Mary Sue Newton

Monday, February 28, 1927 - Friday, March 6, 2015

Mrs. Mary Sue Newton of Slocomb passed away Friday, March 6, 2015 at North Okaloosa Medical Center. She was 88.

Funeral services will be held Sunday, March 8 at 3:00 p.m in the chapel of Sorrells Funeral Home & Crematory in Slocomb with Rev. Larry Newton and Bro. Brian Cowley officiating. Burial will follow in the Slocomb City Cemetery.

The family will receive friends at the funeral home Sunday from 2:00 p.m. until service time. Mary Sue Newton, née Friar, was 17 years old in 1944, recently graduated valedictorian from Rainelle High School, West Virginia, when she boarded a bus that would take her to Washington, D.C. She was a coal miner's daughter who had landed a wartime job in the Federal Bureau of Investigation typing pool. She had never been away from home before. About four years later Mary Sue would marry Bryant Austin Newton, Jr., a Slocomb, Alabama, native who was also then-working, as a clerk, in the FBI. They would spend the next 60 years together, until Mary Sue's husband passed away in 2008. Together they raised three children - Stan, Ellen and Rick. Mary Sue and Austin lived in Alexandria, then McLean, Virginia, and Slocomb, Alabama. During her life, Mary Sue would sell real estate, work at the National Wildlife Federation, substitute teach, serve in Dothan, Alabama's medical community, and be instrumental in founding Slocomb's public library. She visited England during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, watched sunsets in Maui, and one time addressed the city council of Asago, Japan. She loved Austin, enjoyed her coffee, did not suffer fools, was supremely proud of her grandson Brian, and leaves a family behind who knows there will never, ever, be another like her. Mary Sue left this world, but never our hearts.