesville and have three children.

Now, their oldest Henry is just finishing up his freshman year at UVA as an Echol scholar. Margaret is their second child, and she is a sophomore at Western Albemarle, and Mac is their 13-year-old that's at Henley. Nice. Very nice. So Lance is the blame for you being in Virginia. Exactly, exactly. And then my younger son, Kevin, went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth after Woodbury Forest,

and he lives in Austin, Texas, selling commercial real estate, which has been a booming market. He has two children, a 13-year-old boy. Cole and a 12-year-old girl, Courtney, and I try to see them as often as I can. I have a small cabin in New Mexico that they try to come visit me while I'm there. And it's been great. Until 1996, my husband and I were at a orthodontic meeting in Denver, and he woke up and had kind of a crick in his back. So we called our doctor and said, he explained what was going on. He had a weakness in his arm and leg, and the doctor said, you know, why don't you just skip going back home and just fly from Denver to Dallas was where our doctor was? We had been with him since

dental school. So by noon of that day that we flew in, we were told by a neurologist that he got us in with that my husband had two brain tumors. They didn't know if they were malignant, but two. And so they said that was very rare for somebody. to present with two primary brain tumors. Anyway, he then had a biopsy. We sent records to Memorial Sloan Kettering to UC San Francisco, the best I got online and just started finding, and as well as M.D. Anderson, and the doctorate, Andy Anderson,

and Houston said, I can operate, you won't be paralyzed. And he said, I will get as much as I can. turned out my husband had glialblastoma, which is the most, the worst. So he lived for actually two years and two months. He worked a year after he was diagnosed. He had surgery and was able to work a year. Practice did fine, and then it came back, and it was devastating. And he passed away at,

50. He was 50. It was five days before my 50th birthday. And so that was a big change in direction. We had also just built our forever home, which I lived in for an additional five years. Then I moved to Midland. I had many sorority sisters and college friends there, lived there for nine years. And then Lance kept saying, why don't you come? Well, actually, his wife was put to bed, and so they rented, or not rent, where Lance worked, they had a corporate apartment, and so I stayed on the downtown mall, which was fun. So, Lance, he stayed here after high school and his college, and then. He and his wife both went to UNC Chapel Hill.

Okay, nice. And then moved back to Charlottesville. Yes. Nice. Nice. And you got here. So that's incredible. I'm so sorry.

That's so heartbreaking and so unexpected. It was just, it really brought it full circle to the three of us, how life can't turn on a dime. You just moved into your forever home. Yes. Just went on a conference and then found out. Yes. Never had headaches. Never really had a headache the whole time.

So, and he just had a full physical two months before he had this episode. So anyway, that's that, and now I have come out here, love it, love the seasons. It's so nice and different. I was going back and forth each summer and spending the summer at my home in New Mexico. I broke my ankle in the fall of this past year, rehab, and then I arrived at the Martha Jefferson House and life has been wonderful. It really has been. Well, fortunately, we got to meet, or I got to meet Lance when you had just broken your ankle, and he was kind of looking around.

And as many families go through, when it's all of a sudden, they're faced with all these decisions of what their parents should do. And it was very sudden, and it just happened to work out perfectly that, you know, we had availability just at that time. And it really did. It did. All the stars aligned, for sure. They certainly did. and in my current apartment, even the furniture from my house,

my rug that I just had a decorator come do my house in Edna Village, everything fit in my apartment. So it really was meant to be, and I enjoy each day. Well, you're filled with so much love, and I think it's incredible that despite everything you've been through, you're still just, you are filled with so much love,

and you're so kind to everyone. I would love to talk a little bit more, about your husband. What was he like? What was that first date like after you two first match? Oh, he was, we were a perfect match. His family, his dad was in oil business. His mother was the bookkeeper for the dad's business.

We had very similar financial upbringing, both public school educated kids, and I think that's important, looking back to have a similarity with your spouse. And we definitely did. We had a wonderful marriage. We had Lance while my husband was still in dental school. So things, instead of going out to dinner, we would have dinner at home and we'd go to the park to entertain.

And, you know, a simple way of life, but a great way of life. And we left Dallas after dental school and went to Odessa. Did you not want to move back to Austin? I thought about it, but Austin's so different than when it was when I was just a sleepy, kind of hippie town. And now the infiltration of California people and New Yorkers, it's changed it. At the airport, you walk in and it says, keep Austin weird. And it is kind of weird. But in a good way, it's a fun.

It's fun to visit. Yeah, yeah, fun visit, exactly. I thought it was really special when we were talking earlier, and you just kind of briefly touched on it, that when your husband, when you first became pregnant with Lance, you two had made the decision together, even though he was still in orthodontic school,

and that's a full-time gig for sure, him getting out of school and then going and waiting tables so that you could stay at home. Yes. We had decided we weren't going to have children until I could be a stay-at-home mom. and so he would go wait tables at a steak restaurant and it was frustrating at times having clients

not treat you nicely and he would come home and say you know I really could be practicing dentistry I am a dentist but yet he was still in school and it was prohibited at that time for him to practice yes he must have been very humble Yes. What do you see most in Lance and Kevin?

What do you see about your husband most in Lance and Kevin? Both of them look, especially Lance, look a lot like him. Interestingly, my husband ran track in Arkansas for one year before he transferred to Texas. Lance ran. track for one year. Henry has run track, got COVID, and that kind of ended his running career. He's now on the squash team or squash club UVA. Margaret, their daughter, is playing field hockey. She's on the varsity field hockey team, and then Mack is running. Kevin I talked to and his 13-year-old is running.

junior high and really these boys i think it's something in the gene pool here athletic gene yeah especially with track and but my austin grandchild cole he is a sprinter where the others even my husband and they from generation they didn't know what they excelled in each generation before and the the boys have here have all run the same thing as my husband which was an 800 meter run. That's incredible. Yeah. So.

I don't think I could run 800 meters. You had a slow pace. So you mentioned that after your husband had passed away, that Kevin and Lance definitely stepped up and were there for you and surrounded you. Absolutely. And Kevin even came home for a little while and stayed with you. Yes. Did you have friends that also kind of rallied around?

at the same time. Yes, had lots of friends beforehand. Now, after my husband's death, our couple friends, more or less evaporated. The wives would call and we'd go to lunch, but as far as going to dinner as with me and

them as a couple that more or less stopped, other than one couple stayed and we would vacation with them as a for some, and they just continued on, and they're going to watching this podcast and they will know exactly who they are.

They have been, he's an attorney and he was pivotable in writing up, getting us set with trust and getting all legal documents ready before my husband died. So true friends. Yes. Does that become like family? Yes. Yes. So, yes, I've been very blessed to have.

Were there ever moments after your husband passed away that you felt like you couldn't get through it? Or you were just... Oh, yes. It just happened. It seemed, even though it was a two-year period, it seemed to go by very fast. And I kept, I wanted him at home, so we had care come into the home and helped me. But, yeah, it was a tough go. I'm sure.

I'm sure. That sure. It was heartbreaking to go through all of that. to stand by him at the same time and they'll still be supportive. Yes, because he was, and you don't really realize this as a couple until one isn't there, but he was always the outgoing one that would, we'd walk into a room, and he could always make conversation, and I would trail behind because I was a shy or type until I got to know somebody.

But without him, I had to step up then and be the one to go meet people. How are Lance and Kevin holding in there after losing their father? They're doing fine, and I must say I act like this happened a few years ago. It happened 27 years ago. So they were 22 and 25 at the time. Kevin was a senior in college. Lance was starting out his career. So.

It feels like yesterday sometimes. It really does. It really does. but they're doing fine both of them and have had families, wonderful children and families and spouses. I'm sure Lance loves having you out here.

It is fun. I really, because they neither one went to school close by us and then they were gone through high school. So this has been very nice and Kevin visits and like to say I would see him each summer in New Mexico

when he would bring his children and come to my cabin. How often do you make it back to New Mexico? Well, I was going every summer two years ago, and I would fly my car out. Nice. Not fly my car. I would fly out, and my car was transported out.

And two years ago, I got there, and three days later, the police knocked on the door and said, you've got to evacuate. There's a forest fire. So, luckily, my next door neighbors live 70 miles away, and we thought, it's a fire. leave and go. They invited me to their house and said, come stay with us. So I did, and the fire

just kept burning and burned two houses on my little street, didn't bother my neighbor's house or my house. And then by the, that was the, at the first of the summer, so I came back that summer. I shipped my car back, flew back home. It was a very short but expensive vacation. And at the end of that summer, then there was a flash flood because all the trees had been burned, nothing to stop water. So the flood came, and people were like, maybe somebody's trying to tell us something here, but I still have it. And I haven't gotten back for those two years. My health was declining, and then I fell. But I'm hoping, if not this summer, and I know.

Lance is probably listening to this and going, no, but I'm hoping, if not this summer, next summer I can go back. Where in New Mexico is it? It's in Ruudoso, which is at the southern tip of the Rockies elevation. And the city is at 7,000 feet. So we didn't used to have it to need air conditioning because it would get so cool at night. And now I've recently put in. sitting out.

It's beautiful there. It is beautiful. Well, some more existential questions. So since you've been at Martha Jefferson House, what has surprised you the most about how your life has changed at Martha Jefferson House?

The fact that I don't have my car, I can't drive right now. But now that warm weather's here, sometimes I was going to say, I feel kind of cooped up or the lack of getting out. Now that the warm weather's here, I planted flowers on my patio that I hope survived the cold weather these last couple nights.

And I'm looking forward to spending time out there. That'll be the next best thing to going out in Charlottesville. Do you feel like you have a peace of mind? I guess that's where I was going with that. Do you feel like now that you live at Martha Jefferson House, you kind of have a piece of mind knowing that if something were to happen, unexpected. It's so, yes, it's so reassuring.

As well as having meals, I don't have to worry about going to the store and getting food and fixing it. It's just like being on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week vacation. It really is wonderful. The food's delicious. And gets your house cleaned? I wish I could have that. Yes, bed-made.

It's just ideal. Sounds like my daughter's life, actually. Just a few more questions. You said that you are most proud of your two sons and the men they've become. What makes you proud of each of them? What makes you the most proud about Eric? I mean, sorry, Kevin. What are you most proud of about your sons?

Okay. They are not only devoted sons, but also wonderful has my Lance is married my youngest son

is divorced but Lance is a wonderful husband they're both devoted fathers

really good with their children Lance has a wonderful wife I must say also

that helps to raise these children and provide I also my sister had

two kids. So after she passed away seven years ago, her two boys had become very close to me. And so I talked to them, if not as often, sometimes more often than I do with my own son. So really, four outstanding young men, Scott and Grant, they both live. One lives in Dallas and one lives in Austin. The two second children of both families. are in Austin, so I think they get together and have some fun times together, and that's good. Your family doubled.

That's right. Yes, it really did. You answered when I asked you about how would you define your life, and you said your life has been about love. What does that mean to you now? Has it changed at all since your husband passed away? Well, yes, yes. I think the time that my husband and I were together, I've now, that love has grown to my children and their children. I love being with my families and the grandchildren are just out of this world. Fun.

So speaking of grandchildren and your children, years from now, when your sons and grandchildren, think about you, what do you hope they remember? That I loved them dearly, that I was generous, sometimes overly generous, and that I just admired them so much. They've got such good heads on their shoulders, considering their young age. They're much more mature,

and of course they're facing a world that's far different than when I was growing up, but they're much more mature, and world-wise that I was at their ages. Well, Susan, thank you so much for sitting down here. Yeah, and sharing your story with me. It's incredible. My name is Mark Hunt. This is a life unedited, or I get to sit down with remarkable people like Mrs. Kimbrough. Thank you.

Thank you.