The Diamond Survived, Its Person Didn't
A fire took almost everything.
Susan McPherson’ relationship with one piece of jewelry lets us into one of the most personal and painful moments of her life.
She is a petite woman with an enormous presence. She radiates positivity and grace. She’s generous with advice and runs McPherson Strategies, a communications and social impact agency with clients like Intel, The Tiffany Foundation, and Save The Children. She’s also addicted to connecting people (I cannot imagine the size of her rolodex). She’s such a believer in this skill, she wrote a book about it. “The Lost Art of Connecting” gives readers “a tried and true method for building more thoughtful business relationships.”
And she got a lot of that passion from her mama.
Susan is the youngest of three, raised in Albany by David, a professor father and Beryl, a working mom.
“I was the youngest child and I only knew my mom as a professional. But my older siblings knew her as the wife of a professor.”
When Susan was in first grade, Beryl went back to work part time at the Albany Public Library and when she was in third grade, her mom went back full-time. By seventh grade, Beryl had started traveling.
“All of my friends moms were home and I would have to come home to an empty house and I resented her for it. But by the time I got to college, she was doing so many cool things. I really admired her.”
By the time Susan was 21, her parents had settled into a long distance marriage. David still needed to teach for a few years but Beryl was anxious to continue developing her career beyond Albany. They commuted back and forth and in December of 1986, they traveled to Puerto Rico. David remembers that Beryl only had two requests: “sun and casinos.” San Juan fit the bill.
They stayed in a hotel that didn’t have a casino but Beryl loved playing slots. On New Years Day they decided to split up and do their own thing. Beryl walked down to another hotel for some casino time but didn’t mention where she was going. Hours after she sat down at the machines, that very hotel, The DuPont Plaza, would become the site of the largest hotel fire in Puerto Rican history and the second largest hotel fire in the history of the United States.
David smelled smoke and walked outside to the DuPont plaza to take some photos. He watched the fire in disbelief without realizing that his wife was inside.
***
In the wake of the fire, Luis “Lou” Feldstein, a Miami-Herald reporter, was sent to Puerto Rico. Susan remembers Lou’s description of that time in an article she wrote for REBOOT in 2022.
At some point during his daily coverage of the cause of the fire, the rising death toll and other “breaking news,” Lou decided to write a story about the family members who were anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones. When he struck up a conversation with my dad on the street, he felt an immediate rapport and asked whether he could follow him as he searched for his wife. Fully expecting a “no,” he was surprised when my dad extended a warm and welcoming hand instead.
Lou shadowed David for days but hope was diminishing. Two days after she left for the casino, Beryl still hadn’t returned to her hotel room. Lou followed David as he tried to get answers.
David heard they were taking bodies to the medical center and when he showed up, he encountered a multitude of people who encouraged him to get Beryl’s dental records. It wouldn’t be long before he would get official word. Beryl had been identified and was included in the list of victims. Susan wrote about her father’s memories from that day.
Before my father passed away in 2008, he would talk about my mom in almost every conversation we ever had. But perhaps because of the sheer pain of what transpired that New Year’s Eve, I never pressed him on the exact details. All I recalled was that it took several days to confirm that she had been one of the 97 victims whose lives were cut short in that deadly fire.
The thirteen firetrucks, 100 firefighters, and 30 ambulances weren’t able to recover much but the morgue did find one thing near Beryl’s remains.
When I was growing up, there wasn’t fancy anything but the one thing that was fancy was my mother’s engagement ring. It was one carat and as a kid, I thought that was ginormous…and when I would put it on, since I was so tiny, and I would pretend to be a princess…years later when I was 21, it was the only thing that survived on her body after that fire.
Susan is always looking for more stories of her mom. When Lou Feldstein, the Miami Herald reporter got in touch via LinkedIn back in February of 2022, it was such a gift. In 2019 Susan met Emily Ramshaw, the co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit newsroom, “The 19th.” Over coffee, Emily mentioned that her dad, Gregg Ramshaw, was the Executive Producer of the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour on PBS. PBS was the last place where Beryl worked and Susan asked Emily if her dad might remember Beryl.
“He [Gregg] told her [Emily] that my mom was one of the few women in the board room at PBS…being respected. There are so few people today that would have any of those memories.”
Beryl was enigmatic, an absolute presence. Six hundred people came to her memorial service in Albany—during a Nor’easter.
“People called her a serial connector,” Susan says. “She didn’t have email or internet or social media. She had the telephone and typewriter.”
It’s been long enough now that Susan is thinking of taking her mom’s ring and repurposing the diamond. “There’s so many things I would have learned from her if she would have survived” she says.
That diamond made it through hell and somehow got back. Into the safest of hands.
Many thanks to Susan for sharing her story with me. To follow her on LinkedIn, click HERE. Find more about her book HERE.
Take Care Of Your Hearts.
🙏🏼🙏🏼🩵🩵